21 February

Broken

1991 Moments ago, as I rummaged through the dishes in the drainer, I realized that I had dreamed of my favorite glass fractured into large sharp pieces, the thick bottom still in one piece. (A few weeks later, I would drop that glass and it would split apart exactly as in the dream.)

At a wide spot

You know who you are

Remember me when your high beams sweep the shoulder of a new back road you’re driving at the edge of speed and catch a glistening of shattered glass as chilly as starlight, those shards so dazzling they bewitch you to forget they ache to shred your skin.

Think of me when the rain’s begun to fall and you stop to change the flat at the only circle of light in miles of blackness, and the pay phone hunkering there, dry in its glassy cubicle, jangles all the while you’re loosening the lug nuts, jacking up the car, cursing the flaccid spare, all the while ringing that steady, dull, insistent peal that you don’t answer, though you want it quiet, because you know it’s no one calling you.

1993 I dashed an ugly cup he’d left behind to a concrete floor, barely any recompense at all for treating me so casually.

A Gesture of Mourning

For Steve

I was telling your story to a friend at the recycler’s

while I sorted mildewed boxes,

beer bottles all the way from Illinois,

crinkled balls of grimy foil.

Grieving the suicide of another vet who wasn’t exactly killed

in the war that ended twenty years before that spring,

you called form a Motel 6 in Arizona

to say that you had finally wrapped a rubber band

tight below the first knuckle

of your smallest finger, waited for numbness,

and sliced with your biggest knife

through the space between the bones.

There was a cracked jar with the lid still on,

which I couldn’t budge,

but I did collapse the glass into the shards

it yearned to be and sliced a gouge

in the flesh below my thumb.

“It came of like a chicken wing,” you chuckled,

but you forgot to flush the toilet where you left

the tiny segment of yourself, and a maid found it there.

I blamed inattention, but I’m thinking now

that it was solidarity. I watched my blood

pool bright on the asphalt.

“Didn’t mean to frighten anyone,” you said,

and the familiar grimace of regret

seized your voice a thousand miles away.

A man who works at the recycler’s offered

His blue bandana and told me, “No one ever

Cut themselves before when I was here,

not in five years.” I wanted to apologize.

2005 He said that spring breaks everything. “Only the ice,” I disagreed.

2009 So many icicles dangle from the balconies of this building that the sidewalk below is roped off. They glittered in yesterday’s sunshine, and I recognized my own balcony from the street because I know my icicles, the best in the lot.

I remember hurling mason jars at a barn behind a farmhouse back in 1976. I don’t remember why.