He refused to wear a seatbelt,
preferred the dark country roads
with their unexpected bends,
kept wishing it would snow.

I insisted on drive-thru coffee,
thinking it might be wise
to stay awake.

We listened to talk shows
and requiems,
chatted about acid rain,
flirted a little.

The trouble started when I asked
where he wanted to be dropped off.

I’m not going anywhere, he said.

Hence, my dilemma.

Inspired by Frances Driscoll’s “Forecasting”

Weave weather under skin, create
patterns brilliant blues—hues
to cool heatwinds.

Make neat lines garden.
Accept this thread
attached to strings unstrung,

have rejected need
though its storm courses. Long
to trace curves with tongue,

hold ungloved.
Take off coat; stay awhile—become
landscape in distance

never quite reached, boundaries
between: too. Have stars in eyes,
hot vials    fire threatening to burn

to ground. Worn sky pounds
to powder, flour fine
will be sifted through cracks, floor.

When walk on,                   feet
will enter rooms noiselessly;
patients will hear coming.

Have sewn up so, yet refuse
to unravel. Ravish with, if not hands
caress in dark         under water

or amidst a noisy people
being ferried in            and of
waiting rooms. Will wait in will sit in

uncomfortable seat
while          are called ahead. Smell
will be with antiseptics, touch shared

with latex, with crosses
marking off days on         between
appointments. Will taste

in medicines, hear
when there is nothing left
hope               sound itself.

Move on bed, seek out
between sheets—no one here. Refuse
to breathe, to see past scars.  Skin,

not skin. Eyelids fastened shut, with pins.
Wear sky until it calls,            sea
it can drown, earth if it move.

A maze
cannot navigate. To slough off:
like skin cells, turn from a fine

powder, into into earth into sand
into skin oil and light. Burn.
Am neither nor tongues,

but everything which comes of mouth
is fire. Cannot sit; cannot speak.
Created and erased, am longer

a woman and weather, unleashed.
Map       uncharted. Sky.
Night.                           An uneasy

A perfected balance achieved in sleep
can sometimes twist up through wakefulness
its delicate wire and weight contraption.

A faceless distraction is noisily prowling
the rooms in my mirror
I’d already set in order.

Watching a stray leaf on the lawn
until the weight of its meaning as an object falls
through my attention and disappears.

A child-like willingness today
was, only yesterday, an embryo
in the womb of my resistance.

A wrist of stratocumulus lies slack against blue sky,
the bone of it stolen by wind
to nourish the wildflowers at my feet.

Thriving, as fog thrives in air, diffusely—this will be
my model for every pact
I make with emptiness.

If you don’t write this,
you might go mad,
or take to cleaning out the pantry;
difficult to say which is worse.
Fill the sink with cleaning products.
Wring out the cloth:

bits of rice,
broken pasta,
stale crackers,
grilling salt,
herbs bought in the throes of
gourmet dinner clubs now shriveled in their
glass bottles, a litmus for the total
disinterest in anything to do with food.

Start your day with a
kettle of boiling water,
mind the baby and those
tiny, fragile, reaching hands.

to travel up and down
these harsh expanses
shining with salt

to wander as a mortal woman
among the milestones of the world

seeking a sign
that has survived nothingness
a lost toy
or simple earthen potsherd

a human response
to so many blind landslides

& Sidney I would have seduced out on the battlefield
in my naughty nurse outfit. I would have said, My Lord,
let me take your temperature, & occasioned a sonnet
sequence premiered at court. What a tragedy he died
so young that I have only his portrait to covet.

& Donne, well, there is no doubt I would have swooned, panted,
crawled into his confessional for repentance, admitting
all kinds of horrific deeds and thoughts just to hear him emit a gasp.

& Stein, I could have been her flapper mistress trading Freudian slips
over cryptic crosswords and 2000 piece jigsaw puzzles.

I’d have curled up with Calvino too, on a night train to the ends
of the world, offering myself up like the happiest whore. & out the caboose
we’d shoot the history of thoughts of dead writers. Love tumbling
out like syllables. The two halves of brain closing like a book.