The New Year

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin.

With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap,

I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet

of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts.

With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight,

I will love another man because I will be a woman.

Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.

I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body

has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half

will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

Source: Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009)