To Noah, From Wife,  Some Years After

Brought back that glass box of ocean,

the glass a kind of ocean too but slower.

The green world was strange, nothing holy,

lots of space. When I looked too fast

at things they looked like ocean still, my

eyesight a splash of salt water

I didn’t actually own. The last

thing the boat/god said was study

the moment when water sees water. We

are married as the ocean is to its

glass self, is, is not, is.

(Published in The New Yorker, October 31, 2022)

What Interruption

When I say goldrush what I mean is how

the gold rushes into itself how the arrow

that broke me was me how it is ongoing.

(Published in Bowery Gothic V, 2021)

(There is a spring at the right side,

and standing by it a white cypress.

Thirst [untranslatable].)

Even now, after the shine

on my ideas shook off in tinsel, I still

want things. Thirst is a handful

of local grit you can pick up glittering

anywhere. Thirst is a native tree

all over. When I got to the water,

they said and you are . . . ?  I said I’ve been

leaning against this white-hot cypress,

reaching, all my life.

(From Start)

Detail of Paradise

(Giovanni di Paolo, ca. 1440)

Particularity evidently survives in paradise.

Your own uniform, the modesty of it, still fits.

Your bruises and cuts still glimmer.

The goldapple trees still stand up

like the very first numbers you ever learned,

and love’s sentence—I am so glad you’re here—is still what you say.

(From Stubborn)