P: on children

Rising
reasons. Some-
times duty
saves

add then the
attenuant pleasures

A heart put
in hand a fleet
heart

Taken back will be
given others

Hearts glimpse thru
forests

Only
first trees
cryout contra

beauty

D: on children

Watch them be
not a thing more honey

Their stock legs--a morality
play for learn

On backs
tracings, paths
to a field we've no

wing to follow

Catching one the death
of me. I'll not
except the way they move

cistern2: On children

P: I don't find infants entirely interesting.
D: You wouldn't.
P: I mean, perhaps evolutionarily...
D: Child is the mother of the woman?
P: Something like that.
D: Is it about communication? Because they can communicate.
P: I know, it's just not--
D: --entirely interesting. Well, it is, actually.
P: I know.
D: Theoretically. Pre-linguistically. Goo.
P: Yes.
D: You are lonely with them.
P: Yes, that too.
D: You're lonely by yourself, aren't you?
P: That's the definition.
D: I don't know definitions, just that I am not lonely.
P: Because you're always in community.
D: How do you mean?
P: When you make. You make with people, for people, on people.
D: And you?
P: I just create.
D: Sounds empty.
P: Yeah. Sometimes. Sometimes I get to share. Mostly not.
D: And when you do?
P: It can feel forced, like it isn't its nature.
D: What's nature?
P: The nature of words.
D: It isn't the nature of words to be shared?
P: No. There's this ownership thing with naming.
D: There is this ownership thing with bodies.
P: But we know that's wrong.
D: Do we? You always did think you were the special case.
P: Aren't I?
D: No. Everyone gets lonely.
P: You said you didn't.
D: No, I said I am not, different thing. I am not lonely. Not an identity. I get lonely, a condition.
P: Children are like that for me--a condition.
D: I know. It's sad.

cistern1: a dialogue at the well

Poet: We haven't talked for awhile.
Dancer: Talk is peach--messy, too much juice. Southern.
P: You love peaches...
D: Only for flesh, sinew and pit.
P: How have you been?
D: Moving, you?
P: Not so much, not forward. Circles. Like around this hole.
D: Forward is overrated.
P: Thank you.
D: Not a problem. I did miss you.
P: And I cd tell that how?
D: Are you looking at me?
P: It's difficult not to: you're naked.
D: How does that make it difficult?
P: Well, I can see your nipples, and they are irregular.
D: Irregular?
P: Not like coins. Not pink.
D: You spend so much time with what's negative.
P: Absence.
D: It's less romantic than you think.
P: Who wants romance?
D: It's how we were trained. You can't get past your training so easily.
P: Oh?
D: Even when you do, you rely on it. You need something to undo.
P: We lace, we unlace our shoes?
D: We keep standing up and lying down--it isn't useless.
P: What does it make us?
D: Simple machines, maybe. Have some water.

They're back--the gray spiders that eat my periphery. They are hater-spiders, they spin hate. I've seen one skate the lower right corner of my eyeball to weave the word "careless." They want me to think I'm careless. They want me to feel as if I am moving through webs. I am. They are thick in my mouth and dry. They suck from me better than infants. They are naturals.

My heart is too big with me. But they will have that too, I bet.

Charting the white

for Emma Bartholemew

If I begin by drawing oblongs
one outside the other, I
can make a mesa.

If I use white ink on white
paper, like something em-
bossed my plateaus become

invitations. "Get married"
they say. What they mean is
"you'll not know such

blinding heights again--
first lush above, first empathy,
poem, first striking child."

From noon the dark
lengthens, and the antipathy
for all I once thought

pure thought.

Tree wandered over to the kitchen area for coffee. The refrigerator was blazing its food verts and diet pills, its laxatives and gym memberships and home-toning instruments, its stomach-stapling surgeries and take-out menus. Tree opened it and got out some creamer. The coffee was on a timer, and as she walked over to it, it percolated and exhaled, greeting her like an apartment dog--post long day alone. Coffee was necessary for thought, part of thought's ritual. Tree thought about Chip. That Chip was psycho. He worked in financials, it was really no surprise he'd finally lost it. It was all a gamble these days: since the crash of '08, Wall Street felt less like J. Press and more like Vegas--old Vegas. America was the last stronghold of the consumer; the stuffists had waged a 20-year battle and they'd won. The rest of the planet had abandoned the U.S. and its bigGod bigBuy buyGod policies, except to sell there. They'd left Tree's country, a shrunken-yet-bloated first world of one, all alone in its piles and piles of misery. Except, of course, to sell there.

The phone call every morning was from Chip. They kept quirks from their childhood: one was the first hello, a second--the love of old phones, like the antique rotary dial their father had on the desk in his home office. In their early adulthoods, they had both scavenged for one separately, and now the olive model beside Tree's bed rung its long and lovely brrrrriiinng.

-Tree?
-Yes G?
-Don't call me that.
-Fine, Al.
-Tree...
-Sorry, what's up Chuck?
-Chip.
-Of course. Chip. What's up?
-I had a dream last night.
-You dream?
-Stop it. I'm calling because you can't... don't do the show.
-(Pause.)
-And don't get rid of it.
-Rid of what, Chip?
-The last one. You've been having a hard time voiding it, yeah?
-How did you...
-The dream, sis. Just keep it. Somewhere. Hide it. You'll need it.
-Why?
-To do more.
-More?
-That's all I know. I'll explain when I work it out. Listen, maybe I'll come over later?
-Yeah. You're being very weird, Chippie--you best come on over.

Later, however, Chip did not come over. Later, Chip was found face down in the sludge along the Schuylkill River. His neck offered up the precise red absence of piano wire. Chip and Tree also had a thing for acoustic instruments. Tree played three-chord guitar, and Chip's stand-up was never, ever in tune.