Two Poems

Drew

There’s nothing to say again, meaning I’ve been crying a lot and calling it poetry
and there’s no poet like the man eating chicken bones in the Amsterdam library
who says to me after we touch hands, open-palm, and I watch him weep perfectly

Let me ask you a question.
What do you think about your skin’s softness?
What about that purse? 
What’s a more interesting question?

who drew a crab on my left hand, then a smiley face, then a ragged stray line up 
my thumb and settled to write alongside me, thrilled, on his own sheet of paper

I would like to write about you
like when I am in jail.

I would like to write about joy
like I would like to write about a caged horse.

and never arrived when we planned to meet later, Laurierstraat 190 at 17:00, where
we were meant to sit in a round group of forty others and hold silence for an hour.

To the stain of my spectral love,

Know that I miss your states, your changes, and I always imagine you in the presence of your collected possessions. What is it you surround yourself with today? What tinctures and tissues lie under which candles’ cold dripping? Which sauces, eggs, and olives, which handfuls of breads have you set out, forgotten? Which soaps and lathers have you washed your hands and hair with? Which fabrics drape your west-facing windows shading which meager plants: morning glories, purple hearts, peace lilies, violets?

We once spoke of poems about flowers being necessarily poems about language.
I see now that in these poems we spoke of every named flower is an elegy.

I will name for you all of the wildflowers that comprise your face. I will mourn
the flowers’ insufficiency and the deaths of my own memories. I will keep listing— listing your treasures— into loss:

The buffalo teeth. The crimson rosary.
The hair in the hinged, brass picture frame.
The wasp hives. The wooden spoon. The paper cranes.
The red-lacquered box. The gobs of raw copper.
The portrait of a skiing German Shepherd.
The three moon coins. The broken easel.
The terrarium for common house spiders.
The quartz in the fish tank. The Turkish coffee pots.
The parlor guitar your mother played.
The pastoral cookie tin. The jar of Junmai sake.
The etched print of a man breathing in winter.
The agate pendant. The blue cootie-catcher.
The acrylic honeybee. The ceramic pitcher.
The wreath of wicker. The engraved hourglass
you turn over as you leave the living room.

marked & yours in Life and Language, 
Meredith