Recovery poem with jargon
After reading Auden, I water my moth orchid with ice cubes
and watch a girl with green hair draw a benzene ring in white erase.
I pay attention to time. I arrange my table of books into heiroglyphs
and try to say something before the sun sets. In Midsummer Night’s Dream,
I am the forest. In tarot, the hanged man. In nightmares, the bottle
with infinite volume. Carpe noctem and carpe diem chasing each other
like clock hands. A möbius band. The shadow-harp. Carbon. Auden himself.
Recovery poem with an ocean between it
I came to understand vastness the way we come to understand anything.
The last seat opened in the church pew. I could see the top of the black casket,
I could smell the white lilies.
That’s just it, something in me moved to make room for one more.
Something bore a hole in my head and disappeared again.
The funeral came before the death, the grief before all of it.
In other terms, water is unlike dopamine except in its absence.
Then its presence is thorough as a flood. Gray water, downed trees,
pathways sealed. Chemical imbalance I was told in the white office
on the white paper, as though I could point from the same shore they did.
As though the tide had not come in and buried the sandbar where I once stood.
