Empty Subject
An exhibit was all you wanted
and me to lay close
my face
like a film behind a curtain
featuring reflections
in odd moments of ice.
You are probably where I left you
inhaling a rough vapor
the real world singing
as I sit with my legs crossed
holding none of you
beginning to cough out
the existence you had contemplated
before you decided
to earth here.
Not My Child
Here where dark cherries grow up from the ground
and have not been penetrated
by time or branches
I wake on a hip that has fallen asleep,
and there you are
with a fully grown family
sledding inward
down one mud-caked hill.
Were I your child
I would be your children—
several ladders
with slightly different oil-spills
undermining my bases.
I’d be slipping and swaying
beneath your capacities
and on one too-long night
you would bleed from my holes
and be fine.
Dead so early before sunup?
you’d say, literally planting a kiss
in my absence
like a weed too petty
to get rid of. I wish
I could tell why my body appalls me
even though you have thrived,
why nobody died,
but that’s just the luck of it.
So I Finally Slept
At first I was afraid
of what felt like mutual need
but soon his initial comfort
was just like corn silk
stripped with the ear
and compelled to the beautiful
dead. He had evolved too
he said as any irregularity
in a mammal and had crafted
forever into an answer of milk
from his bodilessness
that no one would drink.
I showed him what still
swayed inside me and
how grueling it was to be
the harbor for someone else’s
thirst rather than the drink itself.
He didn’t mind that I had not
believed him. Like a sleeved arm
into an ocean suddenly full
of another power of movement
and also with all suddenness
taken away he put me to sleep
by a simple asymmetrical gesture
no patting or sweet departures
just the exponential side
of his face on my face and he
never came back for me faithful.
As Long As They Want
Back I go into a body carelessly
groomed, like a plant
it conceived me
alone
with the root of aloneness
then was blown
toward a mother more consuming
than mine.
One can see
between departures I had children,
and between children
mothers,
both are my cohorts now.
Having sedated my hands
again in time
I fly home for the chance
to watch all mothers
play as children
as long as they want
bouncing the quietest balls
on the heads of their children to be.