your yesterdays
muddy my forevers,
wet river footprints
on the kitchen floor
of the house we’ll never buy.
we argue
over the absolute value
of nothing, the hollows
it leaves under your eyes
when we open the front
door and the world
comes in with the rain.
someone asked me once
why i write
poetry, and i didn’t have
a ready answer,
but after
so much of argument, i
think it’s to believe,
still, in
love, in all its
hot swollen
uncomfortable
nothings that creep
like poison
just under the skin,
its falling headfirst
over and over and
over, somer-
saults into river shadow,
into, again, nothing,
the absolute value of which
is still up
for discussion.
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.
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.
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.
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?
suddenly
we’re reaving yesterdays like
leaf-fall & peanutshells, piling
them in great heaps to smoke
and shudder; tonight
i listen to the same sad song
you sung me on those days
you sang for no one, and
the creak of the polished floors
under my uneven footsteps
echoes through all the seasons
between that day and this:
fall, winter, spring,
summer, fall
winter, summer, fall, winter…
the sound of broken
promises is similar
to nothing so much as that
of broken glass, & suddenly
nothing
is so bitter
as chocolate.
suddenly,
there is all this talk
of elephants.
doubt
is a dragon
who eats love poems,
chews up their beginnings
and chars my pages
with the white li(n)es
and black letters of regret.
fall has not even
truly fallen, yet we stall out
like gas-starved engines:
sparks that stutter, flame,
consume. will winter find
us hitch-hiking home,
the snow melt sogging
through wet leaves, limp
socks? what can rev up for-
ever, catch us now on fire?
who will teach me, again,
to purr?
reckoning season
summer passes. all its hot-
cropped doubts and match-
struck storms leave
a vacuum where we used to sit
on high-backed stools
and sip on laughter. this is
why i fall in love
though it makes me sad, why
we kiss on street corners
and write poems
about poems. autumn
comes welcome and in-
between, filling the sky
with empty spaces
to tell a story
of matched rails
and sunlight-through-leaves.
today is a good day
for the beginning
of end-
ings, wet-burnt
and rising as they carry us
off in laughter and smoke,
leave us fearless, bare-
footed in rain.
day-dreaming in stolen words
children chase the shadows
of butterflies round a fountain
of stone; pink
blooms of crepe myrtle drift in
the august breeze to land
teasingly on skin, clothes, hair.
she finds it strange
how every man who has ever said
he loves her has also said
you deserve better;
hikes up her skirt to let
the late afternoon sun
kiss knees, thighs;
wonders. the moon
will be small and orange
tonight, a plaything
for summer’s dying gods.
who will kiss
her noon-shadow,
chase the butterfly wings down
the arch of her back, crown
her summer-glow
like a prom queen in pink crepe,
carry her home when
august has ended?
drifting
it is august in earnest.
yesterday was almost
autumn, yet here we are again,
dripping. the sticky blueness
of these last few holdout days
clings to the streets like gauze.
by a series of unfortunate
coincidents, i
am thinking of laboratories,
of thinning lines of blood, of my
mother’s dead white hands.
the walls of her hospital room
were that same sticky un-sterile blue,
like an oil painting of some South sea.
it is not the same blue of puddled
dress they found me
in before they called the paramedics
at summer’s end the year of her death;
no, it is deeper and better
for drowning. most seasons i
don’t believe in faith,
but i thank god on august days
for ambles along the river,
for his rich earthy browns.
meditations on the death of summer
fog curling
off the water makes me feel
like falling
off the world; some-
times it’s damn hard
to feel at home here,
the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,
in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive
as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where
the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman
and tossed in God’s wastepaper
basket. we dream
of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn’s
bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday
mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair
in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.
poem ex nihilo
we burn
as the sun sets.
i am watching smoke curl,
feeding sticks into the flames
one by one by one, searching
the shapes of autumn’s shadow
for a metaphor fragile
enough to carry trust
in its silky, river-
fed palms;
for the words to drip
down your open-mouthed
throat like a benediction
and swallow naked, like a sword;
for the way silent twilight
fills the negative space
and becomes a poem
ex nihilo.
(between parentheses)
after R.S.
dear poet,
there is nothing
accidental
about this metaphor:
that we are children
reaching hands
in the hard calloused
eyes of the ferryman who
steers between the winks
of channel-markers
into gloamed twilight;
that we step
quietly on the creaking
planks of secrets and
drink in coastlines
like sweetwater;
and that we finally
follow stars hot
& hard as July earth
until each
reaches home again.
augury, in the strictest sense
we walk through thunder,
and there are drawn stormclouds
across your cheeks, brow; like train-
tracks to nowhere, and i’ll hop
the next boxcar, simple as un-
wanting, follow it til i find
the sun buried in your irides.
this metaphor is a railroad:
straight, the slow
unraveling of sudden horizons.
a friend tells me
the story of the red-
tail hawk attacked
sequentially by two crows
and a mockingbird. i
wonder if it’s because they know
jealousy like you do, see its predatory
threat atop every lamppost and
telephone pole.
raindrops like fat clay pigeons hiss
against rusted rails, tear-on-trestle,
black-feathered bullets of omen:
where will you be
when the lightning comes down?
they told me this was a poem
the notebook i burned that day i learned hate:
i wish i had those words again.
the one long coat i’ll never wear
and the books i’ll never sell, that sit damply expiring
in the back of the closet beside this box
(since they don’t all fit).
the nights you spend alone, every
one folded tight like an unused rain slicker.
my mother’s wedding ring.
my father’s Saint Christopher, the one
he wore for years after they told his sixteen-year-old self
he had a fourteen-percent-chance.
the Saint Jude i lit for the ones who didn’t, their names
melded to the bottom now.
all the poems i write but that no-one can see, and this one,
tucked underneath.
that picture frame she threw at me, before she could throw it:
those hours picking glass shards from skin i will
never get back.
so much for ekphrasis
At twenty-
four, what stories
did you sculpt
into eternity?
What mythologies
would you sing into
fluted white
forevers?
We aren’t much
for marble
anymore, any-
way, prefer-
ing city walls
and less
lasting art-
ifices: wood,
paper, pixel;
would Apollo’s
lust-laden trance
come across
on brick?
or Daphne’s heart-
beat through
softer stone?
(if i carve this
poem in Carrara,
will you still
feel its pulse?)
You’ll notice there’s no image here. I wasn’t sure about copyright protection of images of Gian Lorenzo Bernini‘s sculpture on which this poem is based. The piece is called Apollo e Dafne, and is housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. You can view it, and read a little about Bernini and the history of the piece (which he did begin at the age of 24) here.
urban farmhouse at twilight
there is the subtlest of breezes from full-flung windows where the world
comes in, dragging its day-end noises: settling birds, slowing traffic.
It smells still of dark coffee & morning-baked bread. someone
coughs. the last sighs of light reflect against glass and chrome;
shadows pool between the cobbles. a scrape of chairs as this place
slowly empties, we the dregs of what had been an over-full cup.
my wine is sweeter with every
swallow.
fluorescent heartbeat,
a new green pulses lamplit;
last lip-stained-glass kiss.
above Mayo Island, late March
waves run against the shore below the bridge, longing
to be the ocean. herring make their upstream leap, and
birds fish languidly from the rocks: geese, ducks, long-
legged Great Blues and a single, bleach-white crane. i
walk the beach barefoot, breathing the air sweet with
new green, watch him perch serenely among the highest
squirrel-eared branches, think this must be what it is
to be in love in spring-time, and alone.
linked to dversepoets for Meeting the Bar.
off the record
out-
turfed and living on
borrowed time she
has learned
to dance
to silence, sing
with no backup.
the color
in her cheeks isn’t
from cold, reflects
your heat as she
sits & drinks, thinks
this place feels
pink, like stolen
camellias,
like home; smells
sweet like
lies, like
love.
When every bird cometh
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
–Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules
This is not
a love poem.
Sirens
sound outside
my downtown window:
another broken
heart.
Street lights burn
into mid-February
dark, remember Indian
summer afternoons.
The sirens stop.
In the silence leftover,
your pulse, slowed.
Hope hides
breathing low & fast between
the river and the
dying with its secrets
freckled
into the skin
of bare city shoulders.
A soldier
makes his way
uphill from Main
Street station, red
blossoms
stark
against desert camo.
There is no
snow, today.
A good day
for wing-ed
homecomings,
if one hungers
for such things.
between the rails and the river (keep swimming, girl.)
there’s a sun tangled mid-
winter in the confines
of your eyes, spilling out
over the rocks like sick
solace or liquid
lust & trestled between
either shallow
bank as if it alone
owned the hour-
glass dripping
sand into our shoes
& under our
pretenses but
i’m in love
with silhouettes,
you get lost in
the separation cry of
down-stream currents
and there are still
shadows in this un-
plumbed ever.
