So it’s not the months conspiring against me 
or the wind I thought hard enough
to throw back time or hoped it might,
but surely I can take this personally.

Sunlight faking a hard line against brick.
Police blockades. Dead things
frozen to pavement like nature’s brutal macrame. 
It’s too cold to even imagine novelty.

Anyway it’s the cocktail party talking
with your hands to one other person turns into 
that’s all I really care about. And openness,
in theory. Sometimes you must eat lunch

and sometimes always you must
know a moment is unsustainable
and still lift your cold face to it. Sometimes 
after one drink I get convinced

I’m going to die. I remember thinking it 
too at the movies in the dark and rows 
of seats like giant teeth
and I thought simultaneously of my dad

building an igloo in a dark green coat in the yard 
of my childhood home. It was Spiderman
and my friend cried.
A front door turtlenecked in snow.

The clumsy operatics of an echo.
I didn’t want to think my friend was stupid 
but I did. I didn’t mean to drink three negronis
and get kissed in the slush

and dumb night, and then
I took him home because I was not a serious artist 
and on each rung of the fire escape ladders
clung a thin line of ice.

There are colors. Orange and pink. Chartreuse. 
Clare drew me a brief heart on an envelope.

There’s no green that doesn’t make me 
think somehow of home—

a vast topography of ridges and waves, 
hills and happenstance, the university cows

with built-in windows for biological observation 
or when we painted my bedroom yellow.

Maybe it’s unsophisticated
to turn all art toward the self, to stand before

an ancient painting and remember 
the shower curtain of my childhood,

polka dotted and moldy, and now 
I’m getting hungry. I no longer care

about knowing things. On the news 
a woman was buried under days

of rubble. Haunting, the anchor whispered 
in my inner ear, while I walked

past the wall of chipped purple concrete
I can never figure out

is a layer of paint or some sort of leaking ivy. 
How are you, people say, even

in February. On Friday Ellie gave me 
some drawings. She calls them doodles.

I call them beautiful works of art, 
beauty less a vague impenetrable

aesthetic category and more the way this particular 
orange recalls the faraway decaying pines

of my rural childhood and driving toward them 
and coffee mugs rolling around in my mom’s car

and my mom saying
don’t say I never take you anywhere!

and my mom.
A sudden belief in the truth of my feelings

when evening meets brick, and then
it passes. This is just a list of what things

are like other things, like everything.