{alternate title: in trying to write a poem for my sister's wedding I instead return to the seemingly confessional style from which I have attempted to refrain of late}

after all of this, fire

even in love, or sleep, when it seems
fingerprints could mesh, geese
in a V, undifferentiated, the way touch
is unrecorded, almost every time

bless the skin that keeps us separate, witheld,
all organs wobbling in place, a kind
of concert, locusts in the trees, a hymn

should we learn from the swans to mate
for life, wind our two necks in the pond,
so many bendable straws, learn ferocious
defense, the disarming guise of purity?

life is long, we have no wings and little
but our stains to recommend us --

let us not be pure or whole but flagrant
and honest, tragic when need be, laughing,
approaching each other our flawed palms open
knowing it is this distance that binds us

2

knowing it's this distance that binds us
what might we swallow, a dancer
on fire, stagelights descending, the photo
of your mother's great-grandfather standing
in a field, the scar on my shin
from pulling the doberman off that cat
in 1992, years after you'd severed
that engagement to the woman (no joke)
named Temper who threw dishes
with regularity, months
before I first slept with a man I didn't love
on purpose, first practiced the indifference
that would make us, eventually, possible

3

at first blush, we're not possible, a story problem
gone sideways: if train X travels at 27 miles per hour
and train Y has a locomotive of bees, what happens
in Pittsburgh does not stay between borrowed sheets
but inches outward one denial at a time

if A befriends B whose best-
intentioned gift of apples arrives bruised
to the verge of rotten, where does love
leave its toothbrush

if B replies with a crate
of spent fireworks can truce be called
and the valley again grow fertile

which is to say, not all apologies are audible

4

if scent is the strongest sense memory
why is it always the faces (the lips)

never give a mirror as a gift

5

call it gluttony that keeps us here,
a last appetite for the ache that whiskey
doesn't fix, a wound-hunger
no one bed can sate

but we arrow toward center again
and again, bless the edges but hold
to this spot-on love that doesn't worship
the moon for her changeable shape

but for the stone behind, solid
despite all appearances / we think the moon
kisses stars behind clouds and at each

eclipse, their smaller lights
searing new craters which the sun
with her big fire / can forgive.