How the mind wants still to be sure

Samuel Beckett

You were the white field when you handed me a blank

sheet of paper and said you’d worked so hard

all day and this was the best field you could manage.

And when I didn’t understand, you turned it over

and showed me how the field had bled through,

and then you took out your notebook and said how each

time you attempted to make something else, it turned out

to be the same field. You were worried that everyone

you know was becoming the field and you couldn’t help

them because you were the one making them into fields

in the first place. It’s not what you meant to happen.

You handed me a box of notebooks and left. I hung the field

all over the house. Now, when people come over, they think

they’re lost and when I tell them they’re not, they say they are

beginning to feel like the field and it’s hard because they know

they shouldn’t but they do and then they start to grow whiter

and whiter and then they disappear. With everyone turning

into fields it’s hard to know anything. With everyone turning

into fields, it’s hard to be abstract. And since I’m mostly alone,

I just keep running my hand over the field, waiting.

I Have Never Cared for Nice Party Cakes

With a body, I have found a slow habitat. The states

passed through have the thinnest decoders. One is a sick mother,

her habit of starving. What will never make the finale

is how lonely they are: the birds, like radio personalities,

asking for callers. That the light bothers them little,

is of no use to me. Of these wreckages, these bodies,

orphaning flies, there is no distinction. When it’s morning,

the expectation is one of going. Suppose

you hear the light when it comes, and suppose

you are dressed in yellow,

how much difference can there be?

Someone standing with groceries and someone standing alone.

What I draw on your wrists are the pauses you forgot to indicate.

One man

coughing into the wind

is the same as any other death, you only laugh

because you found a little humor in your cereal box. The birds as dark

as morphine. What shows up in the morning: the children awkward

with teeth, the messages and comedy,

are just errors you forgot to correct.

Dear Deck,

Haven't the nails been enough?

You could be a lot of things moving, or worse,

You could be the last girl with a crayon bank.

This is just the sky that keeps happening.

One person you love talks about horses, and you're glad you don't have to become one--

Even so, arms at your sides, you agree to be looked at.

Every Once Upon always has A Time

You said nothing of March.

Nothing of the way your heart

Pressed against the last of your body.

June came anyway—

Your son that kept going

Imagine, all that light

Just so he could see himself

As something final.

Now, you spell most things backwards

Just to show your mouth how complicated

Words really are: Mother. Once.

The dawn collects its egrets

And goes sloppily, away.

Light was what they told you, but it wasn’t.

This is not you, not singing.