Sorry, everyone.

Simplicity itself: a dozen shells,
a lemon wedge, horseradish and Heinz
in paper cups. Yet decadence: lips
like Cleopatra’s richly sipping at nacre,
lush and lustrous, wet with the juice of pearls.
This is the pure, good taste of the ocean,
the thing itself, whole, perfect and raw.
How many moments like this will you have?
Ten, twelve in your life? The oysters are one.

After finishing off the bottle of vodka he says / life is everything children are ignorant of, / including us, their heroes, who become small / and replaceable. And while remorse pricks us like holly leaves, history does not.”
[…]

“He says vodka is a river and maybe the sea / and they swam in it like children with blue lips / and the shakes, waiting for life to overwhelm / its metaphors.

There is almost nothing that does not signal loneliness,
then loveliness, then something connecting all we will become.

Some of the walls remained and some
fell. We scavenged what bricks we could
for the new walls, some of which

remained and some of them fell.
We scavenged what bricks we could
for the new walls, all of which

are shorter, so we crouch. No one remembers
how to make bricks, how to stop bombing,
how to drink tea without dust in it.

A walnut yearns for summers
long enough for its fruit to ripen.
We held on like clothes to a line
losing faith in the pegs.

An ash bends in the gale,
leaf by leaf, our promises dried,
I couldn’t remove your ring from my swollen finger.

A slow willow doesn’t know yet
what autumn’s for, it will still
have leaves when the year turns,
old sores growing back.

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

As wound deepened by wound? Not jewel, not gem,
Not beauty, not gem. I am this anger.

Vengence is a lazy kind of grieving
the translator says later in the HBO movie

(she’s relaxed now and earnest)—
the victim’s family in this tribe takes

the killer far out in a boat & leaves him— they can choose to let him

drown or begin the hard work of forgiving bringing him up wet & afraid.

He realizes that for days now
he hasn’t been lying,
but saying other people’s truths,
which is worse.

A drop of water on the lip of a jug,
trembling, trying to hold on
for another second to the idea of sphericity—
that was us, our nakedness.

‘The way the world wags,’ I said. ‘The difference between what we’d like to be and what we’re able to be. How to respect myself when I know I’m confused and cowardly. How to respect a world where nothing I believe in is valued. How to live and grow old inside a head I’m contemptuous of, in a culture I despise.’

…nothing in our lives will change because I figure I’m about as happy as I’m going to get the way things are. So I refuse to wish Leo nice, or the dogs free, or my sister happy, or myself forgiven, or much of anything all that much different than it’s likely to get. I just won’t wish them, and then when they all don’t happen, it won’t mean a thing to me. If this is what I get in this world, I’ll take it. Love and squalor, but mostly love. I’ll take it and I’ll take it and I will not be sorry.