We made March by barest plurality;

desperate extrapolation; drastic 

expectation of the bouquet of May 

flowers my wife will buy sighing, for herself;

April showers’ tentative attendance.

Dispel our rhetoric of failure, March,

pardon the immutable Christmas lights, 

rubble of felled ornaments we’d taken 

all along for lessons we were daily

learning, hunkered in one sweater. Nightly

we’ve begun undressing by the window

in dreams of dream homes; adequate reward

for our faith, our endurance, as if 

inaudible in the neighbor’s backyard.

Old Friend visits my city in secret,

stirs in next-door apartment. I meet her

with hushed activity. My cobweb sways 

like an entered hammock on visible 

heat, above the radiator. Houseplants

toss in elemental sleep. I half hear

a life lived without me drip, peaceably

by the sound of it, from the showerhead.

Pain without injury risks suggestions

over fourth cups of coffee; crushes once

unpursued dish normal relationships,

pregnant addresses unvisited, and

anecdotes of less and less interest 

for more and more insistence to share them.

Would I consider you a hypocrite

for expecting me to do now what I

expected you to do then, despite your

having not done it? What if you proclaimed,

in one of endless debates pretended

while vacationing separately (some days

it makes perfect sense, others it seems strange 

to have been wired identically

without correspondingly having been

wired correspondingly), your verdict

more for “might as well” spirit than with real

conviction, while, gravely mediating

pique and an attempted sublimation 

of pique, I (as I’d then proclaim) did not?

The abstinence is not the injury:

Ceding the rarest, the exotic fruits,

choicest leftovers to family suits

me no less than them. It’s Robyn’s theory

that I spin my own martyrdom to gain

high ground that irks. Her muddying attempt

presumes the same high ground which would exempt

her from the view of me she entertains.

In truth, while I harbored no intention

of marshalling my noble deed and word,

I’d not have bridled at the contention

without having firstly been deep interred

in the very ersatz moral terrain

I’d been accused of trying to attain.

I have abandoned inessential friends

(despite determination to never

see nor contact them again, and the sense,

oddly, that I’d not been the betrayer,

I do miss them), and by essential friends 

been abandoned (impossibility

notwithstanding, I’m not strictly against

reconciling [or cheap humility].

“Friends” only in name; if not honestly

then historically, in muddled dreams

and stories that can’t mask notes of mothball).

Now friendless I am touched and modestly 

impressed that any former friends had deemed

me worthy of relationship at all.

What seemed a clarifying revision

of a pat inversion; an amalgam,

in the past, of talent and temperament, 

rather than a presently conclusive 

outcome, rather than a range of outcomes

presently visualized, projects through 

a prism, revealing, in the future, 

a spectrum of buoyant fictive outcomes,

rather than, in the past, a latent range

of possibilities – the roads that might 

have plausibly been taken, rather than, 

in the past, the germ of a singular 

outcome, only unraveled, revealing 

its own congenital deficiency.

The teller’s goal to induce laughter, his 

insular resolve, does not impact the

goodness (my reading of the goodness of

my good intentions [whenever citing

“good intentions” I’m only amending

a lack of intention in retrospect,

a sort of reflex dissembling or

garnishing my benign ambivalence]

matters only inasmuch as it forms

a model: what I might hope to convince 

Robyn that my intentions, opaquely 

equivocal, must have been) of the joke;  

   and laughter’s not so easy to refute

   nor drown in obfuscation later on.

My friend Iggy “just [couldn’t] understand” 

how I couldn’t be dating somebody,

and to inspire me, and/or out of 

genuine confusion, pointed to Ben,

a mutual friend who, for example,

despite so much less “to work with” dated

“Julia” (his emphasis). Julia;

what a strange assertion: I considered 

Ben to have much more “to work with” than I:

More handsome, fit, funny, etcetera. 

And what’s more, I considered Julia 

pleasant but basically unattractive, 

and had puzzled over why Ben dated

someone whose league he was so far out of.

Invitations to “the party” come late

if at all, tangle in speculative 

networks of recrimination, ingrown 

fatalism, that one must either be

or bring a child to defer, rather 

to conceptualize last words besides 

inconsequential last words; winnowing 

to uselessness, the decisive estate

of bar soap; this and each pulsing moment

a lamentation for its own passage. 

Mortality practice, for those of us

who’ve relinquished little or less; votive 

chaos to ratify in advance just

how inconvenient the gathering hurt.

My green crushes; unimaginative,

dewily ambitious: The prettiest

girl my age in whichever capricious

grouping of twenty-five or so classmates

I found myself imprisoned with that year.

   Bedrock of elaborate fantasy:

   marooned somewhere, naked, piggy-back;

   but prudently draw only her, only

   face, in clumsy shorthand forged in my own

   keener self-study. Overlap occurred,

   of course: My eyes, her nose, my ears, her hair.

   These creations... aged strangely; so prescient

   in crude conflation of want and wanter.

   I’ve kept them all and need draw no longer.

One can only be rebuffed every time

before one begins, now tentatively,

later with real zeal, to anticipate

the formation of a new permanence;

hard, coarse, cool to the touch. How is it fair 

that this enforcement of denial should 

last precisely too long, at last leaving 

one both exasperated and relieved,

and at the same time precisely as long

as the relentless denier dictates? 

“Give what you need, and you shall receive it,” 

and when that fails, give what you need 

until you forget all about yourself,

one of enlightened or a vegetable.

Which choice would be the more regrettable

after enough lost time let one reflect

and recognize that, yes, a choice was made;

to have spent all of sparse free time chasing

an art for which one had no aptitude,

yielding chaff, nothing appreciable, or 

instead to have spent sparse free time chasing

an art for which one was well suited, showed 

real talent, and with it, might have composed  

an oeuvre worthy of approbation,

with more, in retrospect, than sparse free time 

left for the chase? One, having since made one’s 

mindless and enduring choice, might rather

not know, still suspects one or the other.

The box jiggled, as if to call a dog,

recalled a riddle, that was only posed 

in response to its own late solution:

Will a completion reimposed bypass 

the cognitive burden that is newness,

reconfiguring a puzzle become

less a painstaking effort to locate 

fractions of a head-scratching absence as 

memorizing the products of matched sets 

of projections and sockets? Yes and yes;

and learning not but how to wisely learn,

heartening, as every piece connected 

simplifies the task remaining, limits 

possibilities, until there are none.

The light so late, a novelty, the shared

apartment wall’s blind counterpart, nascent 

cloudburst, was in fact many lights, staggered

exponents of the acrobats’ accord;

streetlights, headlights, windows across the way,

the moon converged in one uncanny gas

obliquely and blanketed the courtyard. 

No sound; non-scream, blood-heavy pyramid

of basal apprehension reported

treed balloons. As shoeless cricket-hours

home-intruded casting slideshow horrors,

rams and lambs perpetually filed 

up the fire escape, embroidering

reticent Mylar as nothing happened.

A fan of deli roses meets tile,

reorients in time: a viable

day bed, after the drop-leaf descended,

on which the dinette’s ponds of filth prevail

until glass is broken, and respite loosed

our song, prisoned under harmful ore and

yet paring unique agony with strained

genericism. While our deciding 

that a meal, say, or argument remain 

incomplete brought that argument or meal

to its close, your voidance let your biding

remittance thrive. The fiddle-leaf fig roosts

in your lees; all else I’m left’s a diamond,

quick to lose the value it pretended.