Sara Nicholson

The wrong words sit beside us Where the flesh is heavy. The right words come most easily To those who sleep. I put my boots in a CVS bag Because the weather demanded it And my jacket over The windshield in the morning To confuse the sun. Of mine own life, I'll tell you One thing the internet Won't tell you—I wear my hair Like a woman sometimes. The project of the snow's To put the sky in lo-fi And the memory of last week's Snow's a gash in the air. The mountains and seas Have a queer look about them. A hoax of golden daffodils Obscures them, you might say. I've been told We should pretend That everything we see is real, That images should try As best they can To come to life. I feel that iron Should take the place of snow In the literature And that silk flowers Should be manufactured like Real ones each spring. I'm reading the letters Of distinguished men to you. A broadside of a bad poem On very good paper. A treatise on how to infuse Brandy with plums. My fat ass Surveys the greensward And when I step In the manner befitting a person Of little station in the world The dandelions seem to Vanish in retrospect As though to die were just To overlook the rituals That accompany The death and life of weeds And to fold oneself Back into one's roots. I am so big I mean my ass is so big I can't fit in this room I'm building. My ass can barely fit Without assistance Through the door of this stanza Which is why I invented The pronoun "you." The streetlamps Seemed to you to want to Break apart the clouds So we left the city, are always In the process Of abandoning a city Somewhere. Some days now You'll find us trolling The hillsides for wildflowers. Other times, sitting at the very center Of our garden, googling "beauty" With the filter off.

My husband's out-of-town so I set Our house on fire. Champagne And eggs, asparagus for breakfast. Water for lunch. I eat dinner early In the late afternoon while the wind Disorganizes leaves, leaving me To clean them up. I think that the Imagination's guided by logic— A hand that's used to translating Images of rain to snow. Error-filled, The night destroys the details of Poems—the pearls worn by Beethoven In secret, the rocks H.D. mistook For seaweed as she walked In exaltation toward the beach. Is it Possible to sing the imagination Into being? And is it possible for us To valorize autumn by cloaking in Difficult language the paths of stars? Geraniums, they make entr'actes Out of air as I walk past them. Always these goddamn leaves And acorns shat on our house by The goddamn oak. One of us will fail The other, will plagiarize language From the other, that's certain. Acorns are beautiful only to those Who've never had to clean them up.

Covet not the sun its honorarium nor authorize the stars their grants to write. The sojournors spotted a forest adrift with language, but couldn't make sense of it. The woods at odds with the usual channels and those neighboring mountains didn't look like pyramids, no matter the scale. Read this part as if the sum of lilac mattered to you. For love of someone else's vortex, toss the luminaries aside. In lieu of flowers, please donate and in exchange for your sympathy I'll give you edits on the level of the line. Poems are to war as are ghosts to the proverbial orchard. Headstones offer us nothing but an end to syntax. Microsoft Word inverts the sea. I read your manuscript. Reader, I married it. I fear for the estuaries. They are so small this time of year.