Pieces on the Ground

      I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog

      at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.

      And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—

      bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,

      or lousy light deemed it so.

      So what. Give up that so what.

      O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up

      the thousand-pound if and when too.

      Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.

      Give up the know thing that shatters into other things

      and takes the remember fork in the road.

      The remember isn’t a road.

      At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked

      or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least

      little mark, the dash loved, the comma that can’t,

      can not dig down what its own brief nothing

      means on the page. I don’t understand death either.

      By afternoon, the brain is box, is breath let go, a kind of

      mood music agog, half emptied by the usual

      who am I, who are you, who’s anyone.

      Truth is, I listen all night for morning, all day

      for night in the trees draped like a sound I never quite

      get how it goes. There’s a phantom self, nerved-up

      as any missing arm or leg.

      Of course I was. Of course I stared from the yard,

      my mother at the window

      rinsing knife and spoon and the middle of her life.

      In drawing class, all eyes fix on the figure gone

      imaginary, thinning to paper. Not the wind or a cry

      how the hand makes, our bent to it

       —pause and rush, rush and pause—

      small animals heard only at night, spooked in the leaves.