I don’t need to know that your mother collected
wine corks. It is written along your wrists
where the blue veins are trajectories to the stars.

I followed any street I could find when I was young.
When I was a child I found the red crescent of your
heart tucked into the gooey summer asphalt, but
this was before I ever met that boy who talked
big about global warming melting our roads.

No, no, I knew it was the stars which are forever
growing hotter because it is night that is no longer
cool, but it scorches our lovers’ garden patches—

or is it the lovers’ windowboxes, fifty boxes, they
stretch from story to rising story until the house
dips below our foundations and into the murky river;

the river with the sign saying that nobody has died
since 1995 and yet my grandmother passed in ‘96
and she might as well have jumped in there,
on her kitchen floor. I loved her legs splayed if only
because that is the last I know of her that isn’t a coffin.

08/20/2007

Author's Note: There's a bridge here over the Iowa River celebrating a lack of jumpers since 1995 and it only ever makes me wonder about the two bridges half a mile down stream that lack any such sign.

Posted on 08/20/2007
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