Slowly But Not Too Much
as if making your way through an alphabet
beginning with alpha, as if you stood in front
of the Arcimboldo paintings in Vienna and someone said
“Spring is in the Louvre, springtime is
in Paris.” Sometimes we were word for word, sometimes
unspeakable like the painted stone angel
in Dijon, who has been grieving silently
over the Passion of Christ since the end
of the 14th/beginning of the 15th century, as if
someone had said to her, adagio ma non tanto. Think of
the joy of making it onto the train before
it departs—or the sudden blossom of what’s possible
when you arrive a minute late and watch it
pull out of the station. Behind her,
the angel’s wings remain unfurled
as if they might fly. She still
wears her favorite color: chipped-stone blue. My favorite
is omega-may-I, and yours: Venetian-red-and-vanishing.
When Your Lover Leaves You
Learn a language you’ve never heard
Plant ginkgo trees, which will drop
all of their leaves at once
Practice the duet St. Francis sang
with a nightingale
Replace mezuzah scripture at front door
with sentence from AI computer essay: the present,
like everything else, will soon come
to an end
Donate matching red leather women’s World Champion
Ferrari Race-to-Win jackets
Touch the clothes left in the closet
the way the ocean plays tag
with the shore, and remember her design
for Lady Macbeth’s dress: one thick red drip of
blood sewn in from waist to floor
Consider the difference between remainder
and reminder, forget
how she dropped all of her clothes
at once and left them
where they fell
