You sitting on a bench in Philly in the heat,
your laugh, even through the phone, the single ripple
that makes the vast lake’s surface visible
which is something, today, I can appreciate,
my blood sugar righted, rested, drinking coffee,
a bird amped in a treetop, single lines
of Larkin and Lowell tracing whole designs.
All loves spring from the same soil, don’t they.
How to remain there is the only question,
my body sprouting inside itself, one thought
becoming the next by music or dream. “Oh, perfect,”
you said when you answered, just sat down
in front of your sister’s on that car-jammed street
where one huge elm has dived up through the concrete.

from In Someone Else’s House, BkMk Press, 2013
originally published in Hotel Amerika