My heart has been broken many times by-- Horton Foote
people I loved who couldn't find a way.
was breath taking, a flesh knot. There were
many fine Czechoslovakian skaters
that Olympic year. Each ended her act,
like a hyphen or parenthesis, lying
on the ice in dramatic, bad American music.
We watched the Olympian skaters Triple Axel
in heaven while L.A. burned a nervous breakdown.
In New Jersey runny eggs were outlawed, but
firearms were allowed. Locally
the smelt fishers didn't register a change:
up & down all night their parachute nets.
Lake Michigan smelled like arithmetic:
fog trees, fog trees, bluets. There were
grocery store epileptics and alphabet
annunciations, and constellations
of life's commonsensical commitments,
the human contracts: godmothers, godlovers
godchildren, godhusbands. And you my
eye-rhyme, twin trick, sister fast
forwarded to death, dropped your skin body
inconsequentially as junk mail into
the planetary mailslot ragbag. You
left a note: The dog needs a walk, & 2
Emily Dickinson poems, peppered with granite
lips. The shepherd, Saint Cuthbert,
from his field, watched angels carry
the bishop, Saint Aidan, in a globe of fire
to heaven. The men who rolled you out of
your house in a Holy Communion white body
bag wore seethrough shower caps & rubber
gloves. The medical examiner was pregnant,
the priest fat. Oh how I head-talk to God
and my love dead. I have never lived 2 days
inside the same body. I have never 2 days
been married to the same man. In my garden,
the red bleeding heart bush made it through
our long winter. The white bleeding heart
didn't. On the blunt end of a heart's foreclosure,
you count flowers; you remember the landscapes
of you.