Carpenter

With red eyes she watched over him
as he'd drift in and out of sleep or waking
dream from the pain medication. His arms
would lightly raise from the bed and float
in mid-air before he'd begin his work.

Hammering, usually. His thin white hands gripping
a handle we couldn't see and silently tapping
a nail into some invisible construction of his past.
My grandmother laughing, despite herself.

I've done it wrong, he'd say a minute later, his teeth
missing. I want to start over,
and he'd reach up with those thin arms to guide a plane
across the wood
he and only he could see.

We'd take turns at the bedside holding his hands,
when they weren't at work, and say our names.
He'd turn his eyes to us and know we were there,
The medications switched to something stronger
and we'd lose him even more
to his work, to whatever piece of furniture
he was crafting, destroying, rebuilding
until that perfect,
terrible moment of lucidity struck
and he turned to my grandmother
and begged
Put a nail through my head.
This is taking too long.

At the window of a fourth floor apartment

Muted, wet hiss of tires
Against asphalt that grows,
Then dies. Sprinkle-speckled
Puddles halo'd, blushing orange
Under streetlights. The dull amber
Ceiling of the clouds' collapsed tent
Falling over the city. The refrigerator
Rumbling. Neighbors' voices through the wall,
But can't make the words.

The pane
pulling the heat out
or letting in the cold?

I should get a cat.

No reflection with the light out.
Nothing left in the glass.

She hated cats.

Jove

They're saying we owe our lives
To the gas giant, Jupiter, that it shields us
From the collisions of city-sized debris
Hurtling through space. I asked my father
About what the doctor had said, and he
Picked me up in his arms, asked me what
I wanted for Christmas. Boom.
Astronomers with pictures of an explosion
Shooting out of a storm-swirled surface.
Like a vacuum, they said. Sucking up
All these rocks as it sweeps the distant
Dark of the solar system. Something had come
In the mail one day and I remember my father
On the porch swing with a beer in his hand
As we sat down inside to watch TV.

The rusted chains of the swing creaked
Forward, creaked back. Forward and back.

We called to him to come in, but he was looking
At something far down the street. I could see through
the window the mosquitoes swarm around him
In smaller and
smaller circles.

The Loon

I read about a piano teacher
Who loved balloons so much
He filled his house
With thousands and thousands,
Said he'd cry whenever one popped. How silly
To love latex, air, How pathetic to fill a home
With the static cling of false friends
And the desire to hold a thing so close
That the friction of it stands your hair on end.

Imagine being unable to walk
From the bedroom to the bathroom
Without stepping on something you love.

How mad he must be, to replace
a face with these hovering, oblong ovals.
To watch their slow descent,
To resuscitate them until you're flushed
And gasping. How sad that everything, even time,
begins to look like the point of a pin.

Reunion of Broken Parts

You were never subtracted, really.

You're still a whole 

Number, somewhere,

Just slid further down the equation

By some hop-

Scotch duck

And weave through

Crosses and bars

And a whole chain of other divisions.

And the remainder? Too much

Mad mashing of the buttons

On this calculator. I need a break.
I need a light.

You've covered my eyes and the numbers

Fade on my face until you

Let go. Cones and rods adjust and

The answer's back!

In my excitement, a stray finger. 

Clear memory.

I've lost it. Crunch

The numbers again.

Other fingers pressing,

More erasing and then

The tip of the pencil
Snaps. Seeing the dust on my fingers.
So that's how I lost the lead.

Sharpen. A new year.

Your new house. A parentheses, all walled off,

You and him. A and B. I was the X,

But Y was there, too.

Foiled. Add a few more months but

First: the order of operations. We're paired all wrong.

Outside your house and it's dark but I see you

Inside, all lit up with a new variable. That was

Last year and now I'm left with all these letters
That could mean anything or nothing.

This is basic stuff, algebra, and I'm not getting it.

Just isolate this part. Just solve for why
She's got so many confounding gestures.

Just balance the equation:
Me, looking across the far side of those two bars
At the most gorgeous
Puzzle of symbols.
Unreal, elusive meaning
Smudged by too much erasure
And my fingerprints all over, guilty.
I write "Her Blurred Infinity"
In a margin.
And I give up.


The paper returned.
You didn't show your work.

Lower, still, written in red
And underlined twice:

See me