What stuns most is how nothing changes
except the one thing that’s changed.
The tedium of continuing to do the heretofore.
The bills, the traffic snarls, the meals warmed up.
The first year passing, the date looming,
then nothing. Nothing much. Just a card
to mark the time. A measuring stick.
But things stay mostly the same, a tarp
thrown over the pit that yawns in the yard.
Puddles gather in it, then dry. Its fill dirt
carted far away years ago, so that
nothing piled after in its place will ever
quite match the hollow’s former hue or heft.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on my way upstairs to teach my morning writing classes in the Earth and Planetary Sciences building, I pass the lecture hall where I made my only B+ at the university. It still sticks in my craw, a single blight on the landscape of my transcript.

The course was Geology 202: Earth as an Ecosystem: Modern Problems and Solutions. How much worse because I loved the class. I still remember factoids from that course. It changed the way I saw endangered species, the way I understood urban development, the way I saw my own city, which in the late ‘90s was sprawling outward, paving bit by bit all its rural outskirts, even as it died out in the center. (It has since reversed at least the latter part of that trend, if not the former.)

That professor still teaches and publishes at my university. He used to ride his bike to campus. He didn’t own a car. I remember him joking – if he was joking? – that he’d give extra credit to anyone who chained themselves to a bulldozer to stop the Turkey Creek development, which was at that time about to break ground just west of town. I went to my first ever public hearing in order to protest that development. The wetlands surrounding Turkey Creek were a local anomaly. A 90-year-old man, who had lived and fished there in his little rowboat for his entire life, was the voice of the resistance. The new development would bring many jobs to East Tennessee, promised the developers. Of course the project went through.

Now, usually at Christmastime, I’ll drive over and buy things at the Turkey Creek Pier 1 and the Michael’s and the Target. At the entrance, which stretches six total lanes across, there’s a large sign with the gilded silhouette of a turkey, the feathers of its tail fan abstracted to look like the rays of a half sun. The sign is elegy to what it displaced. Once, early in the morning, zooming down Parkside Drive, crossing the bridge over what’s left of the creek – the rich wetland that surrounded it now dried up – I saw the pale blur of a white-tailed doe as it bounded into the sparse copse of saplings next to the road.

I think of that class now and then, and it occurs to me again – as it often does these days – that a college education was wasted on 20-year-old me. Only now am I even beginning to learn how to learn.

Let me just plant in your minds:

This room smells like doomed grad school
crushes and yellowed paper.
For no reason, year round
there are wasps in the eaves.

Enrollments are low. We think
of ways to spruce ourselves up.
We pass around a tome
penned and published by one of our own.

From our tower, we look down
on kinesiology and planetary science alike,
and on downtown, its spread of commerce,
its ad men ants below.

The grassy quads square up, manned
by landscapers in drab.

But listen: the way one woman happened
to say the word evening –
it brought a wafting of oaky dregs,
a wisp of candle just blown out.

I know far better than to ever say never.
Too, this kind of love will never not be hard.
It’s the bottle of costly oil, missing one shard
from its threaded glass rim, I passed my finger over
again last night, opening a freshly blood-filled rift.
Or the bird I saw of late, perched on the sill,
face turned towards the house, ominously still,
and waited for it to shake loose its wings, lift
clear, and fly off free – which it will never do.
Indeed, I found it later lying on its side, one eye
already hollowed out by ants. I’ve learned to say goodbye
to whatever won’t come back, was never true.
I will answer any question you want to ask. That door
stands always just a bit ajar. In spite of what he might
have told you, my mind is sound. I would not lie.
He would. But you must satisfy yourself on that score.
I wish you and your husband abundant joy, if ever
such a thing can come to pass. I think it can’t. And oh, the boy.
Your tiny boy. I don’t know how this world works, why
he came instead when, in truth, our man desired a girl –
someone who’d gaze and fawn and yearn, a pet to spoil.
Perhaps he’s finally found what he sought in you.
And yet, your sudden frantic message out of the blue
six months ago suggests you now know something of my toil.
Well. I leave you here. Your face is fair, you have some
letters after your name. Your way lies open, however it seems.
I hope you’re crisp, sharp, free from groggy dreams.
I wish you a wise serpent to destroy your rotten Eden.

At some point I walked outside. It felt cool.
The moon’s curved spine was broken
on the ridge. A kind of giving up.
I watched the cup sink, till its rims
were two hooked horns, turned nearly in
on themselves, poised to gore. They too
disappeared. The night was dark without its glow,
however dim. Soon the stars came forth.
They’d always been there. And now
I could discern the needle-point of each.

first it’s a bra, then a boot
then a ladder

then a broom
then a hat or a beak

then a pool
(exed-out)

this finger loom
on which I weave

divine my future
double and twist

a length of cheap jute
till it turns to a Moebius loop

unspools to form
an odd-shaped fruit

some new celestial body
whose portent’s unknown

Into the coconut curry soup we made last winter –
its broth the same warm orange color
as the globed pendant lamp that glowed over
the kitchen table – we sprinkled fragrant kaffir
lime leaves plucked that day from the market’s freezer,
their summer perfume frozen forever
glossy green. Time blooms unseen, covert,
in odd directions. As the mother of our doctor
acquaintance, who would walk down each after-
noon to the 92nd Street Y, where on the rower
machine, she’d read three miles’ worth
of Proust. How far she she traveled, and where
I don’t know: the old pages’ sweet, familiar odor
lifting, the pink cheek gone suddenly young, aflower.

When I wrecked my car in the spring, I spent a week driving a rental SUV from Enterprise. At the end of the week, I cleaned it out and returned it, and when I got home remembered that I had left a CD in the player. The next day, news broke that Chris Cornell had died, and it hit me: the CD I left was the soundtrack from Singles. It’s entirely possible that the next person who rented that car could have turned on the radio and heard Cornell’s voice pouring from the speakers, singing . Little would they know that there was a mundane reason for this wild coincidence, and that I had been an unwitting agent of serendipity. Maybe it would be better for them to ascribe it to fate.

The romance novel in the thrift store that falls open naturally, like a ripe piece of fruit, to the juiciest sex scene. The secondhand wicker, the rattan, the hibiscus, the pelicans, the pink, the glass lamps filled with whelks. The cheeky gulls, those beggars. The insistent breeze from downshore that smooths my white sand footprint to a rippled crater within two minutes. The startling moment when the wind briefly dies. The ice slumping, shrinking in the styrofoam. The cumulonimbus that mound thickly in the southeast sky at the same hour everyday. The waves, mulling it greenly over and over and over, endlessly. The light of six o’clock that turns my forearms to galaxies, of the kind only seen far outside of town in the deep wintertime.

A chance meeting in the hall. You were a five-by-eight:
dense, climate-controlled. I was a bloated ten-by-fifteen,
and fine in a cell outside, with its temperature extremes.
My hoard had more volume. Yours, more weight.

You showed me your trove of googly eyes, lapel pins,
photos you’d taken of dirty tarps on construction sites.
Delighted, proud, I lifted from my own first boxes lights
of all kinds: lamps and strands and sconces, bins

of silk and paper shades. Then, reaching down, I found
a fifth of vodka my last love hid, not unearthed till now.
Next, the star-spangled sequined blouse I’d never allowed
myself to toss, although he hit me in it once: crumpled mound

of sparkle, sweat, and blood. Your smile was faint and kind. Sadly,
you slid out a large box marked in all caps, FUCKING NEGATIVES.
We kept some boxes sealed – others, we were brave enough to give
away. Repacked the rest in more condensed, neat stacks. Gladly

rolled shut the metal doors, clicked the locks in place. Another day
we’ll cull some more: risk what we can let go, and what must stay.