RM Haines

from A TOTAL ROOM

A poem to Bernadette Mayer

...what surrounds me, little flame, a memory
of the moth. Two or three make family,
and the whole tree is gone, you know?)

I wonder if you’d recognize whatever life
surrounds me, its isolate flickering, rich
w/antidotes, substitutes, archives bewildered
into singing, years worn smooth to get here.
Pleasant now my mind is not against me.
Honored now I'm not the winter fly.
A little figurine, a corpse-toy left to sun.
And I can’t help the electricity and locks
torn in half out of simple gratitude.

When I look at ’79’s hospital of my birth,
I try to see your living room lit up too.
The globe awash in solar euphoria’s
signal jam, w/adult poets on floors of home
writing out the brain’s magnetic air.
You left receipts in decent enough order,
and the message feels open enough to change,
tracking accident as a breed of insight,
learning losses as the pollen bursts.

IN PERSON

Rice
Coffee
Razor
Paper

—just how I found it
on opening


________

Then wrote:


________


In my dream I was awake all night.
Stood in your doorway carrying a
new edition of, or 1967,

and light as it fell through.

Drunk on air, apartment complex hours,
and snow one answer to how.

________

or instead:

_______

All night dreaming
nothing at all inside the hallway, knocking,

an endless head of news.

You can stop here you said when the door,
the room opened, your eyes’ answer.

Said you can

as the light fell through

_____

3:24AM

still looking
back as

in another life

to you





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RM Haines runs Dead Mall Press. His most recent chapbooks include POEM AT THE GOING RATE and INTERROGATION DAYS. He also shares essays and poems on his blog, Out of Its Wooden Brain.