I.
 
Hunger, memory. Down a bit farther—

It closes on you inside, in the dark, only for a couple of instants.

[Imagination flows against the exfoliation of time].
 
He loved her shamelessly. She had him rummaging through dumpsters before he was old
enough
to know better, to hide the fact from others, to disguise the hiding.
 
That came indeterminately later. But first, a variation on a teaching: to fish polluted waters.

Whatever was found would be converted into money, then into food,
and once again into the reaching.
 
(This is perhaps a way of nearing eternity).
 
But strained through all the levels of process was waste.
 

II.

You told me to write it someday.
In this way you made my wish into yours, led me to halfhate words.
How in the same act I could throw away and reclaim myself.
 
&
 
it consists of forgetting
then feeling over and over the gaping place
where once something--
that draws back into it all of our future selves.
 
&
 
the time I fell in deep soft snow and couldn't climb out.
Why I waited a long time before calling for help.
what happened in the truck by the park.
Why, at sixteen, I ditched school to sleep on the noon beach
with the Iluminations in my pocket
 
&
 
you didn't know. It's not your fault. But you taught me to keep secrets.
 
&
 
You tried to convince me always to pander to the moneyed.
You wanted me to want the girl who loved me, for her money.
 
&
 
those last days when she was paralyzed,
except for the littleness of her hand,
which felt out, and squeezed, over and over
on my finger, that message
 
&
 
a sheet without a stain,
between what is and what was supposed to be,
hangs the conjugal moon
 
&
 
still I fought to keep the words from covering you.

III.
 
I wanted to hand her into the boat,
to steer her past the trash barges, the oil platforms,
and the sopping bodies called back
 
&
 
this same building she is going in,
I came out, marshy with her blood.
 
I could find and stand where they first
scolded me to breathe.
 
I could pull the plug we all plug into,
if I knew there wasn't anything more than this suffering.
 
&
 
to let the blue gathering fold now,
small into her heart
 
&
 
the blue button from my coat came off
and from its edge wrote a little echo
on the waiting room walls

 

IV.
   
                              why after
my mother died I didn't
go to the one who loves me,
why I stayed down with the girl
who had just gotten back from,
who'd been sent to a mental institution
for cuts on her arms and chest,
who hesitates before each tequila shot
waiting for me to say,
                            "it'll be alright," the same
girl who feels sorry for me because
in the dark I keep asking if she went, because
I take love too far, because I
never know when it's
over