Ruth Lepson

of all the books
that came in the mail
the one I wanted to read most

was yours I know you
pretty well now and that
helps too

I’ll bet you 10 bucks I said
he said ok I bet it’s
a hill we kept driving

toward it between the bare trees
it was huge navy blue with lines of
pink ink and at the top looked

craggy like hills but

it was one cloud
covering the bottom of the sky

you could think of it as
beautiful but you could
imagine the end of the world

as some do in these long thin
days as
the century gets started shakily

I was too hard on them
and not hard enough
I should have distanced myself

but the fury twirled us
around in twisters fits
it’s not a question of whether they

could help it or not it’s

what pertained

yvonne told nancy
when you’re in a wheelchair no one
talks to you

when I left the museum
everything was a painting
one painting
hundreds of tiny paintings
the guard rail on the highway reflecting
the towers of pollution the tiny hands

an awareness that we’re all here
like fish minions
like scholars fleabag hotels

it’s lifted from the landscape
once I noticed it everywhere—in the backs

of falling down barns in the diners of
small towns in the weeds in back of the
project in the christmas lights

it’s gone it was
melancholy
it disappeared dried up

is an answer in
something felt
the moon’s as small as a necco wafer

hart crane’s father
invented life savers

to keep things
to yourself

I think you were wrong

a butterfly eaten by a dragon
a dinosaur under the covers
fluky —I imagined miro

saying come out & play then thought
of calder
who then appeared in the crossword

whiff of what’s unresolved
think of arp since he
photographs inside a brain

his poems mention sitting
in the pre-dawn which
destabilized me

it seems he
has no feeling while
sitting and I admired

him all those years
now I

sit in the pre-dawn light
ready to see it without flight
once we went riding through the woods

on his harley there were no paths we
stopped he gave me a joint my first
time a cop heard us pulled up to

the woods’ edge & started walking in give
me the joint, he said and he ate it this
was

a homophone of
myself then

I want to get it
down why
I walked in a field of blue grass

while the horses were waking

the world is substantial lately
with ribbons of
gratification

how they reappear disguised as
others we knew others the seemingly
same

right as rain
I awoke from an ancient dream

nothing to do
but work and sit
through it

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