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I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you, I was ashamed of you. I despised you As the place of my nativity. And there in Rome, among the artists, Speaking Italian, speaking French, I seemed to myself at times to be free Of every trace of my origin. I seemed to be reaching the heights of art And to breathe the air that the masters breathed, And to see the world with their eyes. But still they’d pass my work and say: "What are you driving at, my friend? Sometimes the face looks like Apollo’s, At others it has a trace of Lincoln’s." There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River, And I burned with shame and held my peace. And what could I do, all covered over And weighted down with western soil, Except aspire, and pray for another Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River Rooted out of my soul?

Love's balustrade, love's balcony a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects, an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather these rusty words, these rusting gates before a breath, Standing in the cold morning on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee you look at the word Love written on the side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive because this is where a love poem once stood, what I am saying right now is secretly built over a love poem, the fossils of a cupola, pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes and three red dots, You, second person pink with shutters you could open with a fingernail like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm, two cups by themselves on a table The mind of the attic still persists up there meditative water and the chairs talking quietly to one another It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony the heart had such a fancy elevator that it started to look like a bird cage and once in a lemon-scented fog near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say, "Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers, are falling from my mouth now" Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings math problems that are eight stories high a long division jutting as pollution into the sky laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends, all hanging out of the window that you opened.

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks. The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love. In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in Across the bluing evening. It’s the hour things get To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet. Yikes. It’s fine to be here with you watching the great events Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon In a baker’s life, always interrupted by the familiar notes Of a childish song, “no more sleepy dreaming,” we float Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom, Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn.

Heigho! the lark and the owl! One flies the morning, and one lulls the night: Only the nightingale, poor fond soul, Sings like the fool through darkness and light. "A widow bird sate mourning for her love Upon a wintry bough; The frozen wind crept on above, The freezing stream below. "There was no leaf upon the forest bare, No flower upon the ground, And little motion in the air Except the mill-wheel's sound."

The tortoise walks on tiptoe in June, the month of his ardors. Buttery light, distant thunder in the month of my ardors.

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick, the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse— then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance, bit, and bite.Wait. I have made them up—all of them— and when I say I am married, it means I married all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves. Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

Okay part of it’s here. See it, I want you to see my brother, dead smiling in a red short-sleeved shirt, You look so much better I got through. How does time work for you? I can see where — when — I felt bad. Goes past. I’m not in it any more But this change hasn’t happened in time — a kind of before and after but no ... continuum. You look brilliant! I never let you down — he says — did I? It wasn’t possible,          Why not? Sisters and brothers are loyal, we are the primal particles. I saw how we connected to make a shape in the eyes of the beholder who chose it: But we are not that. What I see is free to change its outline. My story: the shadow of one. Why did I shrink into a story? It’s easier to talk as a person, but why? I guess we decided to, talking. Coyote throws the stars up into the sky.

Even C.P. Cavafy– cynical, ascetic, unknown in his day– printed at his own expense poems no one would publish, poems intimate, personal, to share with readers he called friends. But I have hundreds of poems hidden away in a box. Even when I know Cavafy once wrapped verse with black and gold ribbons to give away as a gift.

Are they shadows that we see? And can shadows pleasure give? Pleasures only shadows be Cast by bodies we conceive And are made the things we deem In those figures which they seem. But these pleasures vanish fast Which by shadows are expressed; Pleasures are not, if they last; In their passing is their best. Glory is most bright and gay In a flash, and so away. Feed apace then, greedy eyes, On the wonder you behold; Take it sudden as it flies, Though you take it not to hold. When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart.

You only have to make her one grilled cheese in the suffocating heat of summer while still wearing your wet swim trunks to know what it’s like to be in love. And you only have to sit once for a haircut in the air conditioning with the lovely stylist to forget all about it, and to forget that anything in the universe ever existed prior to the small, pink sweater now brushing softly against your neck. In this world, every birth is premature. How else to explain all of this silence, all of this screaming, all of those Christmas card letters about how well the kids are doing in school? We’re all struggling to say the same old things in new and different ways. And so we must praise the new and different ways. I don’t like Christmas. I miss you that much. For I, too, have heard the screaming, and I, too, have tried to let it pass, and still I’ve been up half the night as if I were half this old, and like you, I hate this kind of poetry just as much as my life depends upon it. They’re giving away tiny phones for free these days, but they’ve only made a decent conversation more precious. One medicine stops the swelling, another medicine stops the first medicine. Just like you, I entered this world mad and kicking, and without you, it’s precisely how I intend to go.