Let’s meet at the gothic hotel, the one that shivers.
The door unlocked for both of us,
as we arrive separately, and dirty. Meet
by the radiator that spits water at our ankles
so as to say: let this room be flooded.

We’re thin again. Leaning back, my body heating
the frozen wallpaper, moistened onto older paper
by maids many years ago. A tradition of licking.

Outside the long windows is another country
where bells endlessly search for each other.
This, dear, is the easiest city in which to stop suffering.
This is the place in which the town hall is always closed.

Today, pomegranates have stained
my teeth a small murder.

You’ve come for business. Your affair:
to excavate me. First, two lungs orange
with young lichens. Despite their growth, don’t think
I’m closer to dying.

Outside, the riotous are missing. You’re not noticing
the odd lack of shrieks.

Have we come to the wrong city? The air is light red.
They have this address, so we must leave the shower running.

I cross the room to the balcony.
My skirt sounds like flames rising to the fifth floor
of a brick building. I look back and you notice
my hair says all the things I had wanted to.

For days we could stay here, as each hour you take the temperature
of softness. I can rest my head, a delirious poignancy.

We are stoves, little iron ones, that burn until everything is clean.

Leaving Season

In the fields, we have only just heard of love.
Everyone has this sort of life, don't they.

My sister and I learned the color of cornstalks and illness.
There were bad girls husking along Route 110.

You would tell us you might send us there.
You lined us up with sad pumpkins and the insane.

Somehow, through the same nightly recollection
my sister and I are always becoming delicate and fatherless.

We are thankful for prarie grass that is made
for cows, for tiny noises, for crouching by electric fences.

My sister and I have heard that there is an end to America.
We believe in rental cars and regeneration.

Now we go south. The clouds collapse here,
and strange how they look like we did.

We travel through groves of orange.
We hear cicadas molting and they never have to go back.

I Was a Pine Cone Once

I never want to forget
the way I count falling

pine cones in Concord, just
to prove that autumn is happening

again. It is happening
in a car, with James, and an apple

core by my shoe. This could go on --
these towns with steeples, patches of blue

hubbard squash, ten seconds
between each breath. Near our birthdays,

there is a field and children running
while it does not tire them yet.

The trees lean to each other
not because of exposure.

This is a day I want to remember
when I misplace the idea

that the world is always
ready to recover,

in the dirt, down the road
by the farmer sighing.

 Beth

 Woodcome