Wordless I’ve left many a lover.   
Sleeping in the house of a dead poet
old love notes tumble headlong
out of books like love ran so common no one noticed
any more. He and his dead wife, mad 
for each other unto death. Their graves confirm:
Here we were happy. 
What more could be said? On a first date, a woman quoted
an anonymous source who’d warned her off me: 
You cut people out of your life without a word.
I’ll have to marry her, I thought, to prove otherwise.
Soon I’ll be a divorcée. Not a good wife
to my husband, though I coddled
his writing more than my own—historically
the wife’s obligation. The dead poet’s wife 
wished to be a writer. 
Her diaries fell through the rusted-out floor
of a cabinet carted to the dump.
My husband and I couldn’t shake 
the intuition that I gave him the best room, best view
because I believed my words needed
less midwifery. Correctly.
Sometimes people are born hard-hearted. My mother 
deemed me so. To save me from the sin of vanity, she never 
said a word about my face till I was fifteen. As I bungled
repairing a toaster, she burst out, It’s a good thing 
you’re so beautiful. Men will always help you. 
I’ve been raped once by a friend, once by a lover, once by an enemy.
My lovers are natural anthropologists. They’ve taught me.
I’m prone to closing my eyes when talking.
I draw my hair over my face. 
You can never get a good look at the whole of me. 
It’s seductive, people accuse. 
Once, a man with blue eyes forced me to stare into them. 
He held my chin. 
He said Baby as if it were the loveliest name.
I complained I felt naked. 
I lied. Nakedness
is nothing, and this—
as if the sound shut off, my mouth 
still moving, as if I’d gone
underwater, babbling till drowned, as if in some hallucinatory
nightmare I’d no control of my meaning, if I meant, 
and would know my words only by what returned 
in his eyes. I wrenched myself back under cover. 
Some animals there are with eyes so strong 
they have no fear of sunlight, Petrarch claims.
Inhuman grace. No mercy. 
Louise recommended analysis because in analysis
you’re not supposed to look at the person you’re talking to. 
Isn’t that the same as poetry? She didn’t laugh. 
A poem, like a dream, chooses 
its own faces and the poet, the dreamer, faces up. 
All times I turn my eyes in your direction, 
one dead lover writes, 
who’ve made me quite alone, lost to the world. 
The first time my father left, I said too much. 
That’d be Freud’s explanation for my errors in love, 
I joked to my therapist. I watched
the square that held my face
in the upper-right corner of the screen. 
She asked, What did you say?
I chased after his truck on my bike.
It was July. I was barefoot. The handlebar streamers glittered. 
My eyes went white. If you don’t count the ghosts, 
I’m alone in this house. I’m lonely
for you, you a convention in love poems, you
a blue-eyed man who’s seen enough.
Silence is a form like any other. 
Outside, a rain so fine it’s almost 
soundless needles into spikes of wild ginger.