Map
The map had everything
to do with evenings, with
lamps and unfolding.
We’d sit with the world
across our laps, half
of us vanished, or,
rather, half of us
become that map.
We’d sit like one
creature reading
the names of places—‚
Alameda, Detroit,
Ecuador. We’d move
our fingers from Portugal
to Puget Sound, from
Donegal to Djibouti, from
the Rhine to the Tiber.
All rivers, it seemed,
flowed between us
and we were nothing
if not the seas and vast
continents the nights
(climbing the stairs)
kept inventing.
My Mother’s Coats
So many.
I wear them
all
at once
and still
so cold.
The Maps
We were colder
than we were lost,
so we burned them.
The orange-bright
ash, like small birds,
flew up, like birds who
knew where they were
going. And in a moment
we were cold again, more
lost, more not knowing.
Night Watch
I woke and could see
there was no water—
no sea or river,
not even a bed-
side stream or
glass a trembling
hand could hand
to someone else,
a glass that could
remind me of when
I was a boat and
a compass, of
when there was
a sail and a you
who didn’t care
where we were going.
We Lived a While By the Sea
I liked best when she spoke
in Catalan. Before or after.
Slowly or fast. It was a tongue
I understood as hers. The words
didn’t matter. Meaning comes,
when it does, between
the syllables, in the small
beats of breath, in the pulling
back of a strand of hair, as
if that were a curtain, as if
a little moonlight the moon
would not miss could be
let in.
The Moon Never
after Hafez
The moon never
tells the sun:
buzz off.
The sun just
does its thing—
until the lovers
say: oh sun,
go to bed.
Track and Field
I was big so they had
me throw things—
discuss, javelin, shotput.
They taught me how
to hop or run or spin
with an object I
held tight and then
let fly. It was like
seeing a heaviness
in me grow wings—
and then, always,
a small man, scurrying,
would take my measure.
Batting Cages
If only
the boys
with bats
would stay
in their cages.
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight poetry collections, including, most recently, The Sorrow Apartments. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Boston University and directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.