1.
Trying to tell you how
the anatomy of the park
through stained panes, the way
guerrillas are advancing
through minefields, the trash
burning endlessly in the dump
to return to heaven like a stain––
everything outside our skins is an image
of this affliction:
stones on my table, carried by hand
from scenes I trusted
souvenirs of what I once described
as happiness
everything outside my skin
speaks of the fault that sends me limping
even the scars of my decisions
even the sun blaze in the mica-vein
even you, fellow-creature, sister,
sitting across from me, dark with love,
working like me to pick apart
working with me to remake
this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,
this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.

2.
The fact of being separate
enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture––
a chest of seventeenth-century wood
from somewhere in the North.
It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head
but the key has not been found.
In the compartments are other keys
to lost doors, an eye of glass.
Slowly you begin to add
things of your own.
You come and go reflected in its panels.
You give up keeping track of anniversaries,
you begin to write in your diaries
more honestly than ever.
3.
The lovely landscape of southern Ohio
betrayed by strip mining, the
thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger
the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station
are causes for hesitation.
Here in matrix of need and anger, the
disproof of what we thought possible
failures of medication
doubts of another’s existence––
tell it over and over, the words
get thick with unmeaning––
yet never have we been closer to the truth
of the lies we were living, listen to me:
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.