Daniel

The metal of toys recalled to manufacturers
he used safely, removed small pieces
from the palms of other preschoolers
like keys from drunks
as deftly as in the next decade
he avoided the preliminaries of sex -
a wrist of charms terrifying
in its bullet-like fragments,
a gleam of braces in a compact mouth.

Museum

you behind me like religion I don't want
to lose, quiet with muscles I learned from the Greeks...
Now I recognize you in the museums -
arm crooked around a farm girl or a dancer
or raising a scythe. I recognize motions
paused mid-motion like someone else's
passing car window. Either
they've been painting you for centuries
or else the bodies of men now are all
combinations of likeness and unlikeness to yours,
the first to pray through my body
to use it as a messy palette
for your own purposes. Now I've mixed it up -
this room as big as a gallery or your small bedroom,
who stood in front of whom.

On the drive home in the morning

The man who almost hit me
shoves his whole self close
to the dashboard to see my face,
more than my small red car which is
not nearly enough information
on someone who might have been
thirty minutes of his life or even
forty-five, depending on the damage,
even, he thinks to himself mostly
in a joking way,

someone who would
see the bumper - torn
like a smug photo of an old lover
straight down the middle,
in this imagined case between the curve
of the bumper and the actual metal of
the functional part of the hood -

and look up at the sorry face
of this man - late for a lunch with a woman
he no longer wants to meet with for any reason,
much less the one he's meeting her for -

and say here's the keys to this car that you've ruined
take it and repair it
using tools from your garage
and the skills your daddy taught you.
and then we'll talk.

Flood

The inches of rain burst like ink over
the low places and everyone swam
in analyses of themselves in their own broad strokes
as if they'd never seen water or bodies.
(small boys and their father, hands up – you try
and take them to the pool...;
teenagers, swim suits slacking around breasts
like a bored hand; an older sister –
hair hydrated upwards
as the body moves away from the surface –
having given into the velocity
of being at one point against her
boyfriend’s chest and the next
headed straight for the murky lawn
of the retention pond, a throwing that
I recognize as he throws her.
Here I am writing about myself again
while the girl stays aquarium-faced –
the pressure of the solid-looking film over the water
having briefly loosened for her, frozen
yard waste floating at her kneecap,
only to get paused mid-pencil-dive
in the water where I’ve kept her, thinking of my own
understanding of pressure -
how exertion creates heat for the body
so that one can be in water colder than the air,
and the skin - its repositories of sun
collected through seasons of sun like a jar of coins,
and the campfire collected
in the follicles, not lost but shed purposefully -
some kept still in the epidermis, the dermis,
the hypodermis, some layer other
than blood or bones - this rousing
of ember and ray through pores through breath
into water until the water is convinced
to warm the body back like a mutual
handing over of gifts. Ambassador, she's convinced
the water of it, now back -
as lungs unfold pain down the chest like a long scratch -
to the boy on the grass - arms folded,
laughing at her body's talent for immersion -
whom she understands in this exact way
as another unavoidable plan of action.