--WHAT IF I’M SOMEONE I DON’T WANT AROUND?

In the Woods

the light. Blinking it’s one

Bleak eye, tells me

To go back. Black. It’s slaughter

Here.  See

How the spotted owls nod

And prey. In the woods

It’s easy to get lost

Find yourself refracted in

Your reflection. In the

dead earth. Buried beneath

The crosshatched. Pine needles

And shredded promises

Go ahead, the wind says

Everyone’s watching.  Waiting

Dig your hole. Make it spartan

Deep enough. For two.

—SOUR APPLE BABY, BUT YOU TASTE SO SWEET

                                                         What?

Insistent as a deluge, my wife is always asking me questions.  What’s the cat’s name?  Our granddaughter’s?  Did I like the Amalfi Coast and when did we go there?

            It’s Thursday or it’s Sunday, the night before my next appointment where I’ll take more inane tests.

            Out the window, stars are aligned in crooked rows, glittering like the pair of braces Donna Patton kissed me with, her tongue nowhere to be found, my lips left bruised in puffy waffle patterns. 

Out the window, a gravid moon’s carrying our first child, Ezra, but he won’t make it to the third trimester—that’ll be Liam. 

Out the window, the cloud cover resembles my father’s work rags, smudged with soot and regret, reminding me of the day he left a pile of them near the sink and never came back.

The things I recall are water-clear, like the window itself.  The ones I can’t remember are slippery porcelain, shattering at my feet.

            I roll over on the mattress. get a whiff of my wife’s skin.  It smells festive, like pumpkin bread and Halloween.  Lying flat-backed, her neck has a galaxy of creases and age spots the size of dimes.  Still, she’s as beautiful as that day when we, we, we what?

            “What?” my wife asks, her eyes expectant and glossy with moonlight.

            “I just remembered something.”

            “What?”

I feel baffled and untethered, forgetting what I just forgot.

“Honey, tell me.”

I think.  I think and blink and think.  It was something about the way she looked, this naked woman in bed with me.

“I think I remember,” I say. “I think I remember this,” I say, my fingers moving across the sheet on their own accord, uncertain yet determined.

—STAYED UP ALL NIGHT READING THE BOOK OF X

                                                         Circles

We are circles eliminating circles.  It’s the therapist’s idea—to recognize priorities, then narrow.

The questions are printed out and fastened on a clipboard.  It’s the first time I’ve used a pencil in years.  We go from 30 to 20, nearly as slow as we’ve aged those numbers in reverse.

B keeps trying to steal my answers, same as he did in college when I let him cheat on tests and the boorish Prof did, too, because he and I were knocking boots on the weekends, sometimes naked, other times bruised and savage against a wipe board.

Next, we go from 20 to 10.  It’s so much foreplay it hurts.  My eyeballs feel like glue.  My tongue is putty.

B used to cup my face when he kissed me, as if he was holding something precious and unattainable, like a piece of the moon, or a baby unicorn.  When his fingers slid down there, they made me swirl until my nerves became confetti.  Now that’s a fable for you.

I hope he’s seeing another woman.  I hope he loves her the way the oceans love the tide, but I know that’s folly.  It’s me he aims to keep drowned.

We go from 10 to 5.  Time is like watching sludge drip.  My teeth have turned to dust.  I should care more, but does the sand care about the beach or which wave will wash it away?

B is tomato-faced, as if he’s taken up the treadmill.  I should tell him something truthful, that I’ve been the one who’s running, in place, backward, banging into walls and furniture, stepping all over the cats he detests.

We narrow it down to the inevitable, the one thing that’s most important to each of us.  The therapist encourages us to share.  He looks ridiculous, gleaming as if he invented the idea of epiphany.

B shares his right away.  He spouts genuine tears the size of horseflies, coughs into the side of his neck.  “I love her so much,” he tells the therapist, though I’m right here.

Only I’m not.  I’m riding a swell, the current pushing me ashore in a land whose language I don’t understand, a land which I’m grateful to have found.

I mash my paper into the size of a testicle.  It tastes like talcum powder, but before I walk out, I swallow it anyway.

—I COULD LIE AND SAY I LIKE IT LIKE THAT

                                                   Tiny Monsters

           It is something like breathing, the way the wind walks backward through the switchgrass, honey suckle and butterscotch lifting lightly off each blade, here in this very field where you once fought your army of tiny monsters with a gnarled tree staff.  Even then you believed in the soul of imagination and the gift of summer solstice, a boy silly enough to adore and love, my son, whose voice I hear giggling in the catastrophic breeze.