Memorial
who’s awake right now
in Utah this cinema
of long hair, God in undergrad, youngest
cousin in the youngest lake, we’ll bring
a baby next time, my sister says, we’ll bring a kid,
& then we drive away
thinking about aunt
becki, todd, black hair, long legs, strong
arms as a kid, how he was
a loner but was nice to me, even then
had one hand on
time’s other mind, I think that must have been hard,
though what do I know, running parallel, running too soft, having
this other feeling always during normal events like
looking someone in the eye while you both take your shoes off,
just the feeling of being still as you are
in water, mid-dream, the grocery stores
in Utah are so big they reach some third
state between open and closed, no
AC, no elegy, no service
in food lion, where we arrived, arrived the way arrival
makes you sleep
Bear Country
The men on youtube showed me how to pack
a scent-proof plastic vessel full of food. Rain
slid the river up the bank; rain matted the grass.
For days after I hauled my belongings
over the mountain pass, my whole body
trembled now and then, could touch others
only gently. For weeks I wore the cannister
of mace against my hip – the bell, which,
dulled against my belt, sounded
like a peanut
in a plastic bottle. Today, Ben calls
from the hospital to say that during rec time
they brought out bowling balls as light
as Styrofoam. Someone somewhere has determined
just what shape and weight make a thing incapable
of harm. I can’t sleep, so I imagine I’m the metal arm
that manufactures them – makes only fantastic
whirring sounds while producing impossibly
peaceful objects. What I remember now is how one mother
in every town I passed through would say, Bear country
is coming, though never where it was. I never saw a bear,
but I do think I lived there for a while. Near meadows
pooled haphazardly between the pines. It’s hard to tell you
how afraid I was. How for weeks I paid attention
to every single shape and sound. It was awful. It was like
watching, late at night, the face of someone you’re about to love.
