Two Poems

Still life with Courtney Love

By Wednesday I am Tuesday, and by that law his shirt unbuttoned an Ohio summer over a bar-mat. But this is not a whiskey-dam, a hole to bum your sleep in, or a rock and roll band. I said, this is home, my lips a hum in the sink. This is a motel lodged into space. Sometimes his ghost throws racquet balls at the television and it feels like tin mallets went apeshit on my occipital lobe. Silent things fall down and mysteriously break apart in my bones. The debris fertilizes the lawn, the garden that if you walk by enough times will realize is a graveyard, a scarf you cannot touch. Someone in a photograph, a someone I no longer know, creates buzz-killing boundaries. I leave lilacs and rosaries by his Oak and stone. The time will come to get over feeling a hand swift upon my neck, to fit fibula to talus and walk off the magnetomotive force between a rooster and his tree. Driving out The construction was left out all night, the sagging sky perished on the soggy road. A project manager must have forgot the traps, to put up orange cones, hold out rain-buckets, come home to his wife and take off his clothes, bathe the baby with hands that touched his shoes. I drove the car      (to Orlando and Cocoa Beach) (to drug-dealings and Gun Club road) (to an unnamed mountain and the Atlantic pier) (to the Atlanta fog inside my mouth) (to the unlocked door inside a hammered twin bed) (to double beds with double-sheets) to sleep over arm as pillow to crawl out his window to slip back in, thieve my things. In the engine a wife prepared, I love you, too while preparing a silent breakfast. This means the moon is small and awake, tastes like rope between each braid. This means the moon is in someone’s Nebraskan attic lower and closer to our feet. Before tucking himself into a blue yarn he thinks about the empty side of the road, silver cashmere on his hands. He writes, maybe the last time, yours till Niagara falls— and falls a ladder that’s had it up to here.