Shirt in Heaven. Jean Valentine
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for Emily Wilson
2002–2013
in loving memory
Contents
Title Page
6 God of rooms
7 Hold the finch
8 1945
9 For love,
10 Shirt in Heaven
11 there’s nothing when
12 Peace to bad waters
13 Bardo
14 W. 13th Street
15 Open
16 A leaf, a shadow-hand
17 You rope that pulls them where they do not go
18 The helicopter,
19 When I lost my courage
20 His hand takes
21 Bury your money
22 Poem with endwords by Reginald Shepherd
23 She will be
Friend
1 [The ship] is slowly giving up her sentient life.
2 I cannot write about it.
3 Hospice
4 Isn’t there something
5 Down on the street
6 Both you & he
7 My words to you
8 I’m going to sleep
9 I’d get you a glass of champagne
10 We turn in dream
11 Are all the things
12 You’re gone
13 Then
14 You Speak
Threshold
1 Could it be heat?
2 The Window:
3 The Door:
4 Bellini, Saint Francis
5 In the Famine Museum
6 Friend,
7 Great-grandmother,
Then had we well put to, without form, without text
1 Note in winter
2 Ten Degrees
3 When I woke up, our time
4 When I woke up, my friend
5 Self-Portrait, Rembrandt, 1658
6 Song
7 Icebergs, Ilulissat
About the Author
Books by Jean Valentine
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Luna Moth
Luna Moth
Luna moth
at the black window
I hold you in my signal-memory
but I can’t get back to how to talk to you,
silent as the black window.
Silent as your body
little book
on which
I in my hunger wrote.
A Child’s Drawing, 1941
A woman ladder leans
with her two-year-old boy in her arms.
Her arms & legs & hands & feet
are thin as crayons.
The man ladder
is holding his glass of bourbon,
he is coming out of the child’s drawing
in