Dear Francis, I don’t want anyone else
I love to die so I arrange daisies
and fiddleheads in a blue vase.
The ferns unscroll their fronds
in light and water. They twist ugly.
O dear effort. O small joy
to find mail out front. Addressed
to former tenants or “Current Resident.”
Any brief connection
even if the name’s not mine.
We sleep in on Sundays.
Practice vocabulary in Italian and French.
If we get there, may we know enough
words and idioms. The right ways
to be lost. The best cathedrals
and saint names. Names I wrote in classes
when all I knew of evil was a cartoon devil
calling up more devils from crags
and deep splits in the earth.
I did not confirm—no stack of pale
sparkling cards, checks folded inside,
no sheet cake from Wegmans,
a sugar lamb, gentle and meek,
resting in a buttercream field—
but I know how to ask for help and mean it.
May we know divine light or the sound
that startles the cats awake each morning—
the furnace coming on, a neighbor
leaving for work, the dog
dragging a bone across the floor.
May people believe our shoulders
are filled with light,
even though we do not smile.
We bring beer and planets, a spider
shook from an eyelet curtain
for luck or love, reasons to stay in bed.
Let’s pretend we do not see the first tree
to turn red. Put the tree
on a make believe mountain.
Put the mountain in a make believe forest
beneath a sky heaped like grey silk.
Impatient traffic beneath the soft awning.
I like to think of us as a red sign
on the road, a less severe instruction
painted across the middle.
Each day the furnace hums pink
waking lullabies. A rope falls
from the ceiling above our mattress.
We must learn to live with this rope,
follow the fall. On ambitious days,
we trace its path with our fingers.
The gesture, its own enormous grief.
Any zigzag pattern will do.
I am saying this whole thing
is a prayer to end the sadness.
I am marveling at each texture.
How does everything know to come on?
May it all keep coming on.
May the lampposts—scrolled in design
and work—always believe in night
and night and sidewalks and more night.