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.
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.
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.
question i will never ask
there is a Hebrew saying that means: the world is a narrow bridge;
the most important thing, not to be afraid. yet the night here begins
to forget itself, and there is fear in the darkness. you have your gloves on, thud-
squish, my heartbeat as heavy bag. i sink slowly, unrepentant.
the air stickens, and like good fighters, we each face the lightning alone.
a coolness rises off the river, wishing it were the sea. tideless, i
am drowning in the honeysuckled tears of a frustrated blue-green.
the march of dandelion clocks ticks onward, dug-in: six months, some-
odd days and twenty-seven seconds. slow mornings filigreed into chains
of summer hunger; wonder if when i reach its length, i will still find you waiting?
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.
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.
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.
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.
in heat
sleepless.
stroke-handed. velvet.
to fall in love,
stickily.
lamplight drownings;
yellow fever dances.
proto-summer paints
sweat pearls down pinked
fore-heads, nascent
incandescence.
a River District swimming in
haze, dreaming in Decembers.
August-heavy; lethargic
swarm. enchantment.
nights with no fire-
works, only stars.
anaesthesia
vagabond
winds with
fingers dipped
in newsprint and nerve-
endings massage
sunlight into
skin and cortex, injecting
overdrive analgesic
with an 18-gauge
straight through
hippocampal
hang-ups
to the core of
my soul,
a morphine drip
of wireless silence
leaving
me with the
sweet-ish
feel of
a spring
morning’s
blissful nothings
unplugged from
the lower back
pain
of a world
on its edge.
(she spends) April’s Tuesdays
Massaging quotidian
heartaches and
pouring
poison
down the kitchen sink,
clipping coupons from Nike’s wings
while lip-synching to gypsy notes
caught on the tails
of fast-moving clouds and
sipping salted spring
sunshine
left behind in
other languages.
Drawing flowers
from rusted faucet drips
on smudged
granite dreams,
breathing deep
of coffee steam
and bleach while
ironing out
the imperfections
of pore and
past. Studying up
on forgetting.
Practicing
for her
prime time
debut. Playing
barefoot and
dancing naked
and whispering
loudly the
secrets
no one wants
to hear and maybe
even
writing a
poem.
a beginning sort of day
crawled out of this morning;
i was blowing the dead leaves
from its still downy hair
when two new twinned
lives grinning arrived
in the backseat of
Somebody’s dreamcatcher
and with fingers like
microscopes
examined every
strand of me; i carried them
like pistols on each hip,
aimed at the world and all
the cries of its
renewal.
an overstayed welcome
Feathered pressures
filter through the slightly
wilted scent
of hyacinths, a spring
reneged of its
promise before
bedtime, all daydreams
on layaway until
a tomorrow when
the threat
of snow is once
again passed
and Easter flowers
forget their bitter-
tipped Lenten promises.
Then,
then the poets
will grow like grass
fed on a sun in song,
open windowed-
coquettes batting
long-lashed verses
at the heart of a city
and spilling secrets
from bound pages tucked
in unbuttoned sleeves.
(Until then let
the runners run
and the dreamers
drink. You and I shall
close our eyes
and breathe deep
of dying hyacinths
as we
wring the holy water
from our best Sunday
sheets, making nests
from nightmares and
sweatstains where
together we’ll lie
down to
wait.)
thaw
Deep
footprints sunk in swift mud,
tire treads of a season
shedding loneliness like
unneeded garments by an
open door, shameless
and dripping and pre-
possessed. Beauty
unleashed with the
ferocity of tightly strung
pearls
suddenly set free from
a shapely neck,
tossed violently
to a ne’er-do-well of a wind
beside a skirt
puddled brashly on
cold stone.
Skin
braised
with gooseflesh
from the nascent breeze,
her secret
petals
unfold.
metaphor for the middle of May
although near sunset i walk
the same barefoot circles
round the same gravel despair,
morning finds me
prying last autumn’s leaf fall
from the damp spring earth,
letting the soil breathe a
chance for the emergence of
new green.
ebb and flow
it was a
quiet torture.
sudden dyings
and small footsteps in
quick-drying sand;
soughing behind windows;
pestilential dreamings:
if one were to cry
out, none would
answer, but
if anyone should ask,
i left in search of a muse
to make even my despair
sing; i
don’t know when i’ll be
back.
the downfall of the serial poet
he
skins soul and shins on
the sharp edge of a reality
in which he is
but a guest, where in one
drowning amber moment a
golden-skin-filtered finger brushes
hazily against un-
conscience: a heart
saying its
hands would kill
if they had the strength; instead
his thin wrists, tied
down to their bundle of bricks and
bruised dreams,
sink into spring’s
muddy riverbanks where
suddenly life is
existence
but not
existence
life.
as March unwinds along the floodwall
a ragged spring
plies her sunshine like
gypsy’s beads, yielding only to
the river’s raging
fists as it pounds
the footsteps of ice
and isolation
into shaky, shuddering
mud.
searching
She sips cold coffee
late on a Sunday
waiting for the week to
overtake her, ennui
and uncombed hair
pushed back from her face
by images burned like whiskey
into the clenched confines of her gut:
housekeys abandoned to
dewed grass one summer’s
violet ending; dying flowers
of a spring flung out wide
over barren shoulders;
the roughened heels
of her soul’s master
pacing always
three steps ahead.
Brushing back strands
and consciousness
an unmoved midnight
passes hollowly
and she swallows,
searching, bitter
all the way down.
lament
beyond an evening of spoiled promise, i
chase sunsets through
the dense green of another spring,
walk home barefooted, singing, sighing
that there exists no more terrible evil
than the worship of old gods by young voices,
their golden honeysuckle nectar
caught naked and unaware
by a loitering frost which crouches,
waiting, behind the trunk
around which they climb.
imaging melancholy (bagnato niente)
on a cold day in april,
green-filtered sunlight
seeps fire into chilled fingers,
mudpuddles drip with
quiet despair and taunting
rags of cloud break
silence,
flitting patch-wise across
minds otherwise
deserted.
on a green day in april,
watered-down sunshine
makes its appearance
in my bones,
creeps skyward
from the humidity of
clay-drenched feet,
spreads warmth
into a ragged soul,
breaks open the shell of my
longing
like gulls against a cliff
some parching day in august
break open clamshells,
bringing wet inchoate life
to a new silence
or the fragile blue
of the robin’s egg
fallen
under taunting clouds
as they flit,
heedless, across
another cold day in april.
diary
I can smell the rain on the wind
the warmth in the air it lofts skyward,
soft and soughing.
Untame spring unfolds her wings,
sings in words I cannot yet hear.
There is existence and then there is existence.
Today I tremble because I am
afraid of both.
.
.
.
