FDNY: The Bravest
it said on his shirt.
That’s what I’m having,
I thought to say later
about the eggs. 
If you read this,
I was the girl
who didn’t smile
on the outside. 
And I left something
there at Bob’s hostel,
open but closed,
yearning, right away
in the morning.

How can you organize
a nobility as ignorant as mine?

I was built out of paper
and sent off
like a delicate ship.

I sailed across stages
and flew
through rainforest valleys—I do not
feel content in this lake.

My neck hurts, and people
on the bench look at me
for reasons I cannot name. 

My grace is based on Jane Kenyon’s
lyrical transparency, a proclivity

to withdraw from accountability,
and Dickinson

reading Hawthorne, reading
Emerson, reading
Longfellow.

I’m not
always impressed with solitude:
my own webbed feet, my ability
to swim in circles.

When lunch hour
is over and they go,
I will again burrow
my body in the brambles.

The time, the
spectacles,
the way you kept
focusing on the moon.

The length it kept shining.

The way you looked at it
even though you were
looking at other
objects;

the piano,
for instance.
The way he shook his
head when he played it.
The saxophone.

The way she
counted money, blessed and
cursed by it,
as if it could
count for something.

The way they
waited on line at the
Varsity Theater.
The way she ran back and
forth from there.

The way they
loved her for it.