Lines for Painting on Grains of Rice

for Rebecca

You are the kind of? person who buys exotic fruits
leaves them out on the counter until they rot
You always mean to eat them sometimes you rearrange them
rousing over the bowl a cloud of tiny flies

&

How do they balance the parrot who chews a walnut
sideways holding it up in his right foot
the owl perched on a just-lit lamppost
scratching behind its ear like a big dog

&

Your pencil eraser wears down long before the point
for every word you write you rub out two

&

Where the slice of ?toast rested the plate is still warm
a film of fog little points of dew

&

Love is like velocity we feel the speeding up
and the slowing down otherwise not at all
the more steady the more it feels like going nowhere
my love I want to go nowhere with you

&

I cannot bring myself? to toss the cup of cold coffee
you set down by the door on your way to the taxi
all day I have sipped it each time forgetting
your two tablets of fake sugar too sweet

&

Running down the street
dodging between raindrops plump as cherries

&

The ground was feathered with wild strawberries
I picked seven as many as I could bear
I ate two I saved the rest for you here
hold out your hand take them taste how sweet

&

Please hold me the forgotten way the wall pleads
spray-paint face and voice of a damned poet
the darling damned poets save them from themselves
maybe it is us they need saving from