from The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep

I. Separation Precedes Meeting

The cat so close
to the fire
I smell scorched
breath. Parents,
silent, behind me,
a feeling of
trees that might fall.
Or dogs.
A poem,
like trying
to remember,
is a movement
of the whole body.
You follow the
fog
into more fog.
Maybe the door ahead
divides
the facts
from natural affection. How
can I know. I meet
too many
in every mirror.

2.

When I was little,
was I I?
My sister? A wolf
chained,
smothered in green virtues?
Slower
time
of memory. Once
I’ve got something
I lie
down on it
with my whole body.
Goethe quotations, warm
sand, a smell of hay,
long afternoons.
But it
would take a road
would turn, with space,
in on itself,
would turn
occasion into offer.

3.

For days I hold
a tiny landscape between
thumb
and index:
sand,
heather,
shimmer of blue between pines.
No smell: matchbook.
Sand as schematic as
Falling
into memory,
down,
with my blood,
to the accretions
in the arteries,
to be read with the whole
body, in the chambers
of the heart.
The light: of the match,
struck,
at last.

4.

Concentration: a frown
of the whole body. I can’t
remember. Too many
pasts
recede
in all directions.
Slow movement into
Distant boots.
Black beetles at night. A smell
of sweat.
The restaurant,
yes. You’ve no idea
how much my father used to eat.
Place thick with smoke.
Cards. Beer foaming over
on the table.
And always
some guy said I ought
to get married,
put a pillow behind my eyes
and, with a knowing
sigh, spat
in my lap.

5.

The present.
As difficult as
the past, once a place
curves into
Hips swinging elsewhere.
Castles in sand.
Or Spain. Space
of another language.
Sleep
is a body of water.
You follow your lips
into its softness. Far down
the head finds its level