Humans are the animals
with speech who let all of his manuscripts
go poof.

These girls riding bareback on their palominos down the slopes
what do they know, I thought

But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley
it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb
and it was night, you on the back of my bike

I sensed you were about to say
Do you know how much I’ve loved you and I said, Oddly yes
but have been baffled as to why

Somewhere between silversmith and potter
he demonstrated how he works, with his wheel
pulling the material in and shaving it away into a hole in the center

Montaigne was right, without the body’s meddling love
is more thrilling.
Yet from the start in elementary what she did

We trusted no one so he came
along that first dinner and felt
or inferred the pile under footfalls

The dwarf maple caught my attention
in an ominous way, its purple,
its deep purple leaves shredded gloves 

He’d like to be at one with his new self
but memories sit in him like eyes.

My mind went on composing its account at night,
I could hear it tracing glyphs on the hard substance

Outside the funeral of the politician who died young
I waited for you. Rolled in my hand like a baton

were tissues from the mourners inside

The poet is often taken to be a subspecies of the memoirist, stirred to write about her own experiences—the more intense or “authentic,” the better. Thanks to the Romantics we believe that inwardness is truth, truth inwardness. This aesthetic c…