the television era

1. SISTER
Do you remember when you were five, back in the television era, when you stood in front of the TV screen and switched the picture off and on and off again, watching the reflection of your face magically appear and vanish in the glass with each turn of the knob, while the real story collapsed into a small white dot that finally blinked out into blackness? Do you remember the curled brown backs of fallen leaves crumbling under tires as the hurry of passing cars whooshed them off dashboards and roofs? Do you remember things slowly getting worse, each season wiped blank, predicate and cause-and-effect rustling like birds’ nests untwining in the maple trees that canopied our street? Barely old enough to tie our shoes, we tried to grab hold of worry swirling in mid-air, the mitten-muffled clap-clap as we chased dying things in the wind, each fragile part of speech that I let go was a forgotten line from the best poem I will never write, and you laughed in spite of my grief, adorning my red stocking cap with a sheaf of leaves stripped, crackling, to their useless stems.

2. SEPARATION
Today, I look out the window of my basement apartment and see only the knots of bare branches like tangled hair and a flat block of sky. And today, everything that is not sky turns to sticks and is struck by a wind I can see but not feel. When you and I speak to each other from distant towns, our halting sentences trundle through the stubble of cornfields, amid the round stars of snow shimmering under our porch lights. Nothing is sweet between us. I open my door to you, but every day you pass by and never look in. The wind enters anyway.

3. CARTOONS
And no, I cannot fall too soon on these leaf-piles and hide myself. My lover has traced my lips with honey but she wants nothing from me now, and this is a poem described in a movie only by peeling the colors slowly from the film, those framed momentums, where at last the pencil animation of the real story is uncovered. I drag my fingertips along the graphite lines and swirled ovals that fill me in, and throw the ellipses of my fingerprints on your passing shadow. You might pause, look back, feel something. And then turn away.