The door opens to the quiet in the garden, 
Which steps in, too. The rustling, the twick-twick 
Of afternoon birds. Shut the door, and here it is 
The other, thicker quiet. The wind 

That gathered itself is gone. Light shaking 
On leaves, one quick line of ascending 
chirps, barely audible: that’s it. Open the door. 
Close it, open it, moving from quiet 

To quiet, not thinking about death for once. 
Ah, remember how this feels, the quiet, 
The next time your thoughts bolt everywhere. 
The next time you open your mouth to give 

Advice. Lauren, stop! Stop giving advice, 
Lauren! Never, ever give advice.



Lines Composed on Thinking about Poet & Professor Jim Richardson, as I found him to be in Princeton, New Jersey from approx 1995-1999 


Dear Jim, I don’t know how I talked to you 
It was 20 years ago. This poem 
is to say what I didn’t, anyway. 

Jim, best of the straights! When Jimmy Schuyler 
(another Jim) says “I don’t have to write, 
The others will do it all if it’s worth 

doing,” that sounds like you, your modesty – 
Which, thank God (or whatever) for it 
In all that Gothic mess. The snow, the water 

Were important, I studied German, 
Learned I could see time. 
Otherwise, I was a ghost at Princeton. 

I don’t want to even say the P-word 
(they keep asking me for money) much less 
Write a Romantic ode, but it seems right 

If I don’t know what words I used with you 
To use your idiom: mimicry’s a curtsey. 
I take a break to kill nine undead rats, 

Receive one Humanity. I studied 
Kafka, but not Kafka licking the legs 
Of Swedish boys. But that’s not your fault, Jim 

That I didn’t know what an egg was, except for 
The few that must be cracked to make an omelet. 
When Mark thought twink in Meli’s poem 

Referred to “Twinkle Little Star” – I died 
Of laughter. Thanks, close reading. But we know 
Only what we know, my dears, and even that 

Takes so much time. But anyway, gay Kafka, 
trans, or straight, I think you would’ve been 
Ecumenical. When I, brainwashed, said 

Language Poetry was from the devil
You said the best of anything was good. 
I still think on that, and how you said 

Poems are being written even when I’m 
Not writing them…So, great! I’ve written a lot 
These past five years. I kid, I kid, you are 

Honestly, wise, I think, so gentle, with 
Blessedly little gender about you 
Except a love of baseball (L-O-L), 

I read “Wordsworth crabbed across the landscape”– 
Pauline and I say crabwise as shorthand 
For poet-mind, how I go sideways, she 

Goes forward (novelist!) and back. A bead 
Slides on a string. I’m trying to go 
Straight here (well, forward, never straight) 

To make more sense that way – to go back later. 
It’s hard! Swatting at my thoughts while Momo 
Chews the fly swatter into blue plastic fringe. 

Momo’s the dog. I wrote a bad poem in your class 
About dogs, or, with dogs in it – lots! You said 
your poetics weren’t so expansive 

As to extend to dogs, which was as close 
To catty as you’d get. You were married to  
A slim Victorianist with a chic 

Butch haircut, lived in the sparse kind woods 
Away from the town cluster. Together 
You embodied the old-fashioned virtues 

Old World, or East Coast, maybe most valued By those of 
us to whom they’re strange – Ralph Lauren, 
Me, and Pauline. My dear Pauline, austere 

And silly, academic to her elbow patches 
But adamantly Western, Tucson, T4T. 
OK, where was I? Dogs? Dogs. My poem 

Described dogs romping in Austin’s Pease Park.
I looked for it but my computer screen 
Got blurry searching for old poems – 

Kind of an “Abandon all hope, ye who dare 
Enter here.” There was a wolfhound in it, 
That's all I remember. Even at the time 

I found it corny – Peace Park? – but the moment 
Shone (in my head, not on the page) and I’d 
Been taught to write about epiphanies. 

Now I’m obsessed with dogs, I live with two 
And could fill poems with their hair and spit 
And shit – material! But these were ghost 

Dogs, idea dogs, just as I was the ghost 
Of Poetry Future. I was bored. How 
Didn’t I know the whole thing was so Catholic? 

Epiphany, like in the manger. 
I was lucky that we shared a love of 
Aphorisms, old forms, like old old. You wanted 

Me to grope toward what I wanted. 
When I tried my hand at writing callow Talmud 
My other teacher said that isn’t writing 

Go to night school, call back when you get a clue. 
You shrugged and said it’s writing if you wrote it. 
Reminds me of Lyn, who said that fate is just 

What happens, what has happened. (Happily’s My 
favorite, Jared’s too.) Lyn’s gone ahead 
Of me, of you. I wanted to write you 

Because she died. What people said of her 
Reminded me of you: you clear-eyed ones. 
Oh Lycidas! You literally aren’t dead 

So it’s weird to write a eulogy for you 
But it’s been a while since we were close. So
think of this as a bundle of stored time,

Close-kept. A closet, as it were 
From my wayward uptight youth, or else a cave 
I’ve used to renovate myself unseen. 

You didn’t even wear black or act tough 
But you always gave permission, and that’s gay.
If this is actually my Tintern Abbey 

It’s only in the way Exile in Guyville
Was a remake of Exile on Main Street – 
not very. More of a gimmick. But 

You don’t need to end at your starting point 
to be there, still. The small dog licks my wrist 
I palm his small skull under the chin 

Memento opposite of mori. 
The big dog smells like cinnamon 
Behind her ear – her mouth, like bone meal compost. 

Why are cats poetry if dogs aren’t? 
In Noah’s new book, the dogs are messy gays 
He says. I think of Pease Park when I hear 

The Modern Lovers, Hippy Johnny. Hippy 
Austin, small, like San Francisco pre-tech. 
Gold and silver, Tony’s mom blissed out on 

Mescaline, thin-skinned, freckled, a Sissy Spacek 
Wind-blown Texas face, hanging out 
With Roky Erickson behind the gym. 

All the paranoia was incipient 
An innocent rattling noise, Alex Jones 
In Slackers. Sometimes I list who I’d least 

Like to die. Forbidden but useful. 
I also list the ones I used to know 
Likeliest to have fallen to the brainworms 

Of transphobia. I hope not many 
But I’ve already been surprised. I know, 
Jim, that it wouldn’t be you

And that’s a higher compliment 
Then it might seem. Spaces make us 
On the page and sitting in some itchy 

Classroom chair, the Cozy Club, Berlin, where 
Auden brought Isherwood right off the train. 
Jon’s sister owned the Lex, which made 

Him next-door to gay famous. El Rio, Thee 
Stork Club, the Old Place. I first realized 
I could see time jogging in winter 

(Near the fake lake built for hot blond giants 
To row on – crew team, more preppy shit) 
I paused atop a little footbridge 

Because I hate running, to catch my breath. 
The water reflected the high winter sky 
The glare silvered everything, and the geese, 

Black and white, floated through the sheet that was 
Everything: land, water, and air. A spot 
Of time, but not a spot – music, a movement 

How space and time combined in bodies 
Choosing their direction. My other time 
At that lake was on the shore, at night 

The walk down, quiet, night expanding as 
The air got darker. I fucked my situationship 
Above the lake, below the moon. The moon 

Was a well and I fell in, to life 
After that moment. You wrote a group 
Of aphorisms called Vectors, read them 

To our class, and laughed your tenor laugh at 
Your own lightness. I was twenty-one, an age 
For aphorisms, which are oracles 

Since I thought if I lived rightly, I’d catch up 
To an outcome that has evaded me thus far. 
Who knew that even time’s arrow won’t fly straight?

The big dog is afraid of house flies. 
The little dog’s a gremlin, looks at me 
Through half-lidded eyes, and pants. He’s hiding 

Something he stole below his fluffy chin. 
Not sure what it is except it’s blue. 
Another Mark-ism: don’t 

Put blue stuff in your poems, too romantic. 
Well, what if the thing’s plastic? What if it’s 
A really ugly turquoise? If a dog 

Stole it? Dogs aren’t romantic. You reflected 
On my questions. I remember I told you 
I felt vain to call myself a poet. 

You said, at a certain point it’s vainer 
Not to claim the title. I always thought 
You meant false modesty but now I see 

It's more like, why inflate it? Everyone’s 
A poet. Would I feel vain to say 
I breathe the air?

For a long time we would 
Always then we would 
Time and again, we always did 

I walked my fingers through the boxes until a time leapt up at me 
I wrote it on my hand 

What was it like? 
I had newsprint on my fingers much oftener 

We fought duels and wrote satires 
gambled in silk-lined drawing rooms, bought 
our major’s commission, programmed bots on Duolingo 
To win the Arabic league, felt social pain 
As though our throats were slit 

A library’s civic temperature chilled me through doors 
That slid open slowly 

Rats shed one million hairs a year 
For many years 
And many rats 

I read a movie guide with tattered cover and no way 
to see the movies or images of them ever, Best Movies of 1984 

I was fined $30,000 for missing jury duty 
my uncle explained sadly why it must be so 

Falstaff swigged his sack and sat down hard 
The actor farted 

He knew it would be precarious 

to put a hand on fortune’s wheel again 

The straight men of San Francisco said “Fernet and Bataille” 
“Fernet and Bataille” “FernetandBataille” 

We cared about pursuing what we would never understand 
There was no money falling from the sky