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.
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.
still, life
the city sleeps wrapped
in gray dawns and dreaming
of snow, a different place
from what it was
this time last month,
last week. we pretend
the rain falls only
for the soft echoes
on bedroom rooftops, and i
am reminded
of how slippery
januaries can be,
their hunger
that seeps
through exhaust-
stained glass and
seeds my fingertips
with a dark need
for some sort of
acceptance
in warm flesh
or willing words.
The Slip, deep winter
in
shockoe,
foul waters run
downhill, trickle-drip
through cobbles like
tears on stony
cheeks.
canal-shadows
lie like fog ink
in the footprints
of the devil’s half acre,
glutted with the browns
of swollen January.
the river dreams of escape.
seabirds cry grey laments,
the beating of their winterwings
stirring blighted hope
as they careen homeward, away,
and,
for the first time,
i am
afraid
to walk the water-paths
alone.
Consider
consider this
the heartbeat of twenty-
seven stolen seconds, dead
reckonings in
bitter January birth-
pangs; consider
this the end
of beginnings, letters
upside down
on an unfinished
page written by one
who breathes the last
gypsied breath
of penance wearing
chipped midnight
on her toes, walks
the iron-dark canals
like some soulless
wild thing, all the while dis-
(re)-membering:
once upon a
time, i knew
how to write
love songs.
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.
Between May and December
Between May and December
many things change.
I’ll do the falling
if you’ll clean
up the mess,
she says with closed eyes,
glowing. All the stars
in the universe
won’t save you from
breaking. Tamed,
she walks the snows
like lonely Saturday nights,
suffers too many li(n)es
woven into two-
hour unhung
afternoon
windows. Un-
heroed: she offers
the exquisite absolution
of her scars,
pale scalpel-sighs
on wrist & thigh & page,
stale redemptions in
unlit firelight.
I won’t burn
without you.
brief empirical note on rigid body dynamics
The refraction of one-way windows
into remorseless blue-
puddle pasts full
of breaking
glass and sad Sunday
mornings angles
incidentally with the co-
efficient of sweet f(r)iction that
beads sweat on rivergrass
in December sunlight.
(Their shattering is
a thing beyond
the imperfect forces that pull
bodies & universes
together.)
capture no.2
Don’t hide
behind the language,
hesays,
& means it:
sculpt your words
into the grumble
of trains
that rail in
sympathetic
overdrive
beside a silentrunning
river, gray
Decemberdepths
like black
ink
on a wet page
& verses punc-
tuated
with the mourning
warningwhistle
as she slows
on the outskirts
of where yesterday
meets tomorrow.
That crossroads
is all there is.
déjà vu
sometimes i
ache
for the darkness,
turn my eyes
before the ocean of his
mouth
has d(r)ied
on my
lips,
remember
distinctly
the thick taste
of charcoal sucked
through the brown
slatted shades
that hid sunshine
from the secrets
inside.
there are scalpel-
scars still on
flushed flesh,
mirror-marks
of time that
doesn’t pass,
connective tissue
knotted into daisy-
chains of white tomorrows:
where waters whisper
of salt and rust,
there is yet
frost
to come.
i accustom
myself
to the sound
of endings, learn
to hold my hands
close(d). sleep
is the natural
consequence
of over-
dreaming,
an exhaustive
star-eyed
lumbering
collapse. sometimes
i think i
think too much.
Frozen
She perches restfully
against a January morning
whose ground is still
cobwebbed with leaf fall, shivering
as the sun goes down
in his eyes, their fever’s fire
dark and gone. Swaddled
in the quilt where they had
sought refuge together
from the bitter cracks
in the old stone walls,
his limbs now shake no longer,
consigned to an earth his soul will never
know and a cradle-sized casket
set two feet deep
from daylight, the distance
between headstone
and footstone not half the length
of their old kitchen table.
The wind sings nursery rhymes
that settle deep in her marrow
with an awful finality; there
is an ache in her breasts and
a hole two feet deep
in the place where her heart
should beat.
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.
hope
maybe
when this still-beating thing
underneath my ribcage grows
roots enough to grab
onto something worth
grabbing; when those roots
turn tough enough to send
their snaking fibers back
up into its sagging walls; when
those slips of fiber become
ropes to bind and hold and
hang, then,
maybe,
a single bubble squeezed
from the microscopic cracks
between serum and soul will rise free
and from the depths of this chest
go whistling through windpipes and
saliva to form a solitary
syllable on tongue-whet lips:
……..
Hollywood
We hike through a gray Indian
January scratched by skeleton
branches looking down
over the rocks where
a train tangles its way
between the river and the
dead.
intranquil
my desperation isn’t quiet
but goes yowling straight through
to the other side of winter with her foot
pressed to the floor;
a seeping solace with every mile north until
she finds the cold that
numbs the hole in her chest,
hope in gaping oblivion;
kicks then
back feckless by the window at street level two
blocks above the flood line, exhaust-
stained plate glass a membrane
between art and the river which could
carry her away.
left for dead
folded up into a puddle of
blue-stained nightmare
she woke from the bottom
of the bathtub, shivering.
strange because
the tap was turned
all the way to the right,
streaming showerhead rain over
her best dress and dreams
hitherto undisclosed;
maybe it was the nakedness
that caused the goosebumps.
it was a good thing (he knew CPR)
the morning after
december’s first snowfall i
woke up in clear eyes,
borrowed pajamas and with a
chest bruised
from where the
doctors had pumped wild
air back into lips and
lungs that for too
long had tasted only
salt.
unnatural
three days ago in a southern town
which never saw snow, two inches
fell through the bewilderment of
a false spring; a young mother
devoured the bodies of her-not-quite-still
pups and the chanak screamed into the void
left by a depleted heart,
his eyes the milky color of guilt unborn.
*”chanak” (also tyanak, tianak) is a creature from Filipino folklore, which, according to some, represents the malicious spirit of aborted infants and is said to prey on birthing mothers/newborn babies.
uninspired,
i scribble disjointed words
on scrap paper while
an unclothed winter
peers at me as if from
behind my frosted shower curtain,
indicating with her crooked finger
that i am the one
frigid and revealed.
saturated
On gray days like this
i feel my words, wasted,
poured out unceremoniously
into monotoned ears.
The hours last for weeks,
ridged skin bridging
space to fill a vacuum
for an instant then
leaving, a hollow on the side of the bed
where your body should be.
Even though it’s December each
second is not quite
frozen, slow pulse ticking
inside my soul as it drips
crying through uncupped hands
onto earth that has already seen too much
rain.
expiation in flame
a season’s sublimated energy
blushes in the embers, rises
to kiss chastely
an indigo sky; rebuked
by a breath of cold night she
returns sullenly to earth,
glowering out briefly
at the darkness,
autumn’s air but ashes in her mouth.
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.
