Improv: Mark's "Lullaby"

I should be used to it by now, sleep that nails me to the door
in a heat even summer envies, all hair and sweat and sadness.
Throwing a deck of cards against the dingy wallpaper,
you can't help but caress something, a tuft of hair, a settled
settler, a body flung from a Volvo on a Friday night, a widow
of two. You want to sketch me, I oblige and ask
about your heart, she loves me she loves me not,
how it has failed you, can we drink espresso
in your chemo wig. your coldsweat logic.
I miss that. This lamp's heat puts me down.

Improv: Marks' "The Black Bear at Closing"

A figure to be reckoned with and a smell like getting used to the chickenhouse next door, she, the bear, takes the elevator to hell with you, and she puckers and wonders where you've been for so long, where the whiskey has gone, what you've done with Jesus down in the hole. The real fire, you say, has been smoldering and has finally extinguished. She, the bear, removes her garments, her fur and burn and love, and blasts you out with her hydraulic system. She's been hiding it this whole time, keeping you close to the Lord. His hands are so cold. Splayed by the numbers, the 1 through 13, you fall to your knees and say Amen, amen, amen.

Improv: Marks' "The Lake"

Deceptive, this calm, the way slow-toppling
waves bat our thighs, the way the mosquitoes'
wings pause on our shoulders as they proceed
with their nightly suck

of iron, the velvet-red swelling their bellies,
ours: empty. Where's your mother, father,
dementia-prone grandmother? Let us
plunge this johnboat into the lake

without their permission, flooding the foot
rests and our shoes that mingle with rotten
leaves in an admixture less than admirable,
let us stroke with a single paddle the depths

of this pond--though they call it a lake--
and we'll sink without effort in murk
and mire, those trite aquatic descriptors
since we're loaded on Jim Beam and whatever

we've got, let us be the shore, rather,
let the dock's benediction claim nothing
we own.

Improv: Marks' "House with a Bed of Tulips"

To the photo of her crow-haired father,
three years ago when he still took his own
shits, when neither you nor your forgetful mother
had to dress him, I said, keep it.

You must fill this album with things that don't exist,

it's in the contract, the wine's fine print,
the locked door and deal closing,

like your mother's yearbook photo with her braces,

brother, now dead, plunging his face into the night
air, chickenhouse teeth catching bugs. Your tulips
were never watered, I say, casting off the one
of your house before the flood. Your former husband
and you--or rather, more poignantly, the ex--
standing side by side before he blew
his brains out in the hospital parking lot,
sends the jolt of a cringe down my spine.

Improv: Marks' "The Poet's House"

Sits not on a foundation. Remember that city?
The one known for its lobster, for its annual parade
and 5K and not much else, the city tired of its hunt,
brushed away to the back pages of the poet's
biography, though it permeates his work:
the factories, the strip malls, that moment in the eighties
when the Rainbow Room spread wide its doors,
howled like San Fran in the rainy months,
the constant birdsong, the cough of winter.

Improv: Marks' "Hotel Fire"

Before we were led through the hotel's stairwell,
before you paused, telling me what you thought
of our neighbor's housecoat and pink slippers,
before that pregnancy test made itself known
to itself, to us, we lied pieced together
on those starched sheets in the steady,
open plastic of love. The alarm came
suddenly, imbuing thought into a thought
less tangible that we'd imagined. A cluster
of moments' explosions excised and examined,
Where would you like it, sir? hurried,
gasping, a breath like a dying leaf's. The fire
escapes' dull iron railing painted your fingertips
red, those flecks ironed into my wrinkled collar.
Where are you now, where.

Improv: Marks' "Three Bridges"

When the rains came I was spooning salt into a pie, the neighbors bleating
through the walls, the narrow, invisible cracks. I had to leave
it there--my mother's recipe--on the oven, away from the windowsill
where no steam would drift, where it would be beaten down or swatted
into the damp clay. I swear sometimes I hear a voice in the well.
The airhorn's distant movement sweeps us up, my daughter and
her cat, my husband and his Hagar, spits us like a plug
of tobacco into a silver cup. The voice in the well says that
the rain may never stop, and I am fine with my reflection there;
it must be what death is like, an attenuated hush, a roused silence.