The poets I know don't draft in here,

but I do. Open the window and enter the room.

Let chance play. Don't be a bitch about it,

said Richard Serra, or something to that effect.

He died last week. He didn't mean it was weak

to worry about the making, just that we're running

 

out of time. In 2011, still in this life, I was running

through his sculptures in Bilbao. Here, here,

here. Suddenly I was where I was. I shared a room

with someone I knew I was about to love. It

was the first time anyone had had that effect

on me but not the last. We stayed together that week

 

in a Wonderland-themed hostel, weakly

lit by the time we got in each night, running

up the stairs, still strange to one another. Here,

it's okay for me to say there's no room

to talk about how that ended. Save it

for another poem about first love, the effect

 

of witnessing and being witnessed in my affects,

my dirty dishes, the bugs smeared on my wall, week

after week. I wouldn't blame anyone for running.

If I could get away from this too, I would. I hear

many good things about ego death, but in this room

ego is it. That's the problem with words. They're so lucid.

 

It's hard to convey in language what it means to lose it.

My mom's words leave her, but even that effect

is structuring. The words she has left shape our weeks,

and I know Richard Serra was right about running

out of time, but I'm not motivated by urgency here

if I'm honest. What keeps me writing in this room?

 

What keeps you? The poets I know make room

for me in the silence. Would I exist without it?

Would sculpture, would my mother, would the effect

of the blinking cursor in this window? Each week

the sun shifts a little bit higher, days running

into dusk, dusk hiding what's looking back at you, here—

 

—you. Can you hear it?