Keetje Kuipers

what keeps you up all night

listening to the neighbor

call his cats in: oh the animals

we might choose to save, put them

on a polystyrene ark to Mars: what

we start that finishes us: the seventy-

four degree day in December: …

Your own body, broken into so many times, became a clear lake

for her to bathe in. Remember pulling the one tiny, suckering

leech from below her neck, the pale collarbone Braille it left.

The deer come out in the evening.

God bless them for not judging me,

I'm drunk. I stand on the porch in my bathrobe

and make strange noises at them—

                        language,

if language can be a kind of crying.

Here's what I'm trying to say: The deer coming toward us through the dark

      and we're unable to see them

The car passing over the bridge into the maw of the city like a willing moth

      suddenly wrapped in fire