I was stoned when I saw the eskimoed figure crunching down the street with a flashlight and cocker spaniel. The iced trees hung in on the road and my dazed synapses made suburbia look like a cave. The figure trudged ahead as I flexed my stiff fingers, watching her from my hot box of dry heat …

I am reading the
book of someone I
have been “figuring
out.”
It is Borges’ Labyrinths
(labyrinth, a convenient
metaphor for anything
you can think of)
I am searching for
something
inevitable about
the words underlined
in pencil.
Mirror, circled,
instead of time or soul
cartouched on the yellow
paper. “Hardly a soul
on the platform.”
That, or the dreaded window.
Secret, busy, multiform,
Madden stalks alone
through the garden, and I
am thinking about the razor
blade …

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
—Philip Larkin, “Ambulances”
He believed that to strip away what seemed
would invariably be to find a truth—to get to what is.
He disbelieved in deduction, though: my professor saw something
beneath—real beliefs, only …

 I.
the tarmac is hot 
my face is looking up at the sky
T is face down on the pavement.
the concrete rubs off littler stones onto our faces and skins
and stretches out as far as we both can see
 
about the length of a lighthouse away is
the body of the drone folded 
out of new, tender quick aluminum.
it shines like …

I’m from Sitka, Alaska. It might as well be my last name. “Hi, I’m Jonathan. I’m from Sitka.” Sometimes, “Hi, I’m from Sitka. My name’s Jonathan.” It’s not just me. When making introductions, many friends deem my geographic provenance more salient than my name. And sometimes the two become one, such as when I first …

I missed twenty days of fifth grade. Whenever sipping my morning orange juice felt as strenuous as sword-swallowing, I deployed my angst-pantomime (wince, gasp, moan) to tell Mom I wouldn’t be able to go in. If she was too absorbed in the Times to notice my performance, I would just say, “Mom. Strep.” And everything …