Throw It All Away
My granddaughter who. The one alive in speech descends. A plate
for Cali, a plate for Paul. The party of the first part, fallen asleep.
How I wish, love, you know—we trade seed packets, we measure the
silt turned dawn. Listen, when I stayed at the YMCA it was sadness
married to a joke. It was frozen condiments, salt-packed meats,
ethnography of the failed. Guess what: I’m thinking of a John
Ashbery from one to a hundred. No grandchildren there. But a
singular guitar, picked like a nose, a duck-like pluck. We learn other
ways to be beautiful, don’t we? And still the pure mouth, the child
going away. A handprint works its silence down the chimney. Rain
makes the lake a hammered steel. Granddaughter, pushing a blanket
through the bars of political speech. Poetry a wind to lift new bodies
from the earth. A happiness, a leaving.
