My Bright Head
Makes shadows, makes noise, calls
the ambulance, breaks glasses in the sink.
My bright head has three eyes. One
only sees darkness, the other two
I try to keep closed. My bright head
finds three pennies in the drawer and then
loses them in the gutter. My bright head
has a drowned wick; however long I burn
my fingers on the match, the candle will not stay lit.
My bright head arranges flowers in the flame.
My bright head rides in a carriage drawn
by carrion flies and crippled mice. It takes
a holiday. It takes a drag from the cigarette
of the man with a disease my bright head
can’t pronounce. My bright head doesn’t
have a mouth, so don’t wait for it to tell you
what is wrong, where he will be staying.
Ghosts of Love
We pretend we are them. They play piano in the dark.
They frighten us. They make noise in the other room
where no one is. We think we see them. We make
love to them; they hollow us like taxidermy,
skeleton what was. We dream them;
they have no faces, their hands, blurred.
I see photos of them, but I never believe they are
real—their luminosity, no sense in our world,
fireflies in human form. And their voices recorded
by the sound engineer sound dolphins in static fog.
We believe they communicate something we never know.
They terrify us—Is that the right word?—we turn on all the lights.
They change the thermostat to low so cold blows
through furnace grates, keeps us awake through the night
no one knows as I do. They unmake beds, dirty dishes,
rearrange books on bookshelves. They ruin all
the compasses in the house, the star charts, translate
sacred books back to dead language. They return
my prayers as stones in silver bowls with dry marigolds
and pheasant wings, tell me what to say when nothing’s left.
