a farrago of autobiography

in every convoluted line

          *

there never was a Balzac configuration,

I made that up

          *

all the untended graves

I once told her

didn’t matter

          *

marked for demolition

the site of my permanent records

          *

he said the salt in the street

burns his dog’s paws

          *

morning of my expulsion,

arms around the trunk of the sycamore tree

in the school parking lot

          *

crushing crabapples underfoot

I’m six and a half,

going on seven

          *

the boy who couldn’t read

never got to clap erasers

with the blue-eyed girl

          *

the wet muzzles

of the watermelon thieves

          *

the plunging sabbath

of a frozen

waterfall

          *

it would’ve been enough for me

to be Issa’s

sure-footed horse

          *

hard egg yolk on a bent spoon,

Guernica somewhere else

          *

forsythia in bloom

my defenses are down

          *

I was a blind spot

in her rearview mirror

          *

secretly wanting to join

the caterpillar procession

          *

keeping my mouth shut in a room alone

with my war-ruined cousin

          *

what are you going to do

when they find out

you can’t read

          *

sliced peaches

and the lateral lines

of the blue-tipped shark

          *

I didn’t tell the politely smiling

conductor on the Amtrak to Pittsburgh,

he resembled an Ukiyo-e print

Patrick Sweeney is a short form poet and a devotee of the public library.