to love what we love

In the retelling, we’ll say we surrendered. We’ll say it was fate.
There is the sweet narrative we’ll draft from the complicated geography
that somehow pulled our continents together. We’ll chart the tides,
the turning leaves, the particular intelligences responsible for how the story
found its edge, that pivotal moment of knowing.

But first, what must birth out of us is trouble,
heart-legs buckling under, the muscle shoring us to solitude
sliced limp. The devastation will not be minor.
We will cut and claw ourselves away from the sharp, new light.
We will brutalize ourselves with escape.

But out of this flight and anguish a vacancy will appear,
hollowness we will mistake, initially, as loss. Here, here is where
the real beginning begins, swiping us naked from our hiding place,
imprinting the true permeability of our skin. We will be astonished
we are even alive. The cold air will feel like the slimmest kind of luck.

And then, this: A space will warm and soften around us.
We will gather the silence in at the corners.
We will squint at this unfamiliar shape of peace.
And from here, fresh breathing room for love, our bodies leaning to a steady
fibrillation, the hum of a radiator underneath the floorboards,
our mouths petal-wet, opening to the first, honest kiss.

We won’t be able to stop it. Coming alive is impossible to fix
into a single embrace. The dismantling will pull the river out of us,
and we will fall against the other in a wellspring of raw relief.
The language will be a stranger on our tongues but
we will understand it perfectly: to love what we love
is an undoing, a deliberate fall with our palms out,
hunger with the grief torn out of it. If it is surrender,
it is to the confession that we are worthy. If it is fate,
it is to the irrepressible freedom that bubbles from our darkest places.

There is no going back, our gaze wrenched away
from a lock-jawed past, the bones of us already fusing,
the sky wide above in the perfect V of flocking geese,
and a clear and faithful morning
welcoming us awake.

bold

“So,” I said, swiveling on the barstool.
It was a Monday night, ordinary as laundry.
“Do you think we’ll live together?”
I took a long pull of my IPA.
It was only slightly on this side of bitter.
Her eyes crinkled. Her dimples deepened.
The subtlest film of moisture appeared
at the root of her lashes. She took the hand
I had put on her lap, traced the skin there.
The bar was filling up, college kids
on a study break. The glass
was pressing a groove into the napkin.
“I love how bold you are,” she replied,
then swallowed hard. I saw the ripple
of her throat, the movement down her sternum.
We were inches apart. We were apart only inches.
She opened her mouth to say something,
but not a syllable came out.
Her eyes never moved from mine,
and that, that
was how I knew.

luggage

Luggage like history, like stories you carried
that said something about the places you were willing
and unwilling to go.
Luggage like roadmaps, like stop signs.
Luggage like loss, like yearning.
Luggage like weather, the sky a continuous unfolding
into gray and storm, wind that would uproot trees,
leave the fields flattened.
Luggage like the home you never bought,
the ring you never wore, the child
you never had. Luggage like the missed foul shot
and the final game of the season.
Luggage like an empty tank, and you driving on regardless.
Luggage like the wounds you were dealt by love,
unsuspecting as you lay yourself bare for more.
Luggage like broken. Luggage like dead.
Luggage like a tumor lodged in the middle of a spine
that insisted on bending through the pain.
Luggage like family, like lack of family,
like too much and not enough.
Luggage like bad directions and threadbare and absent.
Here’s what I am carrying, what you are carrying
despite ourselves, despite everything we want to forget.
And yet the moment I come to you with all that rawness and wrong,
I know nothing will keep you from seeing what I hope
and have always hoped to be seen.
The simple fact of this body reaching out, just wanting
to be held.

yes

yes
yes
after a violent rain,
bloody battle on the roof
mud-inked, wind-broken
roots chunked and hazardous
the velocity of the river a cause
for posted signs and nervous dogs
yes
yes
to blisters on shoulders from too much
sun, mouth woolly, limbs limp
as old dandelions yes
to skinned knees and black-bruised
egos, shyness and tongue-tripping yes
yes yes to the slow crawl of indecision
to remorse to hideous mistake
to saccharine and over-salted
to no vacancy and lost chances
yes to the ugly failures in front
of the hometown crowd
to oversized and under-whelmed
to cheats and lies and cowards
yes to the rips in your new silk dress
to torn up and torn down
yes to the conversation
you didn’t want to have
to irrational, irreconcilable, irreversible words
yes to cracked throats and busted ankles and spent light bulbs
and burned batteries and whatever dies after
it has lived
yes
to a broken promise or three or nine hundred
yes to the time it takes to tell the truth
yes to desert and dry spells and lunacy and lost hope
yes to the middle of a blind-white October
yes yes yes
to sharp and scrape and cauterize
to discard and done for
yes to ducking under yes to darkness
to breaking in two
or more pieces
than you can count
yes to the disappointing lunch
to the disappointing summer
to the disappointing marriage
yes to the seesaw fear of stillness and escape
yes to the bad haircut in eighth grade that ruined your chances
yes to the fumbling in the back seat that led
to your bad reputation
yes to beyond repair
to what’s done is done
to a change of heart mid-stream
yes to bad art
to old age
to out of shape and shapeless
yes to where have you been
and why didn’t you call
and how many times do I have to tell you
yes all of it yes
not a moment too soon or too late
this yes, this yes
this ripe and mad and fleshy terror of a thing
this yes will save us
tie our restless shoelaces and stroke
our fevered cheeks and pay off our
inglorious debts
this yes, this yes
this aching starved animal
will bear down until we open ourselves
to its wet mouth and slip our skin
under its teeth and feel its dark heart beating
ruthless against our lungs and let our heaviness fall
like a string of dominoes until we sing
our fragile, damaged beauty
into the waiting arms of the world.

the crossing Yom Kippur, 2011

After the guilt borne like oxen,
hungers denied their proper lungs,
and honesty flatlined out of fear.
After the inadvertent knifings of the heart,
words rifting a cellular divorce. After the pockmarked disturbance
of disappointment, the intimate failures carving their grooves
into shoulder blades and the narrow spaces between ribs. After the graceless
uprisings that resulted in a house worn down to the nubs.
After the leveling waves of shame and sorrow.
After loss.
After the itch of misgiving, and the strangely winged
freedom that nevertheless pulls the body under.
After all that was wrong had been teased out,
and the great list assembled and filed in a box labeled “history.”
After the box had been hefted into the garage
for the next trip to the dump. After the rumble down an uneven road
that brought the car to a standstill at the foot of a pit
spilling with lists, trails of flawed reasoning and unmet longing,
burnt offerings from the frontlines.

After all this, there was nothing to do but walk the woods trail
with autumn drifting her scent among the leaves still clinging,
to take care with the roots underfoot
on the way to a river marked by swiftness and sound,
and to concentrate on the important matter of forgiveness.

Then watch as late afternoon light passes almost as if by accident
on a detour, the foliage thinned enough to convince a path
from what had been certain – by all appearances – to be a dead end.

Once you have let go, you are not empty.
Once the skin of your unease has molted, the flesh reveals
its secret elasticity and knowing.

And so, it is with unusual new grace that legs bypass
rain-rotted half-logs and trapdoors of tall grass camouflaging mud.
An invitation articulates itself, weaves into October’s sweetened air,
and that is enough to make the advance to the outer bank,
the S-curve fenced by still-lush maples and exclamation points
of mushrooms and bright red berries unquestionably lethal.
A felled trunk lies equipoised between shorelines,
like a doorway, a release from all that was, and the imperative
is clear and simple.

It is not a dance, a balancing act, a levitation, a circus trick
involving stilts and an absence of gravity. It is gravity incarnate,
torso in blunt contact with bark, knees pinning inward
to steady the last half of the body. The crossing happens
in inches, time irrelevant as dust, and underneath, urging,
the chill and swirl of river water and slicing edges of rock.
You cannot not look down or up or back. It is this:
one quadrant of log and the next, nothing more or less than
the available strength of arms composing each shift forward.
The forgetting will begin soon enough but for now,
you will understand this moment
exactly as it is:
your life, being felt,
being lived.

maps

It would take less time to return to my mother’s house,
the Mass Pike so close I can see it around the corner,
and yet I look at the atlas because I don’t want to get there
too quickly, the day not even half over. And there it is,
Route 20 east, a small green line squirreling toward Amherst,
and I know it will be slow, 30 miles an hour, 45,
the towns in between pacing the drive. But on the road to my right,
a tag sale, the Premium Outlets of Lee, an Appalachian Trail picnic area,
where I imagine someone, having come out of the woods,
is resting and eating their lunch,
thinking about the rest of the route, and what they’ve left behind.

I wonder what I’ve left behind, what I might have taken with me
on that fast highway which I decided to untake. And now the car,
almost as if it were new,
finding a fresh way home.

orientation

For nearly a week, it was the lake, ovular and clear-bottomed, dotted
with small islands spreading west. I could see it peeking through the pines,
the gloss of it rippling in the early fall wind. Small waves slapping the dock
were like soft clearings of the throat: ahem, ahem, and in the dark,
with the moon blanked out by rain clouds, I could still tell where the trail ended
and the water began. Afternoons, my fingers wove a porous net
as I dipped and glided around the cove. Summer’s last mosquitoes
hovered like Harpies around my ears, but it was no use. I had already fused myself
to the strokes, made an arrow of my legs, found a rhythm in my lungs.
Even weightless, even groundless, I was certain I would never be lost again.