I.
When I am standing in this open field (with
these open mountains and cows with their
open tongues) it is like I can feel my brother
in the corner of my left eye, like we are
sharing a motel bed again the way we used to,
like I am the glass of water,
on the stool in the bathroom, where I spend
too much time.
II.
When I say I’ve never
been in love before I mean it; I say this
looking into the mirror and it is like I am
looking into the wrinkling face of my mother.
When I picture my mother I picture her
in the kitchen with flour on her hands,
even though she does not bake.
More: she is in bed again, with coughs of wires.
I’ve started planting herbs (basil, thyme), I thought
to dirty my hands, but the more
I look in the mirror the more I see
and feel like my mother, the more I realize
that dirtying my hands was only a pretense.
III.
My best friend from school is a boy
whose nose bleeds easily. He transferred
after the first semester. He is in Sicily now,
probably making all of the Italian boys fall
in love with him.
The other friend shares the first friend’s name;
when he kisses me it is like I have forgotten
to do the laundry.
IV.
I meet a boy at this farm who also
loves Anne Carson and it is all I can do
not to think about him. It’s that I’m lonely, it’s that
it helps that when we’re with each other, just
the two of us, we barely speak, but at meals
there are times when I can feel his eyes on me
like a rush of cold pond water.
V.
When I harvest radish
the vegetables heads’ are small and round
and this is good and I wish I could be
small and round and I wish
it could be good.
VI.
In the field here again it is
as though for a moment I am
my brother, but only
for a moment.