Pretty Little Collection of Weaknesses 

Sometimes it’s bridges, it’s fainting spells
in a church where everyone keeps lighting
candles while I am questioning
fire codes, ten years of my life afraid
of spiders.

Ask me, I know,
said the button on the shirt of the woman
in the department store,
but she didn’t.

She didn’t know why I was afraid
of spiders, of delivery men who leaned
a little too close, or the abandoned gaze
of the man on the train reading me the news,
how he kept saying, And twenty-two
were children were killed, then Retails sales
are up this year.  Sometimes

a photo of a swan leads me to crying,
or loneliness, or standing in the middle
of another country and watching
a mother spider let loose
small webs of her children,
one by one into the countryside
they floated away with no one seeing
any reason to fear them.

The Art and Pleasure of Not Knowing

The mind is a brouhaha of shattered yesterdays,
a lava flow of future plans, a garden of scattered
bees. The mind, not to be confused with the heart,
is beating summer waves against the dock
and we could be washed away,

in the thought that memory is undertow,
the mind’s milk—sometimes sweetened,
sometimes sour. We carry the broken reflections

of mirrors—some days we lost, some we tried
to hold what cut us. Bits of glass, bees wings,
the empty window where we looked out
into the years, veiled in smoke from the bonfire
we forgot to light.