Music

I walked seven miles to the Grateful Dead show
at Citi Field to watch the people dance in the crowd
in front of the stage as the immense glow
of colored lights swept over their faces and the cloud

of fake smoke blurred their features and made
them indistinguishable silhouettes. A lot has been
written about crowds I can’t remember. I am afraid
of how much I forget. The people who numinously spin

around, over and over, and border the field. The pink
sky, the heartbreaking information in the music the dead
impart to us like language. I watched a beach ball sink
over and over again, as though this was what led

it to touch each person, and I remembered why we’re
here. To forget our features. To make crowds appear.

Snow

Something was written in the footsteps of
those deer that spilled out of the side yard
we parked near that time in Syracuse, the glove
was being removed from the night, it’s hard

to describe all that from here,
far in the future where it’s daytime and you’re
in Texas where I’ve never been, how the deer
footsteps made shuffled noises, these unsure

noises of the glove being removed, the glove
hides the hands of night, it doesn’t want to show
you how it’s true, or necessary, or that love
is a part of its mechanism. The night makes snow

out of the air, and the glove makes the deer
look normal. Emelie, it has begun to snow more.

The Fire

Everybody is youthful and drunk around
the fire. It is July, and the sound

of waves cheers over our voices. I have died
and am reborn this way. In one part of the night,
people are drawn to crawl inside
each other and be whole. I pretend the light

from Cassiopeia and Mars
and the images it all makes will stay
still, that the sand at the water is a mirror the stars
trap themselves in. The next day,

I am surrounded by plastic cups, each
one as immaculate and unused as my mother’s
name. I am covered in sand from the beach.
Rain washes off all the other colors.

Magnolia

If you take the highway out from exit 12 you will get
to the yard my bedroom window looked
out on with the absent eyes people let
rest on their faces until something is unhooked

inside them and they resolve to be different.
This was how the magnolia tree
in the yard released its petals, which I spent
a morning every April gathering haphazardly

into a stack in my hand to bury in the ground
nearby. I didn’t want anyone who knew me
to see me do it. So much had to drown
in the waves of confusion in the ocean in me

so that I could just admit
to you, or take your hand, and put the petals in it.