Because we can hear someone doesn't mean
they can hear us, the crux of every relationship

problem. The four children next door are crying
again. Some of their trees grow up to our

trees, right before touching. When I can no
longer find the right words to describe this,

the baby next door tries to speak, the trees drop
their stars. Maybe there are only so many words

on earth. So we must give them to the children.
No one told me that the man who lived in

this house before me died young and quickly.
As if to say that death is the biggest secret.

Some days, I hear him cough. Some mornings,
I hear him get on his knees to pray to his children.

I want to tell him that they have moved, but I am
afraid he might leave me ghostless. Today, my

desire to live is so large, I woke up two hours early.
I even agreed to walk with the dead man's

shadow. The house is so silent, I worry the midwife
skipped it. I worry I had asked the midwife to

skip it. I worry I have children upstairs. I worry
I have no children upstairs. That I never had children

upstairs. I worry my daughter upstairs has
killed herself. Then, her quiet cough.

I used to think that grief was heavy. But it is
actually like an edge. It weighs nothing. It

consumes itself to remain a line. On some
days, when I am too heavy with joy, I divide

myself into cubes and triangles so that I can
once again be faceted. What to do with my

dead mother's proverbs, my dead father's
unlived years. Because I killed him, I have the

extra years in his first briefcase. The black
briefcase had a plastic red label with his

English name embossed on it. Briefcases were
once hard cased, lasting longer than the people

who carried them in sunlight. My father's
briefcase is so heavy, it feels like a eucalyptus

trunk. I move it from house to house. Each time
it takes one more person to move it. I don't

know where the extra years are coming from.
There's no one left to ask. Now I know that

when we die, each of us has a surplus. That
the body leaves, but the years stay.

Where double-breasted cormorants fly back and
forth. On a highway of lack and joy. Mouths

empty one way, full of dying fish on the way back.
The fish is grief but the bird flying back to the tree

is joy, meaning grief is inside the mouth of joy.
Lately, all I can look at is the dark green covering

the gold. Maybe joy and grief are the same
electric wire. We watched the cormorants go

back and forth all morning. In that moment, my
mouth tasted like dead fish. I thought of how my

father always gave the fish eyeball to an honored
guest. The long dinners, large round tables

where the fish's eye would stare, glassy and
open. Of how life is a long series of being looked

at and looking. I always thought that being
looked at was the goal. We talked about the

cormorants and the fish. Then the sun came up.
The bird froze in the middle of the sky. Nothing

moved but the fish's eye in the bird's mouth.
Some days, gold is inside green. Other days,

green is inside gold. There must be a reason
why we can see all of it at once.

A group of Canadian geese spread out on a patch
of dirt, like running into someone else's sadness.

I talked loudly to see if sadness would move but it
wouldn't. I admired its indifference. As we walked

by, one turned its head. My friend lifted his camera,
as long and wide as two geese. I try not to point at

things that may be traumatized by guns, he said.
But I kept thinking that sadness had actually been

pointing a gun at us. As we walked around sadness,
a few finally began to get up. So I no longer could

tell if sadness was moving or we were. I had lost
hope because I had witnessed another person's

future again. Sadness knew this all along. Still, it
got up. Still, it walked toward the dark lake. Still,

it left its hope on the outer banks for us to touch.
My friend and I watched, my shadow longer

than his, even though he was taller. By the time
sadness made it into the water, our shadows had

their own shadows. We walked toward the lake,
step by step, but our shadows were still long.

Meaning our shadows still had their arms up.
Meaning we had surrendered to our suffering.

Then sadness flew out of the water, toward the
moon. Not one of them looked back.

The weather matched the red in my mind.
Matched the crows attacking mockingbird nests.

All the birds came into my hot flash with me.
No one tells you that a hot flash isn't just heat.

That your own longing pulls on your suffering.
That everything wants to stretch into a chord.

That eaves in the brain shake at once. The sky
in the brain also falls. No one tells you that

suffering is a form. I went from fear for the
mockingbirds, to realizing they were the ones

winning. We often grieve the wrong things.
At least half of our grief for others is grieving

our own deaths. To acknowledge death too
often isn't too much grief. It's too much desire

to be commemorated. Every new life comes
out of annihilation. How to make my eyes see

spring as a time zone. Joan Mitchell was 51 when
she painted Red Tree. I looked up her age because

of the black-red clump in the middle of the
painting. And the patch of greens, blues, and

pinks below it. How if she named the painting
Menopause, 1976, no one would look at it. Except

the one woman nearing menopause. Walking
in the wrong direction. Looking for her face.

Hilma af Klint made abstract art before
Kandinsky. Yayoi Kusama said that Warhol,

Oldenburg, and Samaras copied her work
and became famous. I thought about this

for days. About circling the museum at the
Kandinsky exhibit like debris. How night gets

all the credit for loneliness. Af Klint said, Those
granted the gift of seeing more deeply can see

beyond form, and concentrate on the wondrous
aspect hiding behind every form which is

called life. She left 1,300 paintings to her nephew,
and told him to show the work 20 years later.

I watched the crow sit on a palm tree, the
mockingbird plow itself toward the crow, Kusama's

alarm of dots. Dots not as fame but as form.
I could see af Klint's Tree of Knowledge,

the one with a heart in the middle. My pencil
with its middling thoughts. The crow never said

caw but coward, saying that a poem was never
a merchant but an encryption. Life lies in the

month of October. When all the children are back
to school. When even fleas are still. When thunder

is somber. I can go beyond form then: woman,
mother, body, shrapnel. I can see words spread

out, separate from each other, lose all meaning,
become the milky dots they always were.

Someone said metaphor is making the strange
familiar. All this time, I've been trying to make the

familiar strange. Now I can't decide if the sky is familiar
or strange. Whether I should describe it as blue or

as a creditor. If it is endless or walked on. Whether
something that has no width or height should be

described. In the drawing, the lines look like electricity.
They are trying to say something that I can't read but

I can feel. Something about our desire to name all
the roads and then cut them off. Something about

our desire to make everything an heirloom. I can only
read the small p in the upper left-hand corner. Or it is the

only thing I think I can read. The wires are a language.
The buildings are a language. My skin is a language.

What do I do now if it peels off. Each day I pick at
small flakes. Pull down time like a cord. What if all

along my hormones weren't true. I've been peeling the
flakes off for months, wondering when I will get down

to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What
happens when the forests are gone but the trees are still

here? How can I be an animal and have the form of a tree?
Once I am no longer a woman, the narrative poem will

finally turn into a lyric one. Maybe war is our insistence on
the narrative when we are descendants of the lyric.

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