The Carrying

He said we don’t believe in the afterlife. I stopped him and said, I don’t believe in God, but I do have some very interesting thoughts concerning ghosts.

My memoir could be called I Thought I Wanted a Baby but All I Got Was Your Dead Ex-Girlfriend’s Two Old Cats.

Would I be more patient with a child? Would I love the smallness
of a life more than the gone-ness of the mind? Yes.

Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind?

Time does that. The arrow we ride into the now,
then into the future, does not pull out of the skin
backward. Or does it?

The past is happening.

the one who wants to love you, but often
isn’t good at even that, the one who
doesn’t want to be diminished
by how much she wants to be yours.

Wife, why does it
sound like a job?

Creeley says, The plan is the body. What if he’s wrong?
I am always in too many worlds, sand sifting through my hands,
another me speeding through the air, another me waving
from a train window watching you
waving from a train window watching me