(After Michael Earl Craig)
A standard street lamp on my desk lights a bench.
All of the buildings on the shelves are quiet and dark
and lean into one another, sleep standing up,
and not a soul comes to sit on the bench the length
of a No. 2 pencil, not one of the wind-up toys,
the waving cat, the orange with a hole for sharpening pencils,
not the eraser that says Smart Women Make Changes.
Under the green lozenge
from the reading lamp, a steady dotted line is falling
where bats in summer are like a flock of paper cuts
onto this bench, a city bus stop, the slim leather building
in the row of color houses. Late at night, I move the neighborhood
around, putting lovers and spouses next to each other,
the suicides and early deaths together,
ones from Mexico, France, Chile, Germany of the 1980s,
in a new atlas. I sit a nineteenth century poet
beside a modern American I know she’d get along w/
& be the less lonely. I line up teachers and friends.
I take my vitamins, which include the stain glass
window over a certain staircase, a lozenge, triborough on a key chain.
I turn on Music from Brainwave Massage Creative Mind System,
and they sway like water plants on stems,
drifting amniotically.
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