A Midwestern water park in winter is
like farting at the gym on a Stairmaster
or tripping in public only to glare at
the crack in the sidewalk that isn't there,
like using 'vestibule' in conversation
while standing at the lip of a hole
the size of eight city blocks. Trying to hail
a cab in West Lafayette, Indiana is like tap water,
anywhere, like writing 'Great! on a piece
of paper, then underlining it, twice,
which is sort of like betting on yourself
winning a foot race in moon boots or
building a campfire on the beach,
on an incoming tide, or the way parties
are lonely, like music. Like quitting smoking
for a few days, as you imagine the end
of the movie of your life, which is like
the idea of drowning that you have just
minutes before burning yourself.

It was many, many years ago
in this house, with this tree
that a woman lived, whom I don’t know
in a photo you can see. She baked bread
and ate with two fat men
and her picture looks much like me.

I was a child and she was a child
then neither again would be
she in nineteen-thirteen
me near two-zero, one-three.
And we loved with a love that was more
than a love, at the heads of our centuries.
Let me see less than she’ll see
because I know more than she
and, even from here, it near-blinded me.

And with virtue and reason, long ago,
In this picture that looks like me,
A bug blew out of a cough one night,
chilling the woman who looks like me;
So her muscled kinsman came
and took her away from our tree
to bake no more bread for fat men
and escape the brutality.
Yes, a wind blew out of a cloud
one night chilling and killing
who looks like me.

Microbes, heartache, and wars
do not give way to reason nor pause
at the soaring wrought-iron gate
of Brooklyn, nor at the doors of state.
She was here and some time later died,
well before I arrived here or anywhere.

But our love, she for fat men, I for my
small and tall friends, is stronger by far
than the love of those younger or richer
than we, and who could be wiser than we?
And neither the redbreasts in heaven above,
Nor the dolphins down under the sea,
Can ever quite sever my sight from the sight
Of the woman who looks like me.

For the moon rarely beams without bringing
dark dreams to the woman who looks like me;
And the stars never rise but I feel my tight eyes
on a dark dream that looks like me; And so,
all nighttime, I lie down by the side of my
searching self and my self that hides. With a
photo from nineteen-hundred, one and three,
of a woman who looks a lot like me.

Is it just winter
or is this worse.
Is this the year
when outer damp
obscures a deeper curse
that spring can't fix,
when gears that
turn the earth
won't shift the view,
when clouds won't lift
though all the skies
go blue.

A light static rained on the radio. The drug-dealing dykes next door had hauled themselves out into the violet light of the alley, fighting again as they had all day.

I was in the kitchen—still wearing the hospital bracelet, sitting in the dark in my underwear in a chair I'd dragged to the window—in the mood to discover, vague notions of beauty punching through my thoughts.

One of the girls, let's call her 'Debbi,' accused 'Bev' of sucking some hillbilly's pipe.

It was a mystery. You could hear the semantics moan. Like slivers of silver flame.

Then a face got slapped.

Then someone said, you dumb cunt, and they were at it, grappling beneath my window. A week earlier men in space suits had flooded the alley with murderous light, corralling the lab across the way in yellow tape. They were pulling the sheet over a body in the weeds when I walked up with my groceries, jawing on the phone with my mother who was somewhere else equally complex, somewhere in America. I have to go, I said, saving her the situation.

THE END. Except the memories coalesce in some corner of the self. I make no mistakes with the details: the way the streetlights coped with the trees, how darkness was forming in the cicada's buzz, those cries from the alley—I'm sorry; I love you; please come back—grasping for me to read them.