There are four poems.
I like to know, when I'm at a reading, what's left.
Four-- and none of them is in multiple parts, none.
"The Raft."
"Color of rust, russet, color of fall.
I can lay my head on the wet sand that is nobody's chest
now, not a chest at all.
Or I can lift it.
Why not lift it?
More a fugitive than lost, more spent than stranded,
if I've been no stranger to disillusionment,
nor am I enslaved to it.
The one who wanted me just to hold him gently
and the one whose mouth was his only tenderness, the one
with whom about whom, who was a light, as off
of water that kept unsettling like
thought itself, like the scrim of thinking
when pierced suddenly by what nothing but instinct,
pure gut explains.
Inside me, the old desires half negotiate,
half meander their way back again.
Find those places they never stray too far from or not
for long.
I had thought the truth would be a falcon, for how it rarely
soars, as much as for that precision with which on wings
instead, built for speed mainly, it descends then strikes.
But it is not a falcon.
The truth is a raft, a rough- at- each- of- its- edges
affair of many sturdinesses lashed together,
standard beauty, realized expectation.
The lucky ones get to choose.
And they choose when they want to.
From this distance, it's hard to tell at first.
The raft's moving closer, I think,
though it's still far away.