WEBVTT

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There are four poems.

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I like to know, when I'm
at a reading, what's left.

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Four-- and none of them is
in multiple parts, none.

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"The Raft."

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"Color of rust,
russet, color of fall.

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I can lay my head on the wet
sand that is nobody's chest

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now, not a chest at all.

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Or I can lift it.

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Why not lift it?

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More a fugitive than lost,
more spent than stranded,

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if I've been no stranger
to disillusionment,

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nor am I enslaved to it.

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The one who wanted me
just to hold him gently

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and the one whose mouth was
his only tenderness, the one

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with whom about whom,
who was a light, as off

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of water that kept
unsettling like

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thought itself, like
the scrim of thinking

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when pierced suddenly by
what nothing but instinct,

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pure gut explains.

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Inside me, the old
desires half negotiate,

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half meander their
way back again.

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Find those places they never
stray too far from or not

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for long.

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I had thought the truth would
be a falcon, for how it rarely

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soars, as much as for that
precision with which on wings

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instead, built for speed mainly,
it descends then strikes.

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But it is not a falcon.

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The truth is a raft, a rough-
at- each- of- its- edges

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affair of many sturdinesses
lashed together,

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standard beauty,
realized expectation.

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The lucky ones get to choose.

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And they choose
when they want to.

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From this distance, it's
hard to tell at first.

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The raft's moving
closer, I think,

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though it's still far away.

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