4

Something in the air has broken.
It has begun to rain,
and I don't love you any more.

Thinking this day would never come,
I feel ill at ease; unsprung.
Imagine how you'd feel, discovering
your body no longer required food.
The nostalgia of this freedom, I admit,
I didn't expect. My whole body is quiet,
as if it will never be afraid again.

I don't love you any more. My heart
finds difficulty in believing.
My heart is surprised by withoutness.
This sparse scene contains only leaves,
street, me; not you.

My heart is full of something other than happiness or sadness.
My heart doesn't feel like it used to.
Everyone is bicycling home.

Piles of leaves curl in the nooks of the street,
and I do not wish that you were here.

SF/DC

3

Articulation recedes
into myself; whatever it is
I am comprised of, part of which includes
loving you.

My love for you is not like
a lightbulb, something switched
into darkness as you leave this house,
away from this house into darkness.

My love for you is a glass jar
of fireflies
I have caught, for you, one by one in my hands
on the front lawn, as you watched from the porch
in the long velvet dusk.

A jar that I shake, and watch flicker
when it grows dark, when you have gone home,
when I am awake by the window, the night unstirred,
watching the pensive, quiet lightning; observing the irrelevance
of sleep, and the fireflies

Which were caught for you, which perhaps
exist for this jar,
until the last one drops.

I don't know what
makes fireflies die
by morning.



DC/ DC

2

The plate of rice is
the incandescent nostril's edge
of a white animal, steaming in the morning field.

At times, I think the only time I've said
what I've meant is when I've said
"I don't know."

To be silent is to anticipate
loss, to know
something is already gone

, to observe white steam;
quiet breathing in someone's
dreamless sleep.


SF/ DC

1

In my secret life,
things happen in instants.
Something changes, and I know
"I am alone," or
"I don't love you
anymore."

Meryl told me
that the day the war ended, she watched the parade
muted, on the color TV set.
The whole house was quiet.
The screen filled with noise she already knew
the sound of.

Even in my secret life, I am afraid
not of death, but of dying.
A documentary about volcanoes rages in the corner.
The colors are almost stunning,
so realistic.

I don't have tinnitus, but I wonder
if this is my home.

I am afraid if this is my home. I don't want to hear
anything, not even information about fire prevention.
Too many words make the heart get sick.


SF/ DC