On Our Seventh Anniversary
A frayed postman
wearing a threadbare flat cap
delivers a letter you posted
seven years ago.
I offer him a dream.
He chooses coffee instead.
He leaves; I open the envelope,
and grasshoppers
from the heartland greenÂ
hop out of the crease within.
I remember - we've declaredÂ
them to be the national beings
of our Republic of Mind.
You are asleep. I whisper,
"They are alive."
Cat's Tongue, House No. One Hundred And Ten
The lane makes a bottleneck.
We have a name for the narrow isthmus;
we forgot that; perhaps the lane's purpose
is to pour the world into the house at the end,
No. One hundred and ten.
I desire to apprehend if you still live there,
keep the books you borrowed from me
decades ago on an evening remembered
for hidden feelings, fog muffled streetlights
casting unstable shadows of us on my celadon wall.
My mother coughed and coughed as you depart.
I recall you bent, hands fisted, books in your tote.
You didn't acknowledge that you would not return,Â
no one could. We stopped and watch a starling caught
in the orange cat's maw. The cat spokeÂ
with its mouth full. I didn't know the tongue.
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