Doesn't grass, grow on its own out of sand? He should have felt guilt ripping it out with each hurried step. The mist maybe waters it, the sea air too thick to do much else, he thought as his tissue thin lungs bore on. The night had given way to new humiliation, given way to a morning still dark, still grey, but backlit by the sun somewhere. He could not compete with this world, this hunk so infatuated with limits. The sky shakes hands with the sea, the waves pound the sand, the sand swallows his feet, his weight and all the weight around him keeps him from drifting into the one place with no limits, the one place forever collapsing, expanding, folding in on itself.

A limit: the path a secret takes from mouth to ear, brain to memory. On the ferris wheel over the water, mood still reflecting all the cheap, gaudy boardwalk lights, he swung the gondola grabbing the cage and throwing his weight. She screamed, clutched her hands to chest and laughed. They were kinetic, hands waiting to connect, to start the cascades. A limit: this desire in the dark.
Standing in line to the fairground swings, the two watched as the summer visitors were strapped into their seats, raised and lowered through the air around the tall sea horse in the middle, paint peeled. He remembered his childhood thrills, the way the lights from below would blur as he went round but the passenger in front would stay steady in view She sat in front of him, hair pulled up showing the soft of the nape of her neck. He reached for the chains to her swing and held tight. He could have whispered in her ear, through the wisps of hair from the wind, but his words were caught in the circumference. He felt his palms redden from the chains, a slipped grasp and the centrifugal force pulled them apart. She turned to him, bangs blown over her eyes. She reached her hand back to him and opened her mouth to laugh, but all he heard was the chimes of the organ carried by the air past his ears.
Consequences exist for limits crossed. He could still feel her skin, taut and littered with raised bumps--fear. He could still feel her grip, so tight around his arm before loosening. In an instant it was swallowed by the dark---her pigtailed grade school face, the encrypted notes they'd pass through lockers, the smell of her first car, all the times the path veered, his months away, how their small town preserved her just so. The street between their houses the same, the potholes still potted, waiting to bloom; the tree branches almost hugging over the flowery avenue and the broad leaves blotching the sun from the sky. he found her there in memory, sitting in the yard with white flowers covering her eyes and a smirk. How is it we recall things as they did not happen? Under the pier, sand rough on skin, she'd opened her mouth but the sound she made had dissolved, swallowed by the waves slapping the planks. Face slick, he now walked back turned to the seaside town. Before him stretched the sand all brown and green, the fields and their brambles, and the sky a morning grey with three tufts of smoke dotting the horizon. The smell of her stained his hands. He laughed, should he feel any guilt at all.

Her collegiate years she stood
background, mouth open, words
formed--the wrong medium for
capture. Goldenrod by the sun
light, streamed white through her
bedside window. Said her Hail
Mary in the rector's room.
Said Our Father cloaked
in basil; knees touching li



tracing the completeness of
a hummingbird in flight.

By the crate of the elevator door
is the place where the belly of his
hand met Lizzie's soft left temple.

An uncertainty of possession:
was it his pulse or hers beating
through the thinness.

Underneath all sleeps. Lizzie knows
in like a lion and what follows.
Perhaps there are grimmer ways to
love another.


Let us attempt discovery--

Lizzie, there are things that cannot be held.
Water falling from the shower faucet; the spin
of the ceiling fan; his tongue on teeth. The clouds
clotting the sky are made of ice, not
whimsy. Lizzie is uninvited to my poem.
Find what unearths: these words become spring.
The elbows of branches, after months spent straight,
now flex bent. bees buzzing everywhere;
an oozing strawberry chin; the tree outside
stands blushing; and somewhere:


honeysuckle.

snow day

I will sleep this away as with all illnesses. I will allow him to reside in my fever dreams: the smallest space available. Maybe it's best that most of what happens between us resides in the internal world; I am watching the snow fall through the sliver of window not covered by curtain and this is how he must view me: through the smallest space available. I could be the world's sleepiest escapist. These words will meet a violent end, the way Robby is writing the book that cannot be carried, the way I change my poems to white ink. All I have to offer is my silenced ego. I do not want ships in bottles because they deserve more.

I think now of the house starting from the corners and then going in. There is a use in piecing this together. Keep the kitchen walls bare mother always told me. It's the busiest room in the home, keep it the starkest. A house is built from the outside in. A house is a container. It is emptied from the inside out. Its skeleton w


ill be remembered. This house was our vetree branches remember a chimney. The windows are blown out now. They are seen by what is not there. The roof is sunken now. The roof swallowed our attic. The attic where


our secrets slept. The attic where on rainy nights you could hear the raccoons. From the corner room you could see the ships in port. From here I can see it intact. A house after our own hearts: not withstanding many winters, inclement weather, shifting neighborhood lines, a highway, the industry forgotten. I am old now. I have few fascinations left. Preserving his name. Ke


eping the walls from crumbling, the boughs from crashing in. Each room behind a closed door and inside them secret plays happening one act at a time. Every floorboard a name shouted on a city street. There is



the human desire to be bound, to be withheld. A house



could not contain all the dead


words

#3

a little white

house lingers

in
my memory

of that

little white house i dream

every night

the
little boy rows

what
does the body


become?
expression stays longer than

bone turns to

powder easier than

and only teeth

remain.

Yes, he'd say, I do remember the jellyfish washed up on the shore.

the end

Dead words bloom tucked
under tongue: His name, some
verbs; the scrim is lifted, the
language learned.