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.
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.
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?
chemistry lessons
photo by N.Klapetzky, edited by the author
there is salt, and there is salt.
what’s the difference,
my father asked me at dinner
the other day, between
sea salt and plain ol’
en-ay-see-el? and i said
sea salt is less strict, dad,
more complicated;
but i don’t know if that’s right;
don’t know its bio-
chemical makeup, how late
it lets its daughters
out at night. chemicals aren’t
all latch-key and angle, you know.
for instance, there are some in the brain
more sensitive to love
than to cocaine. i’ve heard this;
that, chemically, love is the most terrible
addiction. crazy women need brave lovers,
the poet said; this i know also
to be true; i’ve seen crazy.
but i don’t know their chemistry, either:
not love or crazy. my professor
used to wear unmatched socks;
he taught the dissociation of salts.
his eyes were the color of sea glass.
he told my father once i
was the most impressive he’d ever had.
i could have loved him, then,
but i was addicted to my own heart-
beat. that rhythm is less biochemical
than electrical: a crazy drummer in my head
banging out signals to my chest.
i hope he is brave.
too much salt can fuck
it all up, cause heart-
ache. like breathing in sea glass.
how long can you hold your
breath underwater? my cousin
and i used to swim in the lake
by my grandparents’ house,
catch turtles on cane poles
with bits of old bread.
the biggest one we dragged up
onto the shore, and my father
sliced her neck while
her jaws were clamped
onto the back handle of an old broom.
that was before i knew chemistry.
or love. or that guilt could be as addictive
as cocaine. i’m not sure if this
is true, but i have seen crazy.
turtles, the poet said, turtles
all the way down.
They say great poets are thieves. I must be on my way to greatness, then. The lines I took shamelessly came from the inestimable Claudia Schoenfeld, here, and the Bard of Liminga himself, Ray Sharp, to whose poem “of the salt and the light,” this was written as a response.
(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?
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.
love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing
the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.
many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round
the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,
i know the herons aren’t
in the trees. they’ve found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.
epitaph for the soulless
there are
wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this
was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched
into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings
in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-
current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth
dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each
rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,
this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.
shut door when done
remember when it was more than this.
remember the hiss of snow on the lake,
the feel of fire in its place.
remember the forgetting.
remember what truth was, its high-flung pain.
remember the next night.
remember the taste of never,
the perfection of a kiss in the sun.
remember the last time you felt safe.
remember that you are more than (t)his.
remember the dregs and the puddles.
remember these words: concave, blue, gravel, catatonic.
remember the walk barefoot, cobbled in rain.
remember the screams.
remember the hand that picked you back up.
remember why.
remember how it ended, and where it began.
remember that which it is needful to remember,
the song you never meant to hear.
remember that dreams, too, are sometimes prophetic.
Between May and December (II)
The fifteenth. Almost too early to be called morning.
A last wide-eyed breath, oxygen
lines not enough to pull life
down into lungs riddled with what is no longer lung,
nolonger her.
There are no witnesses except the roses
beginning just to bud. He plants a miniature, pink,
in the side bed she had wrested from dust.
Her side of the bed lies cold, stretches
south. The phone rings again,
and again and again. He isn’t
told the day they put her in the ground.
Her carefully tended gardens bloom
once more, fade. The pink thrives
in caked mud through hottest summer,
slight scent of cloying memory.
September brings the burden of storms,
hurricanes. The side bed is awash,
and he is hundreds of miles away.
Wrapped in cold stone,
she can’t hear the wind as it cries.
First frost comes late, softly.
The twenty-fifth, Christmas morning,
a single blighted bud nearing
crimson
has risen shyly against the
white of Decembergrass, but
he doesn’t make it in time to see.
Re-Drawing a Portrait Once Painted on Plywood
A lone housefly myopically crawls
up pale-peeling kitchen walls, entropy
in quotidian microcosms that
screams of a stiletto- hardness
tattooed in both prismic eyes. It
belays the soundful softness
of rounded thighs and arms
of the woman at the table,
the smoke of her solitary
cigarette winding like
lust toward the fluorescence
overhead. There is sex
in this as in everything.
Even death. An unwinding
of flesh into the universe
that birthed it, entropy
again. Or perhaps simply
childhood timelines
tangled with tangential
tomorrows and the
exorcism-autopsy
of memory, a stillframe
of this solitary instant, yellow
and blue, aborted phosphorescent
remembering.
purple
purple
is not only the color
flashing in front
of death and draped
over mourning; it’s the tone
of bruised cheeks against
angry layered blushes; it’s
a favorite of my grandmother’s
though she may not
remember
my name when i bring
it to her in puzzle
pieces and
teddy bears
but
it’s also
the color of the orchid
you brought me
with your chapped
heart over
a year ago,
now
in bloom
for the first time
as if to say
let bygones utterly
be
gone and
love
joyfully
flower.
two and a half thoughts on love
(part 3 of 3)
Weary and milk-mild i stand
ankle-deep in wet sand, each
footprint a burden more than the last
as i head away from the solace
of heavy waters and
back toward solid ground.
And yeah, this road has a heartbeat,
hums with the rhythm of some gypsy dance
lost to the world centuries ago…
But i’ve
run up somehow on the sidewalk,
lost control of fortune’s wheel and now
the stones you’ve thrown into the gears
make it hard
to start any fire at all;
glass shards like stars
sparkle
across cheeks who’ve
seen too many streams of blackest mascara
raining in through a late
autumn night;
meanwhile steam rises
out from under the hood
like the ghost of a lover
i thought i’d forgotten,
wish i
could forget.
I tell myself i’m happy,
unfold myself from the driver’s seat
and start walking; maybe,
Maybe this winter
will be easier than the last,
holding hope beyond the frost;
maybe my breath with steamy
tomorrows will dream yet
in tachycardia, untame and
headstrong like the pulse
of the ocean…
Maybe.
But let’s
keep this between us as
these are secrets
for a December
that no man yet has seen.
dregs
i drank down
your lies like
a washed-up moonlighter
nursing her
last bottle of sweet wine:
a pinot with
a pretty label and
a bargain-store
price tag whose
finish burned ever
so slightly at the swallow and i
should have known
the morning afters
would more than make
up for the high.
once upon a time
you were my muse
and i was your poet;
i saw the rhythms of your soul:
they raced with me across a beach,
laughing.
so when you tentatively
held out your fingers, i
took them as a lifeline,
shut my lids to the
wounds of this world,
found a brighter self in your
ocean-eyes. but like children we
swam too far out,
past the point where our toes
touched land, lost
our footing and ourselves and
somehow you found me facedown
on my kitchen floor,
sunk down in tears and pain,
not the girl you had
fallen in love with, not
even really
a girl at all.
in the darkness
you rubbed dry your eyes;
you shook yourself off;
you locked doors all around me,
blind to the reality that i
was already prisoner inside this
skin, and you, you walked out
under crying skies but
walked free nevertheless,
taking my heart with you,
leaving me to drown alone.
inevitable
….
….
….
….
….
….
….
….
….
….
hate
is what happens
when you’ve cried
out in the dark
for too long
without anyone listening.
when you’ve poured out
every bit of your
soul and
the one you love
sits back
and watches it
drip through cracks
in the sidewalk.
when the fear
in your gut
feels stronger
than your heartbeat,
and no one is there
to assuage it.
when time passes
without healing,
no lessening of the cold
creeping up your bones
and down into your pride
from having been
shoved aside into the October mud
where no one helps you to stand.
when, in desperation,
you throw out words
like firebrands,
bright warnings
through your darkest nights,
shooting stars
howling the hurt
that exists
as every single second,
and every single one
burns down and
fizzles out, alone
and unanswered.
love story
picking stray hairs off the blankets
and bits of rug out of her knees
she rocks back on her heels
and stands, dressing quickly
in the cold left by his absence,
imagines again singing him
awkwardly to sleep.
drowning
In the chaos of raindrops and leaf-fall
you can hear her crushed sigh through
the smeared windowpane and almost
almost discern the lap of pale flesh
by dark waters, gasps uttered for a shadowy prince
from an untried throat, their echoes left for dead
against the cold of the floor;
salt stains her thighs and the glass while
smudged mascara runs down flooded cheeks,
her fingers groping for an anchor, a body, anything
to stop the inundation of her soul.
dirty laundry
they are
of no consequence,
the little secrets
i hoard cupped
in jealous hands
because
when given the opportunity
to use those self-
same hands to bring you close, i
absently tuck them away
like old receipts
inside the tight back
pocket of my careworn jeans,
finding them only
incidentally
weeks later, crumpled
and incomprehensible
in the wash.
coming of winter
frost fell for the first time
last night, softly threatening
like the absence of touch
after the hurricane of your hands
or the misstep in my soul
after too many sad love songs;
silent.
vuelo del otoño
la primera escarcha del año cayó
anoche amenazando, quieta,
como la ausencia del toque despues
del huracán de tus manos, o
la claridad de mi misma despues
de un exceso de baladas tristes;
callada.
caged
i painted my love with pink highlighter
on the canvas of my own skin,
tears streaming all the while to make lurid
confettied rivulets on my collarbone,
navel, thighs. covered in naked metaphor,
a feral thing without claws,
i crouched on the floor of your
third-storied room beside the window;
i couldn’t see out.
untranslatable
A hollow-eyed Sisyphus heaving senseless longings
defined but unsung for a decade,
an eternity;
yearning for the sake of yearning,
I, trapped inside the skin of fantasy,
a starving child on a floor of dust,
a dying woman they will bury in mud
dry-eyed, knowing that
regardless,
tomorrow will come.
Speak of this to no one.
It is my soul they stab–
or, what I think is my soul
when no one else is looking,
foolish shadow the color of blood-tinged clouds
rising again and again to its knees,
sexless and fluid
–without even knowing, hearing
me liplessly plead only
with the idea of you,
never a whisper of desire out loud
to a bitter world, no
not even to you,
to you, strange subjunctive phantom
of my present’s damp sweet dreams;
serpentine, sharp;
your cuts will be no less
exacting
for their ignorance
and this gets too near the subjectivity
of my own truth,
littoral point of no return.
bitter theology
kicked out of bed
by a god i
don’t even believe in;
there was no room left
at the inn
between you and your righteousness
you unwound the warmth from your legs
and gave me your back,
tacitly damning me to hell
for refusing your blessings,
for denying i had anything to confess,
so instead i wrapped myself
in a blanket and the moonlight
poured in by the window
insistingly left open,
curled into a ball
of affronted atheism
on the couch.
[3 hours later,
when i was still awake
and you were waking,
dressing yourself in armor
for the day's assaults,
you picked up your keys without turning the lights on,
you left without goodbye
but with me wounded,
eyes screwed up
against a truth that
such a little thing
as God
could come so far between us.]
