I didn’t notice that I kept on taking

the drugs long after the pain became

manageable, Dr.’s words;

I was happy every night, lying on my back

in a bed in a house that wasn’t mine

because my split skin would open up

if I rolled over on my side. I took

the pills, and if I got to rocking seasick

I’d eat at least a Saltine, Dr.’s words;

and I lay back and guzzled water and

I was happy. I was happy. I

shook all over, like shock, like I could

vibrate right out of my skin through

the new incisions, through the scabs,

and make the world mine. I

shook, I said to the Dr.,

and shook until I brought the Saltines

back up to drop in the toilet

and the filmy bile that was the drug,

and I don’t know when I knew, but it was

probably when I said to the Dr.

no one could be so happy and so sick.

The little pills rattled out of the bottle and

sunk to the u-bend. I thought they must

dissolve, but I stared at them for a long time

wondering if I wanted them back, and they

never liquefied. They lay, those living rocks,

white against white, at the bottom of a shallow

lake I could still reach through, hands wet, pills wet but I

I could have them still, they said.

I still regret now and then how I let them

flush away, like the Dr. said

Reader orbits reader, one on the fringe of the other’s gravitational pull, neither body exerting pressure on the other beyond the gentle tug of a sleeping moon on black seawater. I like this time with you, dear. I’m off on my own adventure, perilous and strange, but there you are, overlaid on the empty desert rock in my pages, my beloved ghostly totem. We live our lives this way, I think; I go to work and you go to work somewhere else, and we run different errands at different times and our friends in their separate constellations interact and react and collide, and on the bus this morning you ran into a beggar while I was ready to hit the parking-garage ticket lady over the head with her stupid bar, and I ate lunch but you forgot and your coworker brought you coffee — all day we are separate, following our different orbits, but at the back of my mind there’s always the quiet pull of home and our books and you. 

The day snaps the tails of my winter coat,

whoops sharp between brittle birch branches,

dervishes down again to skate with me, drives

stinging sugar-dust in loops and whorls

across the blinding burnished silver ice.

Against white silence, the blades of my skates

scrape and scratch the diamond skin of the lake

until the bone-deep crack of the ice

ricochets off snow-dunes and snow-fields

and I am under, in the dim murky black

and the cold begins to burn and my lungs convulse,

drawing black ice, and I thrash and I fight

my way back to the grey of the day I hope is up —

I lie here on the naked bunk,

stained and narrow, of a sailor

who may now be alive or dead.

I  stare up at the rusted coils

lashing the upper bunk in place,

as he must have done sometimes,

and listen to the dull, hollow

churn of giant engines below me

in the dark, vibrating through

bulkheads and down corridors,

and fill my head with thoughts

of him, who called this home,

and what kind of life he lived

between metal walls and

in cramped metal cubbies

in service of a sweet dream.

In the night I lie awake,

fearing to myself

(am I wrong?

am I broken?

can I change?)

and the headlights in the street

chase crooked shadows up the wall

and by turns both fall on

half-white canvas, on brushes

in the mason jar, on

the rigid spines of my

poor, enduring books,

and I listen to the hush

of a single passing car

that free man

that never-been-a-passenger

in his life, and finally I myself

am chained to the wall

by headlight and by shadow,

and I listen to the clank

and I fear both my strength

and my fatal flaw.

The old wives whisper

by each cradle, kind eyes

flashing in the firelight:

dare to cross the fairy ring

and lose an eye or die or

be swept off to fairy realms,

or, worse, be forced to dance

around and round and round,

unable to escape. But me, I think

I’m in the fairy ring, around

and going round for all eternity.

I think perhaps that troupe of

moon-white princelings twirling

hand in hand and toe by toe

in this grove of twilit dream

might just be the portal out.

The trail is in the pack, coiled tight

with paracord and the island map

in its plastic gallon bag. It jostles up

against the soda-can stove and gas,

is cushioned by the old wool socks,

grows warm against your back.

The trail scrubs your heels to blisters,

clenches in your calves with every

long heave up over a boulder and every single

drop, throws each breath you stop to catch.

The trail is the sun-soaked silent wild beyond the next naked ridge of rock

and the copse of lichen-coated pines

who drip their needles in a pungent rug,

the trail is the ginger step of a shadow fox

in the grey false dawn through camp,

and the loons on the lake that rock your

hammock with a lush goodnight lament.

Once upon the perfect hour

and twice upon that night

the bell tolled for me.

I had it ringing deep in bone

and deeper still in skin, and

knew upon the breaking out

of the crows’ and ravens’ feet

that whence arrived my perfect night

must come too my terrible light.

She has the world tattooed on her back

a map awash in colour and soft line that could never be born of a needle.

Across his chest, constellations in black

can take the weight of her burden

with all the ease of the void that holds all things, for a little while.