YOU BE INERTIA, I'LL BE AN OBJECT IN MOTION

This time I'm edging past in the garage
                                    a stack of rusted license plates, hammer
                        heads near handles never mended
            on a groaning metal shelf of seed packets,
gardening gloves, plastic butter tubs
                                    of screws, nails, wine corks stacked up like hay bales,
                        under a straw wreath wrapped in faded Christmas ribbon.

I've found when, why I'm here, why I came to find
                                    wren patterns in the sawdust and dangling threads
                        of your chambray on the drill press I've forgotten.
            Pull drill handle and watch the bit as large
as my finger swivel into sheet metal,
                                    spit out silver corkscrews. Unwind from the awl
                        tucked in tool belt I lug around and long

to unhook under cottonwoods at the gulley,
                                    my hair, and hitch myself there, in a memory
                        where, cross-hatching figures in bark, I wait for you.
            But this time you're drill bits with raffia,
tin dishes, silk flowers, and I'm digging
                                    a garage out of clay, compiling all of your
                        inertia. Amid this scratching ink, I can't hear

you, can't hear anything but gurgle of spider
                                    and hair in tub drain. I should return, hammered nail          
                        in its trunk, to that tree and burn up the Lost sign
            I posted, and hope, not tall grass, pine needle floor,
and plastic bags pierced with cigarette cartons,
                                    it's only paper that burns. You're too young to be
                        this old, you said, And too kind to bitch so much.

What's this I hear—I wait for your tutorials,
                                    your suggestions, your do-yourself-a-favors,
                        but wire wings stain my back, and I'm ashamed
            of my filament heart, your flatbed truck,
and all my clothes that heave the smoke
                                    from your busted lungs, your torched larynx.

__

LEAPING IN PLACE

Don't think this time. Let train's lumbering glow
show how to move in single file your thoughts
lined up and linked, so even on corners

rails hold limbs parallel, unswerving
in pebbles and ties littering the berm,
down its pale green slope snaked with shoe laces

and wire, fishing line in dandelions.
Wrap fingers around cold bars smudged in paint
and prints and hold how it feels to flee,

meditate on space from a boxcar broad-
casting fat letters, flat language falling
from the side of trains as smoke from cigarette

stuck to your lips that rainy morning you built
a deck, nailed your heart to my chest, swelling
and heaving, steam rising off flannel

where raindrops fell. Or were they leaves snowing
sideways across the yard while we scraped
with spoons under a pine atop the hill

a grave for the bird. Yes, it was leaves
and rain, and I gathered them in my arms
and covered you to still this wind, its howl.

__

These poems search from the void left after my father died, I had my first baby, and read for many nights Richard Siken, Sherwin Bitsui, Robert Bly, and Cate Marvin.