November 22nd, 2015

Strangers, Portishead 1994
For Collinsville


sometime I will tell you about the first time I heard this song
it has something to do with painting my bedroom at 15
and how that room felt like a comfortable cage

and how, in a rose-colored chair from the second floor
I would watch dusk fall on all the gathered
houses like a net or a veil, trapping us, binding us, hiding us

and think of all the things I wanted but didn't know yet
you were one of those things, and when my skin itched
with fever under that ceiling, it was a burning to know more

to be more, to break out of myself. The room was carpeted
and I used to lie on my belly and write while kicking my legs
up and down to exercise my hamstrings

This is all true. I am from that carpet and that chair and this
song and those painted walls and the prefabricated wardrobe
I learned how to put together because the room didn't have a closet.

I am from the sick feeling of anticipation as the nail polish dried
and my head floated, free at last, drifting on the fumes. I am from the
light blue sadness of heavy dusk pressing all the factory houses into the hill.

I am from the laps I ran up and down that street and all the sweat
rolling down my back on summer days as we walked around the little
town feeling our own beauty for the first time while the cars honked

and the construction workers whistled from a roof above and our
summer shirts clung to us like the last bit of our childhood. I am
from the shame and glory of that moment especially

May 6th, 2015

Dollars and Cents, Radiohead, 2001

there was something in his smile
like the thrill of seeing letters
together that never go together

like a q next to a t
and a z squeezing
between

do not hesitate

hestiation leads to stale bread

and saltless lips

close in
you are a gazelle who hunts

draw your hooved feet to your breast
and arch your back

you have lost their sharp teeth
before and haven't you
regretted the loss of the loss of blood?

you need the comfort of their
clutch

and you know, you wild gazelle
with twigs in your hair,

it is not even the animal you want
but the pain it brings

and this pain is a long sigh of wind
against the curtains at night

it is a rhythmic twitch in the wrist.

May 5th, 2015

Angeline PJ Harvey, 1998

How It Feels to Be A Thing

 
The hoods of your eyes cloaked me and I could not see 
the silk rope as it came to me like a lost thing, unremembered

having already bound my hands, you poured the tea and began
a dialogue between yourself and your hand 

Shall we you said to your hand hurt her? We shall said your hand
and then you let it hover over my face, but never let it fall.

And I waited for a long time for your hand to hit
and while I waited the night grew darker and then

I remember only disappearing and watching a cpoy of myself,
far below, sit and wait as I drifted up like smoke  

to the empty bowl of night that had collected all the 
ones before me, and we spirits, swimming about, 

looked down on the burning buildings and the tulip 
trees blooming and thought about the space between 

things and how the space between your hand and our
faces was full of a thousand wars and a million words

as swollen as seed pods. 

March 14th, 2015

 Summertime Springtime,  Hunter G. K. Thompson

yesterday's coffee in a pot
and the bubbles move together
and then apart like the pangea

something has broken off and
been reformed, but I can still
see how the pieces would have
fit.

I really should just fall in love
again - I am very bad at making
only one cup of coffee.

February 8th, 2015

Song for A Blue Guitar, Red House Painters, 1996

In the dream I sent him a letter
from the driveway which somehow
elicited a noise complaint from the neighbors

And I realized there were two "I's",
the "I" I was speaking from
and the "I" I was speaking to.

I don't know what this means,
nor who "he" was, but there were
many people in the dream I do
not see anymore, and I woke
to a sadness I am outgrowing.

I am drinking and drinking
the coffee to swallow the lump
in my throat

and trying to remember the specific
texture to the walls of this life I have
built, and why it is here that I am,
and why that is good.

God, you are my God. I banish
fear in your name in the dark

and speak to you in whispers of a
little girl. I swear, in spite of it all,
last night I felt your hand on my cheek

February 16th, 2015

Nostalgia, Hunter G K Thompson, 2013
 
When all the grasses
are dried and collected
for the fires

When the dried wax
is gathered
for the same

When the songs
change because the
notes are warped

we will become old
and find other
faces to tend to.

January 10th, 2015

Track 2, Sigur Ros, 2001

I keep going back to dark corners in which I've hid
versions of myself - the tobacco fields of Simsbury
the shadows of Elizabeth garden

When I go back I expect
those other girls to have accomplished
a great deal in my absence

one will be training a whole colony of rabbits
another will be twisting dandelions into someone's hair.

I hate to look East, even if that's where
the city is. Its mouth yawns against the dawn
or dusk and rips the sky apart.

My back to the plow, I work the land
while keeping an eye to the setting sun. 

February 6th, 2015

I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things, Hammok, Oblivion Hymns

On Teaching in A Broken Place
after Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End
for Beslan, for Hartford

The cold collects in the empty seats
the window left open

no one tending to the plant
which has been cut with scissors

and the paper is nearly gone.

Their dismembered hands flutter
around the room

to the low rattling of vents.

When we left the city his mother says
from the hissing wind she has become

we forged a home of Serbian
folk songs and cans of soup

and carried it on our backs until 
the weather changed. 

We left our forwarding address 
but no mail ever came.

4 pennies will get you all
around the world and back he says

The sky breaks in the shape of birds

and the last of the rain softens earth
who long ago withdrew her arms.

He is scared they say. The black smoke
is everywhere. He wants a home, they say.

He feels safe with his mother, they say
even if she is made of air.

The coats are for protection they say
but their arms too weak to wear them!

There are ghosts who come to whisper at the
window pane - they are trying to hold their

pencils without any bones. At least we have 
our bones and even still the cartilage, I say.

A heart beats against the tile.
It glistens and ticks like a fish on land.

February 3rd, 2015  

Untitled 5, Sigur Ros, 2002

the snow blower outside the window while it was still dark
and the men talking became a story in my dream

they were planning a surprise for their daughters 
something like a tea party

and I moved against my sheets 
holding a blanket to my chest and thought 
how nice, how nice for their daughters

I woke again before I wished 
to their shovels

there were many other dreams I remembered
when I woke that are now slipping away too quickly 
to catch,

as the snow from my car, as the birds from their
perch - how they swirled like wind itself 
last night in the storm and how I wanted to at once
hold them to my heart and join them in their flight

I will always want more than one thing
I will always get stuck, momentarily, in the space
between the two

Alex believes that in Proverbs 11:22 the word 
discretion refers to silence, a demure submission

many male biblical scholars believe the same

they are all wrong

it means sense, judgement, the ability, and the right, 
to decide. 

my youngest sister had been planning her wedding
since she was born and by time she told us,
all the arrangements had already been made

we were all happy, but I wondered where I would
sleep when I came home to visit

whenever I woke to the snow blower 
and shovels, I woke to such sadness 
that I had to remember I wasn't sad. 

I reminded myself and God through my restless
and twitching eyelids that His word does not come
back void. 

I prayed for people in a sighing, in a cough, 
and worked the muscles of forgiveness 
in the depth of belly. 

when I was 16 my mother dreamed that you
left the house to go to a boy. You were wearing
a tight tank top; I warned you not to go, but you 
flipped your hair and looked over your shoulder
as if to say 
 
no one understands love in youth

and what is true is that love in youth
doesn't understand discretion. But we learn
it somehow, don't we 

often through breaking

February 1st & 2nd, 2015


Svefn-g-englar, Sigur Ros, 1999

I.
I am pressed down by the covers with candles on every side.
These are my attendants. We all wait for the storm that I am
imagining as an army of white very very high up, in rings
around the moon, waiting to descend. The sky is a greenish
glow and the whole world seems to tighten itself in anticipation. 

When I drove home to celebrate Joshua's birthday earlier,
I noticed, as I always do, how things spread out as I enter
the valley. There are farms at the bottom of the mountain,

the biggest tree in Connecticut rests against the Farmington,
a vineyard stretches itself along the banks.

The fields were full of snow, and as I drove by my favorite
one, the one over which the moon is always hanging low
and swollen, I saw how the sky loves this field so much that
it mimics the color and texture.

Its clouds were gathered like an expansive gown,
or like curdled milk, or like what waves do to sand
at low tide.

In the diminishing light the white of the clouds
and the white of the field burned all the brighter. 

When I left hours later, Joshua followed me out
onto the porch in his bathrobe, talking to the last moment
without even breathing the way he did as a child

until I looked up from the ice I was navigating and saw
the waxing moon, nearly full, and silenced him with my
exclamation. He stopped to consider the moon, acknowledged
it briefly and finished his thought on the theories of the mind
we had been discussing.

His voice was very far away because I was caught up in the
light of the moon bathing the world in silver, turning
everything into a remarkable sculpture, gilding the
broken bird bath in the wild rose garden.

The sky vibrates with its frequency and I wonder
what scale it is singing tonight. The clouds have
cleared; the night belongs only to this startling revolution
of light.

No matter how many years I live beneath it, the vastness
of the sky still stuns me. 


II.
This morning I read Pound's Cantos III and tried to be
confused, but I think he was just talking about his life
in moments which connect to broader points in the world.

He was a man like any other human, telling a story
of great importance but insular allusions, reference
points which related back to him and then themselves,

umbilical cords - never free, both ends secured. 

The snow is falling very quickly now and I think this
storm will be bigger than anticipated. There are tiny
shimmering sounds all around - my pale hand reaches
absently to my cup of tea and my nails hit the porcelain
in the note of C,

I have turned on the humidifier again because
the heat from the old coils dries out this house, and my body,
a pressed petal, needs to be revived. The water turning
into to steam sounds like a trickling stream that is very
far away.

The furnace roars on and off and I imagine it as a huge
animal in our basement on whose back we ride through
this storm.

And Catherine, beautiful next door Catherine, whose
filmy lace curtain hangs like mist over the loveliest
lamp in her second floor bedroom, who has a small
round window in her entry way like one you'd find
on a ship,

Catherine scrapes the snow off the sidewalk in front
of her house in long strokes which sound like sand
paper dragged across rough wood, like the steady
shucking of corn.

The individual flakes, which are harder than normal,
I imagine their spires as ice, hit the glass of the window
in the rhythm of wind chimes, a percussive scale.

Earlier I misread a Pound line. "Silk tatters"
became "silt talkers".  Silt talkers. Silt, the smaller
sister of dirt and clay, the reduction of larger things,
the delicacy of granules. The silt of sound, the silt
of steam, the silt of snow against the pane.

The collected sounds of these smallest things creating
an ambient symphony as I sip my tea, as I wear my
fingers down against these keys.

February 1st, 2014


Piazza, New York Catcher, Belle and Sebastian, 2003

There is something about the seams of worn jeans,
pulling apart from overuse and love, from hikes and rambles,
from falling, from pressing into the floor.

We jumped the fence to see the abandoned highways,
they had never even heard of them, and when we were
done, I got caught in a bramble bush as we rushed out of the woods
and back up the embankment to the monastery grounds.

The prayer trail snaked through the woods,
stone saints gravely standing every ten steps,
and the gravel of the path hissed beneath the
monks feet -

a real monk, in real monkish attire, and here I was
trespassing, and caught in a bramble bush.

I struggled and pulled and ripped my skin and clothes
and finally fell free, tripping up the hill, into the sunlight,
blood dripping from my arm and my shirt hanging where
it tore,

and fell into the circle of his gaze. He smiled kindly.
He smiled like someone who knew, but still
he let me lie and say something about running after
a small animal and getting caught in the prickers.

The boys asked about stories from the Bible to distract
from me as I caught my breath, the monk answered calmly,
still smiling, still knowing.

I would have liked to have sat on the cool stone benches
next to the stone saints as light fell in patches on my
ripped clothes and talked to him about life and God

and monastic existence - I would have liked to have asked
him about Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Sienna,

but I was not myself yet, or rather, I was taking a long
break from myself, and my lips were always sticky
with wine and my body was a beckoning finger.

I had found myself on the other side of my own expectations,
and standing in his gaze, a trespasser, a liar, a
lost girl with tangled hair, I knew a deep grace.

It was a little bit like the alabaster jar,
though it was months later that I would fall to my
knees and weep at the feet of one I knew
but had forgotten.

When I finally stood, He slipped his arm
around my waist, looked down at me and
said, simply, I have been waiting for you.

________________________________________

January 29th, 2015

Peace and Love, Cat Power, 2012

i said lioness
or deer

and laughed at the duality

she said
i see you more as a deer

because you can dance
around life
and even escape

Mel says we have hands
we have hands
i don't know where they are
but we've got them

i wonder how it got like this
so dry
and dangerous
to speak or breathe

and if we feel this way
then how must the children
feel?

the wolves gather
they've been gathering
they have much to gain
from all our flesh

and i want to break my bones
in their mouth in such
a way that it will choke
them

i'm a lover but i'm in it to win

just wait i keep saying
just wait until i'm gone

i will write words that will
destroy worlds

it's in your hands to come
out ahead she says
twice as she slowly leaves
the room

over and over again

sarah palin is a joke
from Russia

her face is shape
of soviet school buildings

all these gifts from Russia

we are still fighting the cold

but now it is here

and

i am more of a socialist than
they'll ever be

bill gates here is putin
they have earl grey tea
and talk about their
stables full of people
saddled in gold leather

i can taste the bridle

but i will only pretend for a little bit longer
to be lead by it

i have drilled a hole through the blinders

see you on the battle field
gentlemen  

January 28th, 2014


Old Piano, Frou Frou, 2002

I want to gather all their words
and present them to you in a bouquet

stare at their faces - if you don't blink
and let your eyes dry

you can see their bones on the page
and how every bone looks the same 

I have made it to a corner room with windows
We can see the hilton through the slats

Are you a miss or mrs the new student says
in what is almost but is not a southern drawl

What would I even write about if I did not teach?

What goes on in the world outside of classrooms?

Suddenly it is easy to see how sunlight could press
down on a person in a chair on a porch until dust
gathered around everything and eventually what
gathered dust became it.

It isn't that hard to lose your life. I have lost whole
years, and more recently, a day or two, and certainly
many hours to this thing they calling "living"
which is really just the toenail clippings of life.

I have been a mother many times
but never through my body.

Last night I fell asleep on the floor
murmuring protests against my body
and this morning I had to pick up all the
things I lost while the fire flickered
behind my head the carpet bit into my skin
leaving tiny cuts along my back.

Everything has a cost.

January 22nd, 2015


Daniel's Jojk, Jon Henrik, 2014

"The reference to the object of a yoik [jojk] is not something which someone may add to or leave out from the melody…[t]he melody is closely connected to the referential object in an indissoluble relationship. Linguistically this is expressed through the fact that one does not yoik about somebody or something, there is a direct connection; one yoiks something or someone."
              - Harald Gaski

For a long time you were very still,
listening for a song you could not quite hear.

You followed a path that wrapped
itself around a mountain.

You were dizzy with desire and the view.

You walked your feet raw and your knees
busted through your skin, their white caps
gleaming in the light pollution from the valley.

When you finally stopped, when you finally
rested against the tree, you heard a humming

that at first you mistook for the wind.

But it was something other.

This went on for years, the listening,
the chasing, the gentle pulse of your
desire to join the melody. 

And, then, once in the night, you woke
and heard it. Your body, still
asleep, lay frozen. It was louder now,
louder and closer.

From beneath your breath it came.

The song is not something you can
find and belong to. 

You are the song.
It belongs to you.

January 21st, 2015


Guess Again (4:39) , Thom Yorke, 2014

skin over bone

fingers in the eyes of the enemy

But still,  it was not nothing I felt when i saw
the way the falling night rested in layers on the hills.

gradient blue.
The texture of wood siding.

All of my nightmares are in the garden.

And in locker room bathrooms that go on for miles
and every single toilet dirty - a dove with no branch
on which to land

My mother never knew how much I hated the
thick blue black of night sky - how it stuck in my throat
in pieces, like the voices in my head which would repeat
always only the beginning of a sentence slowly,
from very far off, as if talking through sleep.

I want to go home and curl up on the foot of my mother's bed
even if she's only watching the evening news
and folding laundry.

My mother is the smell of baby powder
and clean, gently worn, flannel.

Suddenly I am crying in Starbucks.

Perhaps it is for the stranger who smiled at me
four weeks ago and died today. We looked into each other's
eyes and neither of us knew she was dying. 

The wild stallions of my heart make a mess of my
chest - a muddy, bloody beat, just beneath
the knot in my left breast where the stress
settles in like a cat, like the fog, like the blue
night resting on the hills.

Skin over bone, mattress against skin: this is how
we break through ourselves.

All the boulders are rising to stretch
their stony backs. Tiny bits of moss
and dust drip from them.
They crouch again when my head lights
tumble around the corner.

The field is iced over and looks like a lake.
The lights are seven times their size in this grass
ocean; the jagged shadows bite my lip

these days I live just down the road from plans I've made
and abandoned.

January 19th, 2015


Interference, Thom Yorke, 2014

In the future we will change our numbers 
and lose contact. 

My muscles itch and my fingers are going too fast
and this is not mania, it's fear and stress, but the smell
of my own body alarms me.

There are accountants counting the perforated lines
in the paper

all the paper

I have gotten paper cuts worse than this,
though

I will survive without sutures 

my best bet is gut wrenching

an addict is always an addict,
even if he has never been one

not for nothing, but latent isn't nothing
latent is your lips before they meet mine

and I don't even want to go there,
to that moment after contact,
with fear still rattling around in
the back of my throat, where hope
should be, once you've parted my will
with your tongue.

Leave it be. It doesn't even belong to me.  

This, and everything, is more
complicated than what the tiny spider
is weaving beneath the window

I used to tell stories, but all I see
now is a blond wood bar
and the sticky beer print of glass
after glass

and all the lies that came tumbling
from my lips in smiles.

I'm sorry to any man I've ever hurt.
I'm sorry to any man I've ever pleased.

None of it was true. 

I don't have the right to interfere, to interfere.

January 18th, 2015


Lotus Flower, Radiohead, 2011

It is still so poetic to clean lint from the lint trap

And now I'm lying back in the tub reading someone
else's poetry and the air is colder by the second and
the water is tickling me and gradually revealing my
skin and I realize the drain was open the whole time
but we have a clog, so it drifted down, the water, slowly, the
way Brett's smoke was drifting up just outside the front
door earlier. And now I'm exposed, a sand bar of flesh.

I slip my fingers through my fingers and squeeze to feel
the bone

The other night I went downstairs to put the water on for tea
and found it on already and forgotten. Brett was outside
smoking. The water beat angrily against the tin pot. I poured a
cup and clicked the gas stove off. I drew comfort from the fact
that I am not the only absentminded person here - not the only
one who wants to burn it all to the ground.

When I leave the bedroom just after midnight, every light in the
house has been shut off. The dark resonates.

On the way to the Jewish deli leaning on the car door
I imagined it opening, the highway rushing as a river
beneath. I said to myself "Death is just a door
to something more we're not allowed to open"
and I knew mostly that this was true, but it made my
stomach twist. At the Jewish deli I ordered a dirty
martini to wash my mouth of vomit.

But none of this is what we should be talking about.

Alex says over dinner: In Pakistan there are children 
who are afraid of the sky and only play on cloudy days.

Their sky is full of dead things bringing with them death.
These are our plagues.

but. oh. if you could taste the complexity of this apple
you would not question the songs I sing. 

January 16th, 2015


House of Cards , Radiohead, 2007

The pillow has done violence to my face
like a cloud crossing the moon.

Loneliness is a powerful thing

Gee wiz, Kafka.

Kafka follows me through all
the corridors of my memory

through all the blue rooms
of his blue book

his ears catch the sunlight
and shine orange, bloodlit

veins like eyelids -
the inside -

like swallowing
a flashlight

his ears are lanterns
and his eyes are caves
his tongue is a candle

when there are rocks he goes
before me

and when there is silence
he opens his mouth

and his tongue flickers
over words I hadn't yet thought to say. 

I think it might be true that we 
choose the color we are, 

Kafka. We choose the grey. 
We collect things, and then we 
dismantle them until arms 
and legs are everywhere. 

One day Kafka and I are sitting
on a stone wall we've found in the
woods and I am saying, over and
over, because he can't quite hear
me through the years, I had wanted
bone broth, but I really didn't 
mean to use their bones to do it. 

He smiles and his sharp face
almost cuts me.

We get lost in the folds
of my pillow and he chokes
on the down.

It is a mercy he is already dead.

January 15th, 2015


Faust Arp, Radiohead, 2007

All the cups are collecting and all the Kombucha bottles
too and there is a colony of air inside these glass houses.

I have been lying here for as long as I can remember.
I have been thinking about what to think about.

What I mean is I went to the gym, but mostly I looked
in the mirror and watched my lips as I moved.

It was erotic and strange and everyone was uncomfortable.

The room is thin now that we've turned down the heat. 
My fingers are cold when they wander from under the covers.

I wake up at 3:30 to remember to drink water and sometimes
it is just when the crescent moon is peering in my window.

I have the feeling of being watched. The strange light falls
on the dead flowers on the desk I use only to store envelope

after envelope of words that won't matter when I'm dead.

I have curled myself sideways in the bathtub of tepid water
and have bruised my knees.

I have built tiny igloos of light in backyards of my memory,
the nylon and cotton of my snowsuit a second skin.

I brush my hair for the first time in 100 years
and it crackles with every stroke.

The night is almost long enough to touch every small animal.

January 14th, 2015


Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks , The National, 2010

Alex mentions how he has read my entire incomplete
collection of 2014 poems. I do not believe him.

Glasses clink and laughter rushes around the restaurant
around us, and I smile and shake my head and insist he is lying.

I really did. He says. All of it. The whole thing. You're
lying I say again. Hearts on a string he says.

And now I know he has read at least as far back as he would
have had to to find traces of himself. And he is there, and he
knows it.

I am very quiet now. I have never had to confront this kind
of intimacy. Up until now I have written in code.

I didn't even understand the codes when I wrote them.
David did, and he said "I think you don't want to marry me"

but he was already so far from me that I couldn't hear him,
so I took that line too and made a poem of it.

Anyway, it's one thing to write in code, but to write for real
and know that real people are reading for real, real people
who are smart enough to read fully

shakes me. I fiddle with the straw in my empty
water glass. I knock ice around and when that grows old,
I consider my nails.

___________________________________________

January 13th, 2015


Porno, Arcade Fire, 2013

My razor is very dull
and it barely does the job

You are not allowed to hate your body
I say to myself while I stand in the shower
hating my body.

It is hard to purify something you hate.
It is hard to care for it.

The shower rushes in waterfalls
over the edge of my breasts.

There is misogyny even here,
in this intimacy, in my bar of soap
in the razor that can't possibly
reach the root of the problem.  

The pool of my belly button is
nearly serene as I lie on the floor
of the tub under the heat

making promises to myself
that I know I won't keep.

I lived for ten years alongside those
images in his head.

I heard it in a dream.
I felt it in his hands when he touched me.

An honest witness saves lives.

I should have spoken. My lips are
full and my tongue is sharp.

You are not allowed to hate your body
because there are many eyes on you, 
many girls seeking hope in the lines 
of your hip, in the sureness of your step.

I wring out the washcloth, wring out my
hair, wring out this heart of self-loathing
and climb over the edge of the tub, pure
of pretense and bare.

January 12th, 2015


Waterfall, Torres, 2013

this thick thing, how the walls are painted with undiscovered masterpieces - what a fortune I would make if I could unfurl it and dry it and hang it

Beginning again takes many tries sometimes

When you've nowhere to go but down there are at least
things to remember

What we do in cars
private but visible
and how this changes
the space in which it happens
a parking lot full of tears
a parking space full of your skin
or his, shed in words
as ever closer you leaned
into the fiery center of each other
until you burned up

and this is not a thing
anyone can come back from

our first consumption must happen
before our first birth

I didn't think I'd be born so late

But I am always doing things late
I am always late to bed and late
to social engagements
and late to say I'm sorry

and I'm trying to change this

I'm sorry

I have painted my own face enough to recognize
its angles in the window when I turn to stretch
my neck so that there is no longer a surprise
in encountering myself for the first time.

I am here now. This is happening. 

It will be a long night.

It will be a night hung with dreams
I began before

(was it earlier today or earlier in life? Was
it in the womb I dreamt I was a cabin boy
sailing a raging sea, tasting rum in secret
amid the damp wood and sloshing water
of the bilge - and someone will say 'you
wouldn't have been drinking rum in the bilge'
but I was, I swear I was - was it when I was five
that I dreamed I loved? Was it yesterday
or 10 years ago that I started writing a book
about women warriors?)

It will be cold
and I will shiver and never
really sleep,
but this half sleeping
will help me remember
the new dreams

and I will listen to this song
as many times as I have to to break
through this thick chrysalis

and when I do, I will bat my eyelashes
rapidly to dry them.

Perhaps by then my eyes will
have cleared of tears.

Goodbye my dear,
goodbye my dear.

______________________________________

January 7th, 2015


Silentinium , Arvo Part, 1998

small things slip by me.

I feel their breath.

If I set them down here,
maybe they will no longer be mine.

It was hot everywhere
the dance floor was slick with sweat
I walked through the crowd to find
the bathroom and hands - almost
disembodied - reached.
I turned a corner and he grabbed me
I looked at his hand on my wrist
and then into his face. I did not move.
He looked away, let go, and was gone.
My eyes took back their talons
when I looked in the mirror,
softening to my sleepy self in black
lace who wished only to be home.

In the same way my hair must have
stood on end even under the sweat of his
hand, I feel oceans rise to my throat
when I think of waking up at the trail
head, crumpled in the front seat of my
car, my hair in my eyes, my contacts
like stones scraping my muddy irises
blackened with self-loathing,
because I had been out all night
and didn't want to worry my mother
by going home at 4.

These are hard stories to tell.
They curdle the stomach. 

I have not yet thrown up enough to purge
those nights from my body, but that
isn't how it works anyway, He says.

This is not a good poem yet.

This is all just practice.

I cannot wait for the next thing.

I am a petrified log with many stories.

I have nothing more to say to you.

Have grace, she whispers, for all younger 
selves. 

I will try. I will try.

January 6th, 2015


Spiegel im Spiegel, Arvo Part, 1978

It rushed in on me suddenly, while I was texting her goodnight,
that we had prayed once before in her bedroom.

She is 15 and I am 30 and when I go home to visit I sleep on a
mattress on her floor. There is no spare bedroom.

When they announced their divorce she was only 7 and I
22.  I had been warned by them separately.

When she heard, she ran from the kitchen and locked herself
in her room and cried, privately, as she always did.

I knocked on the door. It took some coaxing, but she let me
in. Her face was white and wet and angry. It's not right

she kept saying. It's wrong. Tell them it's wrong. I looked
down at her, as if from a long way off. What could I say?

It is wrong Sarah, I don't think it's what is supposed to happen. 
It's not the ending we want, but it is the ending. 

She, calm now, shook her head and said No. God does
not want our family to break. I had no words then.

We sat together, the oldest and youngest, sobbing and
praying that something would change.

Many things changed, though not the things we had
prayed for. He moved out, we moved on, slowly, awkwardly.

When he died she seemed not to cry until she read one of his
favorite verses at the memorial service, and then she shook.

The other night we prayed in whispers for our mother
until we fell asleep. The sky breathed gently over us. 

January 2nd, 2015


Firebird , Igor Stravinsky, 1910

We gathered in the basement
my brother's dreams
my sister's candles
my brother, my sister, and I.

We listened to the whole thing -
47 minutes!

By the second movement
while my brother was upstairs
we turned off all the lights.

The basement must braided
into the cranberry and gardenia
of evaporating wax.

The conductor moved his
hands like birds
and his face pulsed
with every note,
twitched with every tremolo

It is like God I said

By some other movement
(for now we were lost)
we watched the flames
sharpen and elongate
at the higher pitches
and stutter at the low drums

We considered frequency
and Joshua suggested that
the flame changed only
when sounds were separate
the air is too dense when 
the whole symphony is playing

We watched the flame;
His theory was sound.

1910: while everything
edged towards now,
a young, as yet invisible,
man wrote a ballet
about a bird.

Did he look at his thin face
in the mirror on opening night
and watch his muscles pulse,
his heart twitch?
Did he watch the candlelight
trace his lips?

And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf's back
Riding along a forest path
To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night
And peck at golden fruit.

I want to hold all the hands
that have shaped our world;
I want to be burned by the heat
of their dreams.