I saw it in a book on diseases of the mouth,
the smile that is heaven, the smile I cannot reach:
the youth known only by some gesture in the street

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river’s high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;

It's true. I lied. Isn't that how
we stay alive? Dr. Metz in Old Testament
101 said Moses parted the reeds on a lake,

My mind is mush. Three days without a thought
but how to tell them I can't eat their corn
again, nor smoke that pipe that tastes like silt,

When his arms raise it’s all he knows of how
a body opens. Light and full,
his body in the moment just before she touches him

What I thought was stillness
was not stillness. What else would
a tall girl love but hills to stand on

Listening to Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary,
Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire and Manic Depression,

For the orange, saucer-eyed
lemurs indri of the family sifaka,
it is the perfect forest of the hot,

Like orange candywrappers, writes
the daughter now, describing the time
years ago when the goldfish

Across the divider lines and cracked asphalts of America,
the cottonwood, poppy, paintbrush bloom, iris
and interstate litter live without a past or future,