WHITE NOISE AT MIDNIGHT

They all want me to stop talking to you.
My mother with the face of a television
Blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses --
Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie
on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon.

Even you are tired of my chatter -- Smart girl
Your ears stuffed with happiness,
Lying with your incest victim a year now
You haven't sent me word as you promised, my darling
Of second chances.

In the light graves the sheets are so clean.
I gather them up and sheath their silk
For bandages. When the armies arrive, Deborah
And Bill and I all lie and spread
For them. The way you liked me, stupid and silent.

We want to please them. We want every
thing absorbed -- The liquids taken in like a sponge.
No messes. No white horses running wild at midnight.
Nothing fecund left to the brown fields. The Blue

Herons lift -- Their wings wild with applause. The Moon turns
Creamy. Everyone gets excited. There is nothing to do.
I cannot stop talking to you.

VANISHING

Sending missives into the black hole
and no reply.
This invisibility must be what the dead feel.
My father, his long rowing home,
is never far from me now.
My mother always saying, You would have been happy
living a nun’s life if we hadn’t been
Jewish. Not a soul invades
my tiny world day in or out.

Looking always toward the river,
I am lost, as you once said.
Lost, looking there, toward the river,
where you always are.
Not beautiful exactly, but
solitary, inviolable,
all of your own making.

It’s a lie of course. Not a lie exactly,
but my own romantic illusion. I wanted you
like that in those days, complete in yourself,
because I wanted that in me.

Now, in this afterlife,
when everything, even illusion, has been taken away,
nothing tempts me
so much as needing our life together
to have been possible.

Look, out the window, how the leaves
race in the puddle after the rain.
Imagine how it is possible for them to love
their own vanishing, and you have just possibly
imagined me.