Everywhere in Baltimore Litanies of Ravens

pockmark the sky; and meanwhile I’m afraid
the only pictures I have of you are losing their color
like beach houses with their identical façades—your smile
wasting away in whatever light is left at the end of the season,
until I will be forced to remember you stone-faced and sad—
in another bedroom, in another corner of this Hitchcockian city. And really,
I wouldn’t mind the birds so much if they didn’t remind me of you:
their fine feathers and preening; their un-musical voice; the paling
they form along rooftops, reducing me to a passing curiosity, or more likely,
not caring about me at all; marking their days by the sun,
and the sturdy comfort of branches, which might have been
my hands if I could ever learn to stand so still.

Leaving Earth

1. Our bones are made of exploded stars.
2. We are only the shrapnel of brighter things; our names
3. nothing but a way to mark where we’ve been.
4. I go in search of the nameless so that I may be unnamed, too.
5. I cannot kill a cat to ease its suffering but in childhood I held a corn husk in my small, cruel fist and whipped our family pet until it howled.
6. (Even in space I am not weightless.
7. I have brought with me all the colors of fall.)
8. Impossible to trust any permanent thing keeps the ocean from spilling into the sky.