Remedy 

Since you’ve not yet left me, mother, father,
I can tell you I will not appear at your graves
on the customary day for cleaning and decorating, 

especially not in bee season, now that I’ve read
about the kind that hungers for tears and sweat,
small enough, almost, to mistake for dust, easily 

and probably whisked up in a cloud you’d make
by dislodging weeds or sweeping the detritus
that collects in monuments’ stone letters. 

If we still have winters then, I will come in winter,
move the snow out of the crevices that spell
your names. It is unbearable, that you will go 

and that, since this is the expected order,
I will bear it, and with grace. The doctor said,
we’ll never see this again, of the woman whose 

eye kept watering and mattering, until he extracted
the bees, infinitesimally small, exactly what
you’d expect from a doctor in a horror film, 

a trope of what’s too awful to contemplate
but bound nonetheless to happen, and recurrently.
She swept her parents’ graves, performed the grief 

that was her duty, but did not see she’d
carry with her grief’s supplement. Let the bees
keep a home in the mallow dock and brome 

entwined with cemetery grass. In spring
it will suffice that I watch the spot where you lay
from the edge of that field. I will read that 

horizon’s haze of pink as a raft of cherry
blossom. It will suffice—it will have to. 

From A Plague Record


i
I propose to cut, sew, and wear a coat made of a felt I press from the gathered dust of this
house. 

ii
I propose to collect, in a vial, water condensed from each day’s sky, from now until the day
and night again balance on a point. 

iii
I propose to sing only arias composed in the unheard registers, as, for instance, those that

measure the breath moving into and out of the lungs. 

iv
I propose to write one hundred letters in a recovered didactic meter, its measure now so
divorced from its original context that it can teach nothing. 

v
I propose to inhale the newly icy air from my porch each morning of winter, one breath for
each of my beloveds. 

vi
I propose to sleep for seven days and nights without ceasing. 

vii
I propose that, when the sickness that is nostalgia comes to visit, I invite her in, serve her
tea and cake, before I bid her go. 

viii
I propose to make a study of the mountain sky, thick with stars, the Perseids streaking
through it, even when I am not there. 

ix
I propose, as the afternoon warms, then cools and darkens, gusts and stills, to live as if I
were weather.