Still Life with Memory Box, Junk Mail, Polaroids, Spare Change, River Viewed Through Window, Extra Keys, and Postcard with Fragmentary Statue of Triple Hecate

1

These daily mistakes.
Yet I can’t seem to disappear for very long.
The keys
needing money again.
I’ll have to be
on the other side of the door.
The papers at the landing that say:
I have lost things.
Someone has opened the boxes.
And the world that says
Nobody tells us how to live.
But even if somebody doesn’t
open us, the contents seldom keep
silent. It’s ticking now.
Is it a clock is it a bomb.
You can’t recall. Same here.
But hurry, hurry, the money
blowing away, the ring
rolling under a car—

2

Mother of Oblivion,
when the Greeks called you the Distant One,
I think they were also imagining the people
who went first to live among you.
What they send us over long distances
doesn’t fit, and of course
we’re children to them, always;
to them we look most adorable
in all we’ve outgrown.

3

But I could make a life here,
among my genealogies.
The men they loved
wore dirt better than suits
their childhoods
infrequently photographed
The men you loved they
stayed put in one way
the ashes like a spiritual nature
best to be contained not seen
The men I love never speak of rivers
except when they’re flying over rivers.
They never like houses or other destinations.
It’s not what they bet on.
The dragonflies in their ears, only
something to talk through.
They sleep where room keys don’t work anymore.
Everything cold has a charge.

4

A dream: the mourners
making love. The earth
a love hotel, all secrets.
The river another story;
only the cold go there.
At least they let us know.

5

Tomorrow, when the doors
get taken down there, all over,
remember we loved the keys–
more than the money and photographs
and the river, though we stayed in too
much, too spooked,
our childhood over ever after,
we stood by the windows
with those bronze
leaves in our hands.
Like chimes moving at night,
become the people who, because
they can’t hear them,
need them most.

Wild

                 Like in myth, this April’s conspicuous
with a girl’s absence:
                  her smile estranges phone poles,
the window of 7-11. Enough

                  woods out here, so many
potential crime scenes; maybe, weirdly,
                   how come names don’t stick
to the cluster of apartments:

                   Hill-something one year, then Heather,
clearly H must be the first
                    letter. Girls Gone Wild
tapes by the dumpster, gold lobes on

                    the path from maintenance
axing the witch hazel, strays caging
                     themselves unwittingly–
how useful being

                      on the side of order.
I need to get rid of these words
                       that won’t arrange themselves right:
Enough. Woods. Apartments. Now

                       Renting. Words. Like.
Strays. April. Her Name. Heather.
                        Myth. Hill. Smile.
Wild. Gone. Girl.

Michael Tyrell is the author of a poetry collection, The Wanted (Dream Horse Press), and a book of prose poems, Phantom Laundry (Backlash Press). A widely published writer whose work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among others, he has new poems in recent numbers of Bellevue Literary Review, The Night Heron Barks, and What Rough Beast. The poems published here are from a series in progress, Revenant.