SCREENSHOT FOR ALLEN

Here’s you. Here’s your street. Now zoom out—way out.

That speck on the right-hand side by the scrollbar is me.

Hanging on the coast. Hiking around, in the cold-day air,

cerulean wind whipping at our faces with our own hair.

Over the dunes, always more dunes. You would have said,

Why does it have to be so sandy? Since you weren’t there,

I said it instead. I wonder what you were doing then.

Probably writing out equations on unlined paper

in your fast loopy hand: something I couldn’t comment on

except at this superficial level. How stupid of me

to find your pencil marks sexy. To prefer them

to the world: the huge freezing ocean: it does nothing

for me. This gull wing jutting up out of the sand.

Is there a bird down there, objecting? Politely?

Excuse me, world. I wasn’t ready to be buried.

DISASTERPOEM (FOR KR)

I want to drive under the overpass all night,

turn the stripe of light, the light’s blink

to a strobe effect—turn the light epileptic—

the interior goes orange, night-orange, the orange

of black—the edges go sharp/slack, sharp/

slack. I think So this is how it feels to be high—

I always think that when I’m high …

& I play & replay the film clip of K

when she stood up to go—when the towering

wave of her drunkenness hit, flattened her

there—when she fell like a building

down into itself, its own empty air—

freeze frame & rewind—those heart-breaking

legs, collapsible spires—it never gets old.

She’s with me now, half-asleep in the back

& ice-cold & now the moths are coming,

the moths of spring—moving toward the car

as it moves toward them—we will pass

thru each other’s fields. Don’t be afraid, K—

though afterward we may not remember

who we were before the crash.