A BELL JAR 

There’s vanity in thinking
that existential panic is very intelligent. 

But I want days off from my regular life—
from selfhood, night thoughts. The sun, the moon.

I refuse to express things for a little while,
as a cloud holds a shower. There’s a room without a door.

There are different ways to enter into one’s nature. 

Let the world have its own life,
I’ll have mine. We can feel each other

naming things over the vegetable universe.

Instruments

In my statement of purpose,
I said something about elucidating
raw interiority, my desire to embrace and
respect its otherness, its everlasting witchcraft. 

But in some ways, I wanted to be wholly
disillusioned of it, tuck its mesh head
under my arm—a fencer done
with the game at last.  

My faith was ended, but my heart was open
to the mild summer blowing through
the melancholy. I ended up typing out the long,
pretty names of French and Italian wines, heaping them,  

like sheets and blankets, onto the page,
onto the ground. This could be included in the disjecta
of those years, as revealing as anything of a soul,
or of whatever shifts in one’s hands.