It has become clear that I learned only from all the best
mistakes I made, more than I did from what went right.
The time I failed to defend my friend, that crucial night
I slammed down a wineglass full of red in my clenched fist,
shattering it to bits. These wrongs put me on “the right
road to wholeness,” as Jung would say, which means a route
paved “with fateful detours and wrong turnings,” and too the mute
chagrin of afterwards, when reflection comes, the dark night
of the soul. I have expanded through what in me was mean
and small, from a base spite at times when my ire burned,
sputtering and greasy – when, rather than be generous, I spurned
the chance to rise above, broaden, keep my conscience clean.
That damned spot is all that keeps me moored to earth. I lean close:
my breath fans the sooty smudge of that which shames me most.

The sea swallows whole
all that boasts of heft and mass,
slows the arc of a brute fist
till it becomes the leisurely
sweep of a ballerina’s arm –

or adds force to the weak,
flinging a stray oak sprig
hard enough to redden a cheek.

To stay requires that one conform
to the fluid cage of the whale,
submit to ebb and flow, gale and lee

that buffet and shelter the brig
by turns. Some do. Most demur,
preferring the sound and solid shore.

the lights
the beat
the heat
the heels

the point
when I hit
the wood

the world
stopped
went dark

woke later
with puke
on my boots

vague sense
I’d been
surrounded
gripped

shameful inkling
I’d screamed
and hit

at the friend
who took
care of me

At the top corner of the bedroom window
in the hollow between regular and storm panes
wasps have built a nest. I noticed last week.

Their place measures, already, dozens of papery cells
across. Once in a while I walk by and flick the glass.
Their legs and wings quiver. Then they scatter angrily.

I read of Vespula vulgaris that they’re less aggressive
than their red cousins – yet now I have these paper-makers
trained: when they see my poised finger approach,

they fly and fly at the invisible border that divides us.
I stand and watch them spread, stab past the glass towards
my face behind it: livid, futile. From outside I torment them

for I have no way to kill them without myself being stung –
that is, until the winter does it for me. December alone
will find these flimsy chambers bereft of all their toilers.

Beware of people who prefer you when you’re low.

Everyone is more complex than they appear.

Wrest your worth from others’ courtrooms. Be excused from such suits.

The Irish know best how to say goodbye.

Glow your own way.

This morning, as steam escaped then plumed
from the kettle’s mouth, the day’s first airlift flew
overhead with its woeful thwap and thrum.
Inside it is some frail lady who, overcome
by potato salad, people, and heat, succumbed
to stroke, or a man who, tinkering with the pontoon
of his boat back by the engine, lulled by fumes,
slipped quietly beneath the green surface
for five full minutes before his absence was
noted, or else a kid whose fingers turned
to streamers and confetti after he lit and burned
a quick, wonky fuse. We hear the wail, see the flickering
red flare of the van now parked two streets away, musing
on the sacrifice of these who give their lives on this day.
At noon the shadows turn, go the other way.

this button wants
free of its placket,

will slip the leash
at the first inkling it can

these cobwebs whisper
what’s beneath

donned lightly
the sooner to slide off again

lines imprinted in skin
traced with a finger

this clasp wants
unmoored from its hook

one strap slinks lower
and lingers

silk pooling darkly
in the crook

I.
only when you slept
was I free to eat my fill
that’s why I left you

II.
one day you got a
flashlight: “open wide and show
me all.” so I did.

III.
you would stand afar
watch my group gab at the bar
chew your straw, alone

IV.
embarrassed myself;
you could do a wolf whistle
on your blue les paul

V.
you liked me until
I passed that test you didn’t
then your eyes went cold

Soft, plump, wrapped in striped fur,
you lay small and still in my palm,
severed back end yet stuck
in the meat of my thumb

so unlike that svelte hard
shiny other one that landed
on my forearm the next June
while I ran away from the swarm,

whereupon, pumping my arms,
I crushed her against my skin, unaware.
She would, I know, have done me more wrong
than that if she could – if I hadn’t first, ere her.

That day in my mom’s van,
after the tweezers had pulled
from my flesh what was left of you,
there was a white welt centered

by a tiny black dot. My hand throbbed
with your venom – still aches
for all the sweetness you’d have made
that the world will never taste.

I want to be like the cat whose every step
contains the whole heft of her mass
so that all twelve pounds of her
concentrate into a single
square inch of paw pressure

like the bird that builds a nest
inside the buzzy first O
of the Food Mart’s lighted sign

like the man who stands by the bin
thumping the watermelons one by one
till he finds the one whose tone
sounds most red and ripe

like the two linked train engines
running parallel to my car on the back road
for half a mile: bereft of freight – bereft
even of empty cars – glinting darkly,
thunderously unburdened

like the kudzu that is quietly
eating the whole South

like the dappled shade of four o’clock
which is never the same thing twice