Big-Headed Anna at the Ice Cream Social
But Nothing’s Fair after Love
Caedra
Dream Car
Engraving
Last Song
Louise Bourgeois to Her Husband, on Love and Her Father’s Mistress
Mr. Kimberk's Kindness
Mr. Longley’s Paper Suns
Our Father, the Lost Geometer
Performance Art
Persephone’s Blues Song
Piedmont
Regret and Other Bodies
The Crystal Lattice
The House Winter Built
Ways to Mourn an Asshole
The House Winter Built
John Sibley Williams
This is the gap
between houses
spiked by fences
where certain birds gather
into a crowded warm plural
while others—today it just happens
to be a blue jay—are as kindled by solitude.
*
Standing here, divided by glass from a dawn
clouded as an early Polaroid, I count
two strands of footprints helixed for a while
ground down to one then to a faint red after-stain, everything
gradually erased by snow. In time
a becomes the, as in a fawn used to eat
the green from my lawn, as in all the deer
are gone now. I am haunted
*
by the space my body fills
and how little it matters
when my breath on the window
cools to winter.
If home is an invented place
why does it hurt so much
to leave?
*
There’s a pool of bells in the distance.
The knitted spine of a sycamore naked
and gray. Above the fence a thin slice of sky.
Above the sky a single galaxy uncoiling into millions
of lights. Many of the birds are as silent as light
but today on the fence between us there’s a blue jay
bold and alone, like someone I know I will lose
and still burn for.
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between houses
spiked by fences
where certain birds gather
into a crowded warm plural
while others—today it just happens
to be a blue jay—are as kindled by solitude.
*
Standing here, divided by glass from a dawn
clouded as an early Polaroid, I count
two strands of footprints helixed for a while
ground down to one then to a faint red after-stain, everything
gradually erased by snow. In time
a becomes the, as in a fawn used to eat
the green from my lawn, as in all the deer
are gone now. I am haunted
*
by the space my body fills
and how little it matters
when my breath on the window
cools to winter.
If home is an invented place
why does it hurt so much
to leave?
*
There’s a pool of bells in the distance.
The knitted spine of a sycamore naked
and gray. Above the fence a thin slice of sky.
Above the sky a single galaxy uncoiling into millions
of lights. Many of the birds are as silent as light
but today on the fence between us there’s a blue jay
bold and alone, like someone I know I will lose
and still burn for.