Excerpt 2 from Common Time
There would be a pistol loaded with our dreams. We would enact a massacre by shooting people with those dreams, and like heroes in the movies, our revolver would never run out of bullets.
I ache in Maine, its green waters and tiny whitecaps
so unlike my deposits
but the movement
(perhaps the way I wish to move
might resemble
in tonnes the way the water
shuffles toward shore
where it argues with itself
before retreating.
Some things we cannot recognize as nutrients,
There are symbols & sheets and days made blank:
Its salt, residual.
Like licking the hand of a lover
after it’s been inside of you—
you learn something that way,
though you may not want it.
(Originally published in Colorado Review)
