Two Poems

Anamnesis

Only ghosts now in the place where we were alive on the cul-de-sac prairie
at Archer and Emerald, making out in your car while a drunk trucker
watched. Only ghosts: the grass, the weeds, the wildflowers, the trucker, us.

How are you dead while I'm still alive, still wondering where light ended
and shadows began? How did I used to describe you? A rock star? A raptor?
A pile of dirty shirts? A carpet of pornography? A bare bulb always burning

And why did I think death was so interesting, as interesting as the blow job at
Johnny Yen’s second wedding at the Swedish Singing Club by the lake? Only
ghosts now, too, at the long-gone Swedish Singing Club by the lake. There’s more

I’ve forgotten. Like the girl I was, and why you loved me, that death is remembering,
living is forgetting, but always unforgetting the prairie, the trucker, the blow job,
the weeds and wildflowers, the bare bulb always burning.

Hex Triplet
— an odd sonnet / cleansing spell

Have you nourished a friend into a predator?
Has that friend become your disapproving mother
standing with arms akimbo atop a ladder?
And has that friend plundered your sullen thunder
and replaced it with her pumpkin-colored Mother Hubbard
stuffed with underworld uncles and bucket truckers?

If so, throw a sand dollar into the waves of the Sacred Acre;
barter your young lover — the star-struck cattle rancher,
still daubing ancient red ochre on the cave walls of summer —
for an older, melancholy share-holder;
lie down with the Owl Father for an afternoon slumber,
and awake to find a worm larva clinging to your finger.
That larva is the friend you nourished into a predator.
If you’re reluctant to kill her, get Owl Father to smother her

and let the beneficent planetary transits begin.