March

Listening to Suzanne in the rain, white petals stuck

to the road. My friend who sells pieces of his heart

blows his cigarette in the opposite direction of my

face. Waiting for a kiss, a better dress, someone

to call me baby like the woman in the cafe does

to her yellow dog. I learn the word for moths

and butterflies––it sticks to my neck like lace.

That science is done by scientists

has always been the only thing interesting to me

about it: all those bodies in a greenhouse

counting the wings, asking a temperature for answers.

I do that daily. My experiments of the heart:

I try to prove I am not the way pages cling

to other pages, not the two p.m. rain, not

the word deluge (over and over again).

I say: feel my ankle. Feel my eyelids. Feel my

bruise. Derrida said the only rigorous response

to grief is quiet––but he’s wrong. It’s probably

your hands behind my knees. Or how in that

moment, I knew my project could never be

silence. Not when you make that sound

I like so much, not when desire peals like

rain hitting my blue earrings. I’m sad all the time;

this is like having bones; I don’t mind it;

I don’t think about it much. Except,

yesterday you asked me why we suffer

and I think my answer is that

we suffer so we can see it in the other flowers,

in the seagulls disinherited from the sky

by rain, in the waterlogged bodies of mice

I step over on the way to class. So we can say:

I am so sorry that happened

to you. So I can write the email that says,

don’t worry about your thirty three absences

in my class. I’ve been absent from my life

for thirty three days before. I wish you

all the best. Really, my only regret has been not

skipping more things, sitting in that absence

like a dress. Have you ever been the only

pair of hands around a mug at a restaurant?

I love that feeling. I hope you had that feeling.

I hope you find your way back to somebody.

It took me a while, but I think I did. Yesterday,

someone I find very beautiful pressed a postcard

into my hand in the pouring rain. The words bled

down my arm like how it is easy to run very fast downhill.

This is what God meant by

words become flesh. This what God meant

when spring first became spring. I think I suffer

so I can know for certain when I am not.