105 degrees

Isn't it strange how much more socially acceptable it is to be disgrunted? Because then people feel like you have something to share, to give them, and that whole feeling of coercion you get when you duck under an umbrella with someone to get out of the rain.

There’s so much electricity in being anxious, people can’t help themselves but surround their anxieties around yours. Communities are born from a mutual dissatisfaction.

The grocery store yesterday, and the group murmur when someone in line groaned “Can you believe it’s 105 degrees outside?” and the next group murmur that followed when the amateur meteorologist buying heirloom tomatoes reported that the next day would be even hotter.

Yes, I admit I was hot, too. Who wouldn’t at 105 degrees?

But I couldn’t imagine turning to the woman behind me fanning herself with an US Weekly magazine and tell her breathlessly, how delighted I was my sister was coming over for dinner, and that despite this great happiness, I was looking even more forward to going to bed with E after everyone left, lying there on top of the blankets with E with the lights off and listening to the swamp birds.

Of course I couldn’t have done that – you don’t tell that kind of thing to strangers. You don’t talk about love. You talk about Angelina Jolie’s woes with adoption and you talk about the fact that there is no breeze and George Bush and the possible drought and the tragedy of this or that and you never talk about the reprieve of nightfall, once the heat has settled and then retreated, and how the moon rises, again and again, ever vigilant and hopeful, over a sleeping town.

surrender

even when it is so late
i forget to make the list
pointing my way through tomorrow,
and spell badly the simplest words,
and burn my tongue on tea

even when it is so late
i am a shell of myself
peering from wide, red eyes
into the thrumming ether of midnight

even when it is so late
it is useless to keep time
silly to eat or drink anymore
and phone calls are out the question

even when it is this late
it is never too late
to put it all down
the lists
the words
the bloodshot midnights
and listen, patient as a mountain,
as she sleeps.

each breath is unceremonious
as the next, but still
my heart sprints regardless.

i realize it is not her surrender
i'm so grateful for.

it's mine.

vaguely

she hadn't been happy for more months
than she cared to remember.
it wasn't that she hadn't felt
anything coming her way,
but it came her way in degrees,
with conditions,
a love that had limits, laws.

she wasn't good with that
never was
didn't want to know her limits
always strayed outside the lines
and i don't mean fucking around per se
although there was that
who are we kidding
but i mean lines as in
the kind of threat a promise creates
between two people,
this "i will never" or
"i will always."

and what with her lopsided heart,
a heart that wanted, somehow,
less than it had been awarded.
not the brandishing of roses, poetry, song, or spectacle,
but a heart that believed in the beauty
of the unspectacular, the smaller movements
of dinner and sleep and a glass of water
a lover could give, like an afterthought,
when she looked at the slightest edge
of thirsty.

so whom should she thank for this
great, unbidden gift
of a glass, appearing at her bedside?

before what monumental god
should she supplicate herself
for the blessing of this shared meal?

what glorious disaster
coerced such sound, delirious sleep?

it doesn't matter.

at last
she is drinking again.
and in the mirror
a reflection she recognizes to be
the one she must have started with.

finally
each day, passing itself,
is beginning to look vaguely,
and then less vaguely,
like happiness.

prayer on the marsh

if you would, god,
spare the egrets.
let them be.

leave them to their long-beaked wanderings.
leave them to their moonlight zen.
leave them to their tiptoed inquiry.
give them their full measure of
egret happiness.

they've done so little to disturb the planet
from evolving.
they forgive even my hasty strolls past them,
say nothing when i trip on my own shoelaces
and curse into the darkness.
they hear the curse
and move on,
silent as fog.

i'm doing the best i can, god,
but i can't lie.
i've kicked up a lot of
useless dust.
destroyed things.

not the egrets.
they've promised nothing
they couldn't deliver.
they love this place
because it's that simple.

each night,
despite all of our rude encroachments
they graze on the expanse
with such generous quiet,
such guiltless tranquility
and for this, god,
for this,
they deserve to be saved.

stolen

too tired for new words
so here:
i've stolen
someone else's.

this poem comes to you from Kyra Ahlstrom, a brilliant young writer i met at a writing retreat last summer. she's been gracing me with her work all year, despite the fact that she's in college and surrounded at any given time by midterms and late-night frat parties. what a treasure she is for sending me this. and so, an excerpt:

-----

Apriums (to my mother)

Apricots
(such a prim, crisp word)
and plums
(sensual, and curved)

you bought them at the farmer’s market,
along with cherries
strawberries that melted on the
tongue and blueberries the best I’ve ever had

such a bounty, a banquet of fruit
lush and colorful on the counter
a feast of love and healthy children and mothers

and today, I walked to Whole Foods
where most of the luscious, expensive produce
is from, of course, California.

And there in a barrel, tucked behind the blackberries and yellow
tomatoes
Is a sea of apriums, gorgeous in their color.
I bought five and it made me feel
Closer to you.

any small safety

moving
inspires its own catalogue
of purges.

last week it was
the photographs.

a box holding ten years's worth -
pictures of someone else's kids, mostly,
or flowers or cracks in the pavement,
all strangely anonymous landmarks
which spoke to no geography in particular.

but there was a gary in my closet, too.
english gary i met on my way west
from sydney. tall, ludicrously hunky gary
i saw bent over a pool table
at a cheap hostel in the blue mountains
holding a cue stick, looking like
the traveler i wanted to become,
all strut and swagger.

beautiful, dark haired gary who racked 'em up
when i dared him to a match,
who ate the meal i made him afterwards,
who said "fancy a walk"
and what it really meant, later,
was the two of us, fucking in the hostel shower
standing up against each other under the spray
then pushing back against the tiles
then slipping back into clothes
then slipping back into separate rooms
then into separate lives,
and eventually,
gone.

luckily i kept the photo of us,
a hike we'd taken the next day
under the auspices of togetherness,
although post-coital we were awkward
as latin noun declensions,
already unraveling into obscurity.

he was still there, though,
buried under san francisco florals
and closeups of chicago.

and there i was, too
fumbling my way
through a dark, australian night,
nervous and sad and longing terribly for home,
longing for any familiar geography
and in the brief fluorescence of a shower stall
bending into the strange, anonymous eddy of another body
for any small safety
i might find there.

smack dab

she was
smack dab
between a wedding
(not hers)
and a baby
(not hers)
and a divorce
(not hers)
and a death
(not hers)

still
and maybe because of this,
because none of this
was actually hers
she was able to find a good dress
for all of it,
dab, appropriately, at her eyes
during the ceremonies
and then move on
with the rest of her life,
which, in its own way,
deserved just as much
of her celebration.