Susan Firer

The poppies start as aliens end as husbands, a pause of light, a dull scatter. Transports dandelion clouds. Venus passes between sun & earth. Exceedingly rare, Transit, have you noticed how close the ode & elegy are? (In the United States someone dies every sixteen seconds!) Husband, Supermoon, Venus come & go. Death says there is no you at the end of weather. "Among the rarest of all predictable astronomical . . ." Husband presented me. The weatherman says we are locked in the clouds.

I wake to money, and take my money slow I watched for money, lights turned low One must have a mind of money . . . Money that is not there and the money that is The art of money isn't hard to master . . . The money surrounds us . . . Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet money Money on a wet, black bough Do not go gentle into that good money The pure products of money go crazy Money sweeping out from us to disappear Oh Money! My Money! our fearful trip is done I myself will die without money Money, Money, you bastard, I'm through.

but lake winds pick him up & blow him into the clouds. I married a dreamer. I wait. He stops to listen to the early lilac orchestra. He starts to change into blowy horizontal lake rain, then migrating red admirals. I thinksay remember. I remember us. We chose the imaginal north/south somewhere between Bartlett Avenue and Jupiter, between Lake Michigan and the Aegean. Remember we drink Serbian Cosmos together, we eat squash blossoms and red snapper soup. We visit the Calatrava before bed. We nurture a magnetic field of words. I am remembering you back. Remembering plays time. Thinking is all remembering. I remember our young bodies. I'm not finished with us. Remember that. If someone asks, "why is that lady out walking in that lake storm?" Tell them "months ago her husband went to the store in a blizzard & never came back." Tell them: "She can't stop looking for him.”

I have just returned from a visit to my pier Often I am permitted to return to my pier For a long time I would go to pier early So much depends upon a pier This is an old pier I celebrate my pier, and what I assume . . . I had a pier There is a certain slant of pier On woman's first disobedience, and the pier Christmas won't be Christmas without the pier I wandered lonely as a pier Pier was spiteful This is just to say I have eaten the pier

In inaccurate skin, among hologram trees, fresh from the tundra of dreams, I hear public television say that Jesus was trilingual. Billie Holiday sings the loss of plotliness, the loss of onomatopoeiabreath. Doris asks if I’ll touch her titanium humerus—I do. I go to Sheboygan to stand in Emery Blagdon's "The Healing Machine," which was brought in pieces from the Nebraska Plains. Its coffee can klieg lights' grace and copper wire sculptures leave burns all over me. Death is like Russia: beautiful, cold, expansive, expensive. Ephesus says: even marble turns to chalk. Aldebaran is nearing the end of its life. Jupiter and the moon are the closest they'll be until 2026. It's 25-below wind chill. Winds push iced piers into houses. My wounds smell like strawberries. Jim who once saw a UFO and was too tired to tell anyone, who rode a tiger, and slept with his cornet's mouthpiece stenciled on his lips, was a lifelong Indiana water garden gang member, Jim who delivered a baby from my body, Jim, impresario of poems, parking tickets, and sky-blue hydrangeas, Jim who "wore a crown of snow," Jim's ashes change the garden. Who can sleep with banded Jupiter so close to the moon?