Four Short Poems / The Same Poem Four Times

On the other hand it's the ghost that haunts you.

Dead things choose us and do not let go.

A man without a parcel is no enigma.

Best to have libraries, whole caravans of

catalogued bodies following you down the mountain.

"Baggage," they say, as if it can be neatly untucked

and sealed away in motel closets.

--

In the photograph your shoulder is whole, immaculate,

glacial as your eventual eyes, hidden as a smile.

My heart has a heart has a heart.

All things, unless anchored, that is to say

tied down, will drift away.

--

If a dead bird is enough to make me forget,

a live one is enough to bring it back.

--

I would have remembered you just before

opening my lungs to let the water in--remembered you

scattering my one-eyed visions. I would have compared

dying to dying while dying. Instead I stood up straight

and puked four times. For you, I thought as the river

pulled it all, swirling, away.

at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
i do not remember your voice any more.
i remember the sound of it, warm honeyed against
my eyes, the facts of its meaning. i hear pounding
in the basement and howling at the windows,
and i daily walk through lakes. clouds clamp down
over my head. i spend all my time pulling
hairs from the wall. i do not remember your
fingers, only their thickness, and the drumming
hallucinations they danced. i do not remember
anything but waking up this morning: dry-cracked
and empty, listening, curled around some new
ruby thought whose hands waste no memory.
all my notebooks are empty, all my pockets full.
i spend all my time writing harmonies on dollar
bills. i'd rather smell tea than do anything about it.
at the bottom of the valley where the river runs through
a cloud crawls through me and i am happy.