marigolds

her keys
were already in the driver's side door
the bridge toll in her pocket
and enough coffee
to see her through the ride home.
dinner had been eaten
dessert,
and so
it felt appropriate to leave, the right thing
for this dinner guest to do,
appropriate.
appropriate.

except for this.

love
had taken her there
to a small town requiring a drive over bridges
to a gravel side street
to a marshy boardwalk
to a cottage.
love had taken her
to a hammock swing
to an afternoon cerveza
to freshly planted marigolds.
love had take her
to a dinner invitation
to a tango over the stove
to steaming rice and a generous pat
of butter.
it had taken her
to a cobalt sky
to a swish of velvet against a wine glass
to an even sprawl of limbs
to the honest clutch
of fingers on hipbones
to a duet of laughter and wind.
it had taken her
to everything but farewell.

and isn't it strange how leaving
is the last thing a body wants
after such glorious satiety?

a dare

let the bad girl out,
my writing teacher said,
and though she meant essay and poem
and nuance and structure and sentence,
i saw it differently, decided
i was doing too much editing altogether,
keeping myself inside my own specific little lines
quiet
small
infintessimal
stilling the pulse of me
the wildness of my wants
the gorgeous mess,
in my secret, terrible heart,
i knew i could make,
apologizing for every little
misstep, miscalculation, or mishap,
and even as i write this i'm realizing
what lovely alliteration that is.



fuck it.
no apologies.
not today.
today i will be grammatically
incorrect, i will
make bold, indelicate remarks,
i will leap
with the whole of my body.
today i will roar from my secret, terrible heart.
today i will forget the lines.
today i will love myself
for the gorgeous mess
i am.


let the bad girl out.
i say this like a mantra,
like a wish,
like a dare.

praise refuge

woman at a table writing
stepping into a hot shower
the meal coming out right
no traffic
morning sunlight and little conversation
a good phone call with your father
rain
an early bedtime with a good book
hot coffee with cream
praise refuge

your older sister asking for advice
a full tank of gas and no expectations
a surprise markdown at the register
a pair of red underwear
a bowl of strawberries and vanilla ice cream
praise refuge

white napkins
windchimes
a ziplocked back of snap peas
frozen chocolate chip cookie dough
a good sneeze
ice water
praise refuge

pipe cleaners and time on your hands
a man's impromptu biceps
fresh air after a party
waking up early
waking up hungry
a game of hopscotch
tea in winter
thrown snowballs
a made bed
Sunday at 3
grand pianos
giraffes
slippers
sleep
praise refuge

choreography

picture this:
after the dinner date
the drive in obscure, nervous silence
back to the other car left
in the park in order to save on
gas and time.

picture a woman driving that first car,
the long, knobby stretch of park roads,
driving past the drowsy bison,
past an archery field,
past windmills
past the shimmy of moonlight
on the casting pools.

see her driving, trying not
to take the easy shortcuts,
trying for extension this time,
as if she had all the time in the world
for a nighttime drive.

picture the scant inches been the driver
and her new passenger
and the exactitude of hands not touching.

picture the dim glow
of an odometer inching forward
and a park, empty of its daytime jubilation,
turning, under moonlight, into enchanted
forest, into something of mythology, into
pre-story.

picture the park as introduction, as the place of descent,
an outer edge, a preamble.

picture a circle of trees, and new ferns, and early blossoms,
and fingers on a steering wheel,
all bending with the whims of the road.

this is what spring is, what it promises
the perfect stonehard beauty of everything,
the mottled pit from which life erupts
unexpectedly but with such precise choreography
a car becomes a dancer,
its passengers inside,
the dance.

notes from a first date

1. the way he looked standing next to his motorcycle in all that leather. like something from the Matrix. like Laurence Fishburn, all square and steel. bigger, broader than i’d remembered. i felt skinny as a chicken bone. and running late, i’d forgotten the usual dig-through-the-closet routine. it was just t-shirt and jeans, barely any makeup. wasn’t dressed for dating, and oddly, didn’t care about not to have showered for this. this is me, I thought, as I approached. i am a specimen of bone and dust. this is all I got for you today.

2. the quarter-inch scar on the upper left of his top lip. wondered if he’d been in a fight or something. some incident on the street. i hadn’t seen it when we’d met. hadn’t gotten that close. later, he said he’d been the only black kid in school growing up, so i thought why not. or maybe it was just a fall down a flight of steps years ago. didn’t ask him about it either way.

3. that it was too early for dinner and too late for coffee but that 6:30 was a perfectly good time for a cocktail. except on the phone, he said he didn’t drink. i wasn’t hungry enough for dinner, and besides, i’d come to believe, after gathering enough evidence over the years, that first dates should not probably not include a full-fledged meal. that an hour is just fine. that a drink is just fine. except he didn’t drink. so what do you do instead. when you’ve had the coffee and you’re not starving and he doesn’t drink. we window-shopped. stopped in a bookstore and leafed through a book on the kama stura. and then it was 7 or 7:15, and that was good enough for an appetizer, at least.

4. his mention, like an afterthought, of being a Marine. spending time at the first Gulf war. me realizing as we walked to the restaurant that it was entirely possible he’d killed someone. me realizing that i didn’t need to know the answer just yet. me drinking a glass of wine instead.

5. sharing a first course. the plate of uncut, scantily dressed romaine posing as a caesar salad. his encouragement that i eat the last leaf. our agreement that it wasn’t the best caesar salad we’d ever had. our agreement of the word “underwhelming.” me hoping that that was the last time I’d think of that word this evening. me feeling the warm, tannin slide of merlot down my throat. me secretly hoping that my enjoyment of a glass of wine now and then wasn’t going to be a problem. looking at the large glass of lemonade to his left and timing the sips from my own glass. waiting for my pizza to arrive. asking about his tattoos.

6. agreeing on the importance of fresh breath.

7. really looking at his mouth.

8. that he did not pay for dinner, and after the initial surprise of that, because i’d somehow gotten to believe this is what happens on first dates when someone asks you out, i was alright with shelling out my half of the meal. it shouldn’t have surprised me. from the beginning, he’d yelled from the middle of a street hockey game for my number. was playing goalie and didn’t care that his teammates were losing. didn’t care that i was on my bike and headed west. there no tentative sidle up at the bar and loquacious banter. and for that matter, no silent, stoic gaze from across an unreachable expanse, and a tiny note slipped into my palm at the last minute. there weren’t any of the expected formalities. he was not like a nervous first date wanting to impress, keeping things even, simple, virgin. he did not ask me about my family or what i did for a living. he wanted to know how old i was. he tried to guess my weight. he asked what my last date had been like, what i thought about black men. he did not take his eyes off me once.

9. that he came home with me to bake cookies was impressive. that he played the guitar and sang blues while i mixed the batter was even better. that he fumbled with the strings, betraying a lack of practice and precision. that sometimes he didn’t quite hit the notes. that he could play imperfectly in front of a relative stranger and not mind in the least and in fact, keep singing.

10. that we did not kiss, not really, even when he left and there was time, in the hallway, with my housemates in other rooms, a perfectly good hallway to kiss in and we didn’t, and despite that, it felt like we already had, that i knew what his lips would feel like, and then, by extension, I became certain of other things, that he would know what to do with my body, if it got that far. could imagine, somehow, the precision of his tongue. could imagine the sex turning into a whipped up furious, frenzied thing, my torso tiring before his. could imagine how I would be woken by a stroking hand on the inside of my thigh at three in the morning, and by dawn the sheets would become a litter of spent condoms. could imagine others there in bed with us, a polyamorous playpen, a rotating pool of interested candidates gathered from an internet prowl, or a late-night crawl to the Mission hotspots where such things materialize. could imagine that. all from a mouth I did not kiss. and shutting the door of him, goodbye, goodbye, you call he said, your call he said, and then the unambiguous announcement of his departure, the opposite of a purr, his motorcycle revving outside like a lion, and the whole neighborhood jolted awake by this animal noise, me returning to the kitchen for more cookies, more cookies, my own mouth gleeful with crumbs.

without fail

the avocado tree outside the sliding glass doors
of my living room sprang from a series of pits
two young girls tossed from their bedroom balcony
in various fits of boredom and scientific curiosity.
or so my landlord tells me, his daughters now
grown and sprouting seeds of their own,
MBAs, new york careers, the lot of it.
he points out the other haphazard, accidental bloomings -
a cherry tree, orange, plum - but says, with a grimace
and an odd sense of satisfaction,
that none of the fruit is edible.

i try anyway.
steal down the trap door to the garden
on a day he's not here, spend an hour wandering
the overgrowth. the trees are weighty
with fruit and possibility
and i just don't believe him.
this is not some desert mirage.
what i see, in fact, is
the opposite of fallow.
a matrix of earth and roots and all the good tools
for bearing fruit. couldn't get any
better than this, I think,
the right shade, the right sun, rain,
all of it right and obviously more than enough.

the trees stand transcendent and wise,
and indeed, the branches climb higher
than i'll ever be.
a primal tangle of
bark and leaf and blossom, but mostly
what there is
is fruit.

poised there like a studio photograph,
all luster and perfection,
something Mappethorpe could have conjured
in his off-hours from the lilies.
the trees gratuitous with fruit,
gorgeous orbs of color, and the word bounty
is what springs to mind at a moment like this.
or eden. i am in
such a garden.

and yet.
each thing i take, once opened,
reveals the true truth of itself.
under shiny, promising skins,
the interiors have waged a losing battle.
without fail
the plums and cherries are ruined microcosms of flesh,
the oranges hollow skeletons of their well-fed supermarket cousins.
the avocados have simply lied to themelves.
inside their mottled moonscape shells
lies a fibrous wasteland of pit and disease.

i wonder how, with its fruit in such decline,
and a graveyard of castoffs haloing
undereath, like a perpetual, vicious reminder of
doom and genetic horticultural failure
how a tree, nevertheless, can aim skyward
with such unstoppable
abandon.

the chicken and the road - another interpretation

there was nothing else to do that day.
eggs had been laid, the afternoon sprawled out
like astroturf, a long, wide expanse of
green.
it was one, maybe two o'clock
the work of the day over
and efficiently handled.
something about the day itself, perhaps,
a friday, before the inevitable
weekend traffic, the bridge and tunnel crowd
still in the office, wrapping up emails and
powerpoint presentations.

out of all the week's fastidious employees
the chicken knew when to call it quits,
punch out even though the bossman
would notice the absence in the cubicled
henhouse, an empty seat,
an unfinished portion of seeds. there would be
the surprise of the abandon.
what? haven't i
taken care of you, fed you
to your heart's content,
provided shelter, a job, decent co-workers? haven't i kept
you safe, nurtured you, made the occasional adjustments
regarding conjugal visits, given you privacy at night
while you slept, gestating?

apparently not. the chicken, somehow,
knew of the road, imagined the slate grey
asphalt horizon, a long stretch of smooth
nothingness.

unbidden, a slim shaft of light
entered the coop, landed in a precise circle
before the hearth and nest and all that was familiar.
and a fine dust rose into the air,
beckoning.

what poetry is

a walk along Hugo Street,
and i'm passing large, luminous houses with
expansive, fertile front yards echoing the bark
of the family dog. here is the picturesque thing,
the beautiful, intractable serenity of a manicured lawn,
but what i love is the secret act
of looking into windows where someone
is typing madly away at a novel
or better yet, a love letter,
a wall of books behind the heavy oak desk,
pouring words onto paper with such concentration
the telephone goes unanswered,
dinner gets burnt,
and a monday is completely irrelevant.

look closer.
this is what poetry is.
a desk marked by a curious orbit
of coffee stains. the trash bin
overflowing with receipts.
the walls, painted a ludicrous, caffeinated purple.
a single geranium on the verge of a vigorous bloom.
words like fire.
a woman pausing at a window for stories.
a fertile, overlarge lawn.
the secret act of looking.
a cloud of longing posing
as a love letter.