learning to swim

You do not plunge, head-first, into the deep end.
You do not attempt greatness with the butterfly,
the backstroke, the triple flip. You do not don
reflective goggles and racing stripes and 9% body fat.

You find the edges with your feet. You negotiate
the temperature. You graze the surface with your palms.
You slip just half of you under.
You sit. You wait. You don't take your eyes off your body.

You reacquaint yourself with your limbs, their stretch,
their buoyant angles. You marvel at the subsurface tricks
of gravity. You discover how articulate
the torso is, how centered and solid you are, even here.

And then, almost accidentally, a fiber of you begins
to dare. You find, one morning after waking,
you have dreamt about water, what it feels
to be looking out from underneath, the melty
psychedelic edges, but even more than this,
you have dreamt about submersion, your hair floating beside
your face, your feet kicking gently below, and
total, edgeless silence.

Now, of course, you find yourself more than often
flailing at the scene, imagining your own survival
rests on avoiding tiny, intractable upheavals.
And so, these slicing fists, these terrified
lungs, the machinations of a narrow escape.

Don't you know you can't really fall apart?
That you need neither grace nor power
to keep the water from pulling you under?
Don't you know you are always this close
to a waiting hand, to land, to the safe harbor
of your heart? Don't you know you already have
whatever you need for what you are about to do?

sometimes, waiting is like death

you ask, "What about..." and "Will you" and "Can we"
and I say, "I'm not sure" or "Maybe later" or "Not yet"
and there are other words like "musing"
or "marinating" or "mulling it over"
which I will imbue with great meaning
referring to my strident, exacting belief
in the infinite relationship between time and certainty.

but I could stand there for hours, for years,
peering at the wide, terrifying, impossibly possible blue,
my feet closer than inches to the crumbling, gravely edge,
and not go anywhere.

sometimes waiting is like death
like lost and seizure and nothingness
like shapeless brambles catching you at the knees.
I will say I do not want this and yet something of
the thorny clutch draws my eyes sharply to the earth,
fascinates me with the maze of roots underfoot,
angles my whole body down low to the ground
until my palms are flat against the dirt and I have nearly
forgotten about what lay ahead, past this vigorous, teeming forest.

how does a deer allow herself the benefit of the doubt
to traverse the hillside toward the ripe garden down below?
how does she manage the road and its violence?
what gentle hand guides her through this steely passage,
lifts her gaze beyond the safe acreage of home?
what am I hungry for? what bright, bold wind
will I trust for my flight?

not only, but also

Ever the dreamer, the beautiful dilettante,
the lover of wishes, the watcher of moons.
The passer of minutes, the swimmer of blueness,
the skipper of rocks on the greenest lagoons.
The gazer of starlight, the walker of meadows,
the mistress of summer, the sister of spring.
The leaper of zeniths, the muser of rivers,
the sifter of clouds, and the rider of wings.

She knows what to do with the sun at her back,
with its warmth on her shoulders spread out on her skin.
She can clamber on treetops and gaze at horizons
and feel so much love radiate from within.

But the difficult task is to dance along pain,
to clutch at its palms and to nuzzle it close.
The baldest discomfort, each roiling displeasure
she'd rather leap past all the thorns in that rose.

Yet her truth and her wholeness is buried there, too,
among all that is brighter and softer and sweet,
and until she is equal with all that surrounds her,
she will lie through her teeth that her life is complete.

She must gather the gravel in tandem with earth,
be as fearless with fears as she is with her glees.
She must visit the places she hardly approves of,
she must open her hands while she bends to her knees.

don't forget to write

while you are piecing together the map of your life,
stepping as nimbly as you can out of the mulch
of your thoughts, the busy traffic of your heart,
while you attempt grace and magic and the blessing of
your soft, surrendered kiss, while you are fathoming the stretch
you will need for the wide and rocky jungle of your own happiness,
while you are hunkering down to a piece of dark bread
and the odd, welcome relief of hunger,
don't forget to write.

write this day, its too-early morning and the birdsong
you cursed into your pillow. write the way the dog
looked at you as forlornly as your own shadow.
write this blanket, this cup of coffee, the irreverent
clatter of the neighbor's lawnmower. write the bees
that bend forever to their task. write the July heat
and the laps in the town pool that cleave you from
this earth, the over-solid grip you have on everything.
write this hour, tired and awake all at once, the distractions
you can make of breakfast or a calculator or the remote control
lying flaccid on the living room couch.

write the dead mosquito on the bathroom floor, the small
clot of blood on your forearm. write the careful arrangement
of the bed linens, the yellow of the walls, the way the
garden hose snakes around the back porch where old boxes
are bending under their own weight and where spiders
have begun to take control of the tomato plants.

write your white legs and your short pants and
the constellations imprinted on your skin. write
the dusty sex toys in the bedside bureau, the silvery
condom packages nearing their expiration dates.
write the wet sound of love in the middle of the night.

write the blackberry bush and its sour fruit,
the mailman in his cheerful hat,
the neighbor who confuses you with someone else,
calls you a name that's not yours, write the feeling
of lost identity and disappointment and some letter
you're perennially hoping for.

write the words for failure. write the words for hope.
write the tightrope dangling above the canyon,
and down below, the electric water furious and free.

write green. write violet. write blazing orange.
write the smell of grapefruit skin, the eyelash
on a cheekbone, the hand you hold in the dark.
write the first, honest paragraphs of sunrise.
write everything, or nothing, but don't forget to write.

Latin

Sometimes, loving you is like Latin,
unwieldy conjugations and rabbit-hole verbs.
It is hard to lose myself in the task of translating
the hard syllables between us when what I’d rather do
is believe the language outdated, barely useful, overly complex,
a haughty echo of what is surely impossible to speak out loud.

And yet there is that other Latin. Solid armature of history
fortressing the walls of this new, wild dialect,
the peninsula I cling to even in my darkest, thrashing hour,
the origin of almost every word I need to know.

last, glorious

The dream is about a woman you haven’t seen in at least three years and haven’t made love with in six or seven, yet it’s always the same: you see her and are smitten, exactly in the way you were when you met, and you find it strange and comforting at the same time, something of you the same, and her the same, and something about the vibration between you the same, the chemical nuances, that whatever-it-is-responsible, that thing still responsible, because in the dream you are swooning like you used to, you are swooning to the shape of her neck and the smell of her skin and the slight pain in her eyes like you always experienced it–with an unmistakable hunger.


What’s odd about the dream now is, of course, that you are in love and actually living with someone else, an entirely different woman who actually returns your affections, who cares about you for real, who knows how to soothe and comfort, who makes you laugh, who communicates herself well, who makes you espresso in the mornings, who shares enough of your interests and makes enough sense to you that together you are planning something of a future together, a future involving not children or marriage exactly, but something else, some other creative thing that you both believe might be just as good. And so the dream catches you off guard, wakes you up early, causes you to look over to the left side of the bed where the right woman is lying fast asleep, the dream makes you consider the slight unease you feel because the woman in the dream, the one you couldn’t really have in the real world, the one who couldn’t handle what you were offering, it’s that woman you pick when faced with the choice, which is what this dream has given you, a choice between these two women, a world of difference, and yet it barely takes a second to choose, it’s that easy, like nothing at all.


Which makes you think, once again, about instincts, about following them, about the wisdom of the gut. It makes you wonder how much of your life you are choosing by instinct and how much you are over-thinking and choosing out of responsibility, or guilt, or a sense of duty. It makes you wonder what part of your life is yours and what you’ve given up to someone else. Except, if you remember correctly, the woman in the dream made you act irresponsibly in another way, inspired in you a certain self-destruction, because if you remember correctly, you stepped all over yourself to get to her, allowed yourself to be treated poorly and have your own heart mishandled, and if you remember correctly, you forgave her for so long for doing that to you, sanctioned the hurt she dealt by going back for seconds, letting yourself go on the walks where she told you excruciating things like she just wasn’t ready, and the timing wasn’t right, and she was still smarting over her last relationship, and yet and yet, she really liked you, thought you were the cat’s pajamas, thought you were so sweet, et cetera et cetera—you forgave her even this cruelty, this luring in and spitting out, you forgave her for so long. And when the woman reappears in your dream, you are still forgiving her, because it takes you no time to say yes, it takes simply a tilt of her face and her eyes scanning yours, and just like that, your heart is catapulting the distance between your real life and the rollercoaster of this other one, and there you are again.


So it’s easy to wonder, waking up out of the dream, waking up and peering over to your real loved one, a woman who is fast asleep and warm and naked and a scant few inches away, her feet layered on top of yours, and the whole day verging before you with sunshine and closeness and intention and the kind of consciousness that comes with living together, the meals and video rentals and dry cleaning and the niceties of morning bagels and walks with the dogs you now share, you wonder, waking out of that dream, if it is, in fact, your subconscious that’s really driving this car. If you are, in fact, better suited to the chase, the uneasy and un-plannable pursuit, if you prefer barreling missteps and careless desire, the ache and twist and tumult of unmet love. You wonder if something of you doesn’t miss the painful uncertainty of a phone call, or the way you used to enter her house, as if on tiptoe, all of you tuned in and slightly panicky, small pools of sweat forming deliriously in your armpits, on the back of your neck, between your inner thighs, your dampness altogether. In the dream, it’s like you’ve returned to your own adolescence, that same reckless want in your eyes, and you realize when you wake up with the solid body of this other woman, this real woman, next to you, for whom your love has never been reckless or wanton or casual or unreturned, you realize there is a part of you that hasn’t quite unstuck from that ache and twist and tumult, and that in fact you are drawn—inexplicably, electrically, intuitively—to a certain cataclysm of the heart, the vigorous push-pull of lust. And though you understand the peril involved and have already experienced firsthand the wake of confusion and pain and disproportionate longing that this wayward lust has left behind, you can’t help yourself, can’t help but look to the woman on your left, who is now awake and asking you if you want her to make you a cup of coffee, who is reaching for her grey robe and tying it at the waist with a certain domestic purpose, you can’t help but wish to be back in your bumbling little dream where you are chasing the one thing that refuses to be caught, your heart, like a trapped butterfly, beating at its wildest, delirious with its last, glorious moments of living.

I can only be where I am

A bird flew in the front door of my house
on a Monday afternoon.

At first, I tried to steer her back outside,
but she wouldn't have it, fluttering, instead,
toward the skylight, the window sill, the delicate
green limbs of the houseplant in the corner
of the living room, even the shadowy hiding place
between the top of the fridge and the cabinet
when the water pitchers and cocktail shakers live.

I said, "This isn't the place for you, bird."
I asked her, "Don't you think you should go back
where you came from? It's much better there."
I tried to scoop her into the skinny bamboo basket
by the door, where we keep the umbrella, but she kept flying out,
back to the branch, the Chinese lantern overhead,
the crawlspace in the kitchen, the top of the bookshelf where,
I imagine, she encountered a lot of dust.

I told her, "Look how beautiful it is out there."
I gave her all of the reasons why my house wouldn't suffice,
I counted out loud then held my breath then pointed then prayed
then said a cheer or two. The bird circled the room, then came
back to the window sill, where she shat a few times.
"Oh bird," I said.

I tried to be helpful. "Are you lost? Are you hungry?"
I gave her a lot of attention. I thought maybe she was lonely.

But the bird was neither lonely nor lost.
She didn't need anything from me.
"I can only be where I am," she said,
then flew away somewhere between
a Sex and the City rerun and the evening news,
when I was adding another load in the wash
and putting the noodles on to boil,
waiting for my love to come home.

instantaneous

it will not serve you to wait, to linger idly
by the window counting the lines
in your left hand or the loose change
in your fringed front pocket. it will not make you wiser
to consider the plodding of the shore birds
or the summery grin of an ice cream truck rounding
the final corner in your neighborhood. you will not be
more beautiful in the nuanced light of dinner candles
or the vertical plunge of a dark red dress. the moon
will not wait for you. the sun is impatient as ever.

yes, there is something purposeful about clutching
your moments like so much sand, small granular spectacles
to examine and forage for their glinty promise.

but let me tell you: it is not the same as living.

come. follow this imperfect, furtive day
into a sooty downtown street.
you will not see the beautiful
black man selling cheap jewelry, or hear
the island song he sings under his breath.
you will not distinguish the five dollar bill
centrifuged in the subway grate,
or the poem you might have written about
the single-footed seagull swimming in tossed breadcrumbs
had you seen it in time.

instead, you will look up at some precise second,
the hot zenith of noon barreling down, nearly blinding you,
and the dumb luck of your next breath will land squarely, instantaneous,
into the palm of your heart, flooding your whole world with green.