first draft for a happy ending
if this poem
were a love song,
it’d sound like Patsy Cline
on a late night out
on the corner of Broome and Mulberry,
the streets filling up with darkness
as you wrap your arms
around my red-stilettoed silence.
its only melody would be the swell
of a gray-green Atlantic
breaking on the shores from Hatteras
to Westerly, where i wrote names
in the sand. early May was once
a time for love songs, you see, but
i have generally forgotten
how they used to go. so this poem
is just a poem, though it slips
off the tongue like quicksilver,
like that lemonade
we bought from those girls
in Gale’s Ferry, a block from where
you used to live.
this poem and i, we
can appreciate the tang
of memory, its pucker & squint,
just as we do a fear of falling, as if
we were dancers
on a pole at the top of a forty-
floor walkup with one arm flung wide.
it was a dream i had, once,
but whether the pole was hope
or doubt this poem won’t say,
so i am never sure when to let
go & have never yet
learned to whistle. much less
to sing.
Wednesday
this morning, the weather is cooler,
and there is threat
of snow again in the midwest.
there are
heart-shaped messages
in my inbox that aren’t
really hearts, just
numerical symbols
that vaguely remind
of my struggles with multi-
variable calculus.
that was a long time ago. this
morning, the cat
won’t let me work.
he sits on my hip
as i type, scrutinizing
every last alphanumeric
equivocation.
outside,
there are
fast-moving clouds
of i-don’t know-what
kind; they make his tail
twitch and my eyes
wander.
i am thinking
about storms (about you),
about dancing (about me),
about how they ought
to make a good poem
together:
a story of spirals and dervishes,
the solution
to some deceptively
simple equation
that explains the mysteries
of mathematics,
or metaphysics,
or something.
the cat
is a terrible spell-
checker.
bitter fruit
we are lulled by
candlestrewn news-
casts into some sense
of wax-puddled forever,
by the delibility
of asphalt footprints
into the tend-
encies to forget.
dripping elegies
for the fallen, we
count cherry-
blossomed blessings
petal by petal like
a lonely child’s game:
he loves me, he
loves me not. we stain
our subconscious
in pink nostalgia,
as if we, too, knew
the sting of April,
as if we could some-
how make it better, as if
by our crying, the world
would be a better place
come May, the cherry
trees then in full bloom.
evolution
searching for sincerity
in plastic, we all wish
we were someone else,
tattoo names inside
our cheekbones, hide
our farawayselves
from the loneliness
that creeps into our
laugh lines.
equipped with in-dentured
jawbones, all we taste
are the soundbites, &
pictures, too, lie;
i can filter love
right
into your eyes, you, man-
ufacture scars
with only the sharp of canines,
piercing truths
to string upon a lover’s necklace
like fingerbones from
some primeval fossil
dug up under a harvest moon.
in unadulterated sunlight,
you see, it becomes
harder
to find the poems.
buoyancy
tequila-truths
float to the top
like ice in the glass,
their density more than that
of water, river- or canal- -
would ice float in a tumbler of tears?
i wonder, but the sun
is already slowing,
its journey through
glassless windows
illumining the last
of the graffitied detail, lights on
the guntower (or so you call it;
though surely it was once
an industrial smokestack,
surely…) reflecting
in the slight dark waves.
enough crying, you say,
and we sip on, our
tongues searching
for the edge
of happiness,
the point at which this
boathouse tips. the sun
now well and truly
fallen & the place
full up with suits, we
take our leave; i run
my fingers over the dark
murals of you, feel
the lingering
warmth of cement. we
used to know this place,
the angle of its suns.
now in the dark, in
the wind, i find again
the poems we may
write tomorrow,
and then, and then.
Dear poet,
i learned a new word today,
and the earth smells like a fresh wound
where tiny waves lick the riverbanks,
catastrophizing early spring.
sometimes the guilt is gone for a moment,
and eternities blunted by the marks
of sharp scissors. your questions
i carve into the shape of april:
if we shine lights on the moon,
is the starglow indifferent?
if we make dents in the mattress,
does that make this just
another lust poem?
Remembering Hal and Gail
everyone
looks younger
in love.
we haven’t been
there much,
lately. i count
crows
feet around
your coronaries,
the hard-ish wrinkles
over my veins.
we need more red,
re-awakened
part-sun days,
thornless. river-
mud between
our toes, not
rose but rust-gold
long(ing)-
fingered lenses
through which
all the world
seems wetter and
better for it,
like spring,
like summer
in a mirror
in a cabin
on a side street
by the ocean, yes.
everyone
looks younger
in love.
lust poem no.31
there is the air
poured
from stale radiator to pool
over bare skin
and open sill.
there is the lament
of a passing train
this side the river. there
is firewood stacked
beside the door, but no
goddamn snow.
it weighs like the hesitation
in her eyes that he
can’t see: that she
is tired of sad poems,
their puckered footsteps like
icefall on the second day
of spring. all ragged clouds
& slush & cold
metaphor. her skin
is forgetful. his hands
are on the small of her.
they weigh like silence,
like stone, like
remembering, brim
with words left
over which long
for un-houred mondays, for
un-hung evers, un-strung lives,
for words which long.
what i mean when we talk about the weather
i am writing the same poems
i was before i met you, where,
raining, i was then too pre-
sprung and ungainly and in-
congruent, lofting
plastic smiles
and polysyllabic line-
breaks despite the yellow
of my skirt. alas, you say,
and i like the letters in the word,
how they spell wings
in other tongues, but we
are far from flying,
drown down in our
respective sadnesses,
can’t remember
conjugations or cloud
patterns or what it was
to love easy. it must be
snowing hard, still,
somewhere.
mindful.
this is how spring comes,
stripes of green between
herring-boned brick, fern-fronding,
bare-armed, broken-eternitied;
mindful. (i am) convalescent,
cognizant of the dragons
that still lean in, hungry.
they bite at me, at
wrists and cheeks and eyes,
blindfully, so that my shape
is not the shape of others, ever.
after dinner, your stereo
won’t work; you ask me to sing, but
i’ve got only that song
where the girl is leaving and the boy
must drop everything to catch her.
(and that is
not us, after all.)
dragons, as everyone knows,
hate the sun. while you are gone, i sit
on the winter-warmed stoop
bare-armed, watching spring come,
scars palely fade, wondering
how this song will end.
the last rhetorical question
where do we dream,
now? i ask, remembering
monday afternoons
that could run through our fingers
like the juice from an overripe
plum. the snow this year
wasn’t as wonder-sunk as the last.
you didn’t dress me up and say
let’s make the most of this.
no, we sat with our backs
to a bar and watched the
flakes fall until they
didn’t. like a disconnect. suddenly
i feel i am stop-gap, filling-
in, badly wrapped
arm-candy. like winter-grass,
pale and limp and persistent.
like the snow that cries, fading.
so i do my dying during
daylight hours, afraid
the neighbors will hear,
call the cops, take
the cat, run. somehow i
am, still; embittered
& embroidered and melting
in what was. you are trim &
full up with prospects & when
you say let’s make the most
of this, it doesn’t sound
the same at all, at all.
sitting, two years later,
in the james center starbucks, i
am distracted by the business
which parades in suit, by
the slow, slow sound
of winter dying, its feeble thuds
keeping time with my own unarmed
chest. there is a meek half-light
outside the windowed-walls,
the sun un-warm & indecisive.
i am afforded a first-class view
of the parking garage,
the crimson-awninged atm,
the bundled cafe umbrellas.
i am waiting, brokenly:
for a car crash, for a lightning strike,
to see someone i recognize.
for you to catch hold
of my cheek and say, come,
let me take you home.
it is more limbo than
purgatory, the waiting;
there is no redemption at its end,
only the promise of a flatter
mattress and yellowed teeth.
as the poet said: there
is evening, there is morning,
and i think i loved you better
when we were
desperate. besides i
quit being a good catholic
years ago, now only
remember my rosary
when digging through
the jewelbox for a gold
chain you also didn’t give me,
also years ago.
This is kinda a re-make of a poem i did about two years ago, posted wayyy back here.
Don’t apologize.
Sorry is not a poem
you post on your wall,
framed in flimsy black plastic
that wouldn’t hold a body.
Sorry looks at you,
dead straight, only
when the war is over.
Then it unfriends you on Facebook.
Sorry has no metaphors.
No spindly pale analogies.
It smells like your future
ex running late on a Thursday,
face scrubbed
with a stale washcloth.
Sorry tastes
like what i imagine
funeral flowers taste like,
broiled. Sorry is the sound
of a silence two
seconds too long;
is the difference
between stalking
and lingering, between
dancing and dithering,
between a kiss
and being caught.
Sorry is always caught.
But is hardly ever contrite.
on the day lightning struck the Vatican, i
was drinking wine &
thinking about penitence,
thumbing through possibilities
of ever after. i have known much
of bleeding, after all, of
bea(u)tification, and now
it’s Ash Wednesday, as they say
in the French, and all
the red roses are gone
from my hair, and it’s
raining but
we still dream in blades and
villanelles and other vague
heart shapes.
to our own
very great surprise
we have survived the night,
came through in stereo,
with beads on, and
glowing.
thunder-and-lightning love
they razor
across a face opaque
as sugared absinthe, her smile-
shanks, swearing nothing
could ever come between them, nothing:
the studded starlight, the straightness
of his spine;
there was a time i would’ve moved
everything; now all
that is left is to move on,
the piles of pills uncut, un-
touched on the kitchen counter, a
caress in their cold aloneness. no
half measures in this meeting; she
reads too fast, so crazy she
mustbe in-love, in-
fatuated (i find
i do not believe youmuch, anymore), un-
characteristically alive; still, she reads
too fast, like cobblestones
coming up to meet you, & there is no
sorry in cement, like our
footsteps that day we walked
the beach in the cold, like
elbows in a coffeeshop
on a streetcorner
where they sit and argue
(will they remember my voice,
when i am dead?)
over what it means to be crazy.
becomings
she breaks hearts
like she breaks
bread, gnawing &
soft, follows
the trail
of heartbeats
as it grows
more obliquely
spaced, slowing.
she is searching
for a place to rest
among the wreckings;
she is silent,
like an empty
tattoo, like a bruise
on a thigh. she is
chewing up her past,
tearing it in tiny pieces
and swallowing.
it is fibrous,
absolving, like a train
whistle, like you
in bed on saturday
mornings. she
still dreams of snow
and red dresses, of
the stuffed bear
he left when she left:
please don’t go
again.
crazy (déjà something)
is the sum of us
counted out into highway miles
between here and the ocean: two-
oh-seven the plastic
inscribed on the single room
key; three close
hours we fight
to keep the bed
from squeaking while your
four gushing walls tattoo
against my own
ever, a millisecond that melts
skin into skin & still
hurts with yearning; the backdrop blue-
lit bourbons spilt
through drip-
ping minutes of Saturday night
into the misty evanescence
of Sunday morning &
suddenly it’s five
twenty-five and unbearable:
the distance, the leaving in
darkness, the cleaving
breathless-ness of one.
just another suicide poem
you don’t want to read this.
untethered and still in tangles, some words
should only ever be sung at song’s end.
for some hurts, there are no words.
here. put your finger just…
here. where it pulses.
feel the slow.
red-black, it giggles
as it drips from skin to
brick-l(e)aden sheets.
you don’t want (anyone)
to read this.
they’ll take away your shoelaces,
your plastic knives.
but then, what’s a razorblade
when all you need
is the will to stop
breathing?
for some pain,
there is no air.
i know these things,
the giddiness of a dripping
pulse. trust me, i’m
a doctor.
here. they’ll take away
your shoelaces
and you’ll walk barefoot,
without dignity.
but they won’t let you
leave. you’ll walk hobbled,
in small circles,
barefoot,
broken.
like poetry.
your story
on some stage far from here,
another bleeder.
here. as it gushes.
trust me, i’m
a poet. feel the slow,
the red-black breath
of forever
a single, beaten tomorrow
that will never
be yours again.
read barefoot,
untangled,
how it gushed
(in the end),
how they wouldn’t
let you leave.
broken, the whole world
will applaud, crying in the end (;)
you don’t want to read this.
for the singer with the cyanide eyes
Maybe this
winter
will be easier;
maybe there is hope beyond frost;
maybe our breath will jut
in steamy tomorrows
across a river that never
freezes; maybe your dreams will dream yet
tachycardic, wild and blue,
like the pulse of the ocean,
muffling the deaths that lie spread-
eagled across decades,
hissing obscenities
under the bedspread, the deaths
that smell ever-so-softly
of overripe promises,
understated like
magnolia blossoms
at the end of summer…
like secrets for a December
no man has seen.
re: the first falling star
this poem
is written under a gray sky,
looking out, poem-level,
at the power lines & december-naked
branches.
it has never smelled heather
in winter; it prickles
with gooseflesh but won’t
let you turn on the heat.
this poem
says: you must make
your own fire. it owes me
nothing. like you, it dreams
in cats.
this poem has no hands.
it sleeps naked. it likes
summer nights and
long walks under the stars.
this poem
is winter on paper,
a message in a bottle
washed upon a cold
Atlantic beach.
its breath steams,
champs, hisses &
waits for us, all, melting,
in the dark.
this is what goes on the last page
we fall, as the year
into december, so
wetly longed-for.
the rush
that calls our quiet
is the absence
of sirens.
the rails we walked
for so long
now blink
into forever,
a smoke-curl
on january’s horizon.
your left hook
is useless
against the coming
cold.
that kind
of hardness
can only melt
or burn.
reflecting as we turn from the water
there was such hope
in this morning.
there were springs
and summers all
jumbled up in our eyes.
there were poems
scrawled in neon, winding
between our fingers:
binding, not bound. now
they slog through wet
descent, flailing, &
here we are at the back
of the notebook, a single
leaf remaining
before october ends.
cold settles in
like a low fog,
like tequila hung-
over, like
responsibility.
the river keeps rising,
and i will miss it.
there was such hope
in this morning.
& i am waiting still.
under construction
like a new notebook or a good clean wind,
summer songs can’t make a dream
exist if it doesn’t want, and
happy poems should not be
items on to-do lists.
he winked at me in fall sunlight
from under his fedora.
[insert standard plot-twist-slash-
voicechange
here]
even happy poems should
have a little mystery.
or a kiss.
i am, after all, not
an iceberg. but i have been
too long among novelists
& nighttime heartache, and
this isn’t a true story.
is it?
definitely a kiss.
on a streetcorner.
[someone dies here]
just
here.
the things we burn
you say we are descended
from giants,
but i
am more impressed
by the tenacity
of acorns,
how they worm
their way into the wet
fall ground. inside
their porcupined-cap heads
they are oaks already, & we
mere children
playing in the dirt, watching
sparks curl round the thread-
bare dark. their every breath
threatens to catch the night on fire,
and my eyelashes are singed
with soot-stained doubting.
these are the things we burn;
with smoke in my hair,
will you love me still?
