Leave a Mess

Leave the cigarettes unfinished when you go. Leave summer still
to happen and all the leaves gone red or yellow sealed for keeping

after you’re gone. Leave friends at dinners, holding places for you,
empty chairs that won’t be filled by talk or toasting in the quiet months

since you have gone. Leave the kitten set for scratching messages
into the skin, the wine still bottled, the doors blown open for visitors

and registries of cold. Leave love untold, the telephone still dead
and unaware that you have gone. Leave the wind in every ribcage,

beating code to say that you have gone. Leave airplanes ascending
altitudes and clocks to be reset when you have gone. Leave

skin underneath your fingernails for evidence of what has made you
go. Leave the mouth of every stranger filled with gossip at your

leaving, every tooth tuned to departure, every standing, sitting,
falling body well-tempered for goodbye. Leave everything and every-

one you’ve touched with fingerprints to be washed clean of upon
some future bath time or dusting. Leave the steady ironed outfits

swinging softly inside doorframes and the laundry set to spinning
in the washer, dryer, tornado season where it was when you had

gone. Leave the furniture upended, every book and dish
and conversation bloodied and chipping paint against the wall. Leave

handprints on your spouse’s cheeks and handprints in the pockets
of your favorite jeans when you are on the way out and going.

Leave words you’ve said not to spark a cinema or any attentive
undertaking in the guise of Where have you been? but leave an all-

around Hello for any potential admirer who might slip a note of praise
into your skull when other eyes have turned to go. Leave all mistakes

for reckoning in figures now that you have gone. Leave no voice to say
Gone, Gone Away, when you’re out-out but have not yet gone.

Last Poem

You’re the you in this poem,
the one where I’m dead in the orange room,

the one where I’m dead abroad. In this poem,
I’m dead in a hospital room calling

coma with old lovers, calling languages
I can’t remember speaking while awake. You’re

the you in this poem. If we’re both what we
should be, you’ll be dead before I come home.

Zelda, where you left me, down the stairs

If you believe it the way she tells it, she married him
because she’d heard somewhere that married people

never go to jail. What remains
of the bubble bath sucks at her body like dry skin.

Everywhere, he is. Everywhere he is
he is knocking on some windowed part of her,

he is touching in her some memory he put there.
He speaks in books to other women, color-coded.

On preparing for a visitor -

I have stolen you and will continue to do so.
Blinds open and dusting, we fill each other like
powder. There are poems in which you remember
what it felt like to touch before you touched me.
In some poems, we’re touching and you’re remembering
another someone – on a stool or in a parking lot,
teeth broken against your mouth or palm or thigh. I
arrange the books by color to find where you’ve been
unintentionally inside.

Break Glass to Extinguish

Killing is a thing we do in measure,
One by one. The sunflower first –

We display in bit-lip pride to
Relatives and company come full

Starch. Aunts look on its molding
Vertebra for laughter, clutched

And clawed at, like the end of last
Year’s favorite anecdote. Friends

And other visitors pinch
Browned and barnacled leaves

For souvenirs to say we’ve grown
A thing that would not live.

The dog with its own unmatched
Skeleton is something more

Of a loosed grenade. The stitching
Of its pink and slept with elephant

First must separate
To reveal the powdery tooth fillings

That birds will use in winter
To cushion themselves against an

Over and over cold spell. The food,
In heaping handfuls of anything already

Dead, must wrongly expire. A holocaust is
Where we fit our hands

Around that hound’s pinched middle
With our increasing tightness until the only

Weight is what emptiness can
Be amassed inside one once alive

Creature. We clean the bones in
White vinegar and, with dried beans,

Fill to whole one milk jug to make songs
For the funeral parade and home again.

The sound is steady beating like a year
Lived to end in any unloved place.

When I’m lucky – in dreams,
Alone – nine or so lovers

You took once or longer
In various seasons of summer

Or rain and all the unofficial
Women you pressed in fantasy or

Memory onto the pages of one
Red notebook, perfectly bound,

Make lovely, arching swan dives
Off of cliffs and rooftops or

Any other precipice high enough to turn
A stomach into circles within its own

Casing. Their necks go cracking and skin,
And I am free of them enough to stretch

Awake in sheets that must be
Burned to unfasten their mistake.

And love, when it comes time for its
Undoing, is not nearly half the trouble.

October

Every following car is someone to be lost.
It takes so many hours of daylight to convince

Oneself that love can happen and only
So much nighttime to think it won’t. Of every

Man and woman, girl and boy we’ve touched
There are strangers

Still, before and after everything else.
I found one of yours in a book

And then another. I found one of yours
In a bar, looking like Halloween

(though August, I tell you, who could forget)
With a hand shoved into mine like a cigarette

From a stranger outside the bar after
Where I waited to be told Forever. I love you

Forever. I found one of mine
In the aftermath bath time and much later

By way of hello. I found one
Of the ways I still love you stinging in morning-

Time, there at the knife-ready stop
Light where all the best roads meet and pass

One another in the fashion played forward by
My stiff and remembering heart.

Elizabeth

It is not wholly against convention to marry every now
and then. When it comes

to love and other bodily functions, a man, of any height or
kind, is expected to go hastily awry. When he loved

that woman,
that fat woman with no look to her except the spread

of short and unremarkable legs, and planned to marry
and be married to her, he said

that he’d gone crazy, suicidal, off the ship again
in the way that always ended inhospitably

straitjacketed and shouldn’t that excuse everything,
every pronunciation of love. She wore

a ring. On her hands that would no longer hold
the sum of men she’d opened for, knowing all the while that

a face so plainly horrid would never earn more than
the angry touching of some previously broken hearted man,

she wore a ring. What plea could be made after
but insanity in its most gruesome,

unadulterated form. What potential is there in a man
who exalts so easily

in that bent knee for which the world tilts at the weight
of her acceptance, that woman,

all fat and unremarkable women that require and result in
continual forgiveness for the act.