barring perfection

here is my torn curtain,
my mumbling, my dirty knees,
my faulty measurement, my mistake,
my burnt lightbulb, my scraping chair.
here is my dying plant, my sour milk,
my lost button, my failing battery.
here is my fatigue, my weakness, my messy hair,
my bad timing, my patchy skin, my bitten fingernails.
here is proof of all that is missing
or broken or smudged of its tenderness, its sweet beginning.
here is all that is left after each pummeling rainstorm,
every wallop of wind that topples the tree of bursting color.

but barring perfection, there is a body still
ringing with visible bloom, bobbing on the water
as best it can, and that, too, must be loved.

Chestnuts

It doesn’t matter whether they were chestnuts. Maybe they were blackberries, early fall-ripe, just off the vine. Maybe they were daisies with their perfect yellow centers and virgin-white petals. Maybe it was a single dying bird, half-heartedly testing out each wing before the final lights out. Whatever it was, the girl had wrapped it in the bottom half of her shirt and was holding the bundle as carefully as I used to hold Grandma’s china when I set the table on Friday nights, God forbid anything should slip and break and be gone forever. The girl was holding her package exactly like this, chestnuts or daisies or a swallow on death’s door, and was stepping gingerly through the obstacle course of the playground to where her father was, sitting on a patch of grass in the sun. He was tall and handsome and he stood up as she advanced toward him, and if I knew more French than I did I could understood what she said to him about whatever it was she was holding onto, and I would have understood his response back, would have known whether he marveled at her patience as a chestnut-gatherer or advised her to dispose quickly of the near-dead bird, or chastised her for picking the daisies.


What I really want to say is that seeing the girl with a bundle in her shirt tiptoeing through the danger zone of sliding children and soccer games and downed scooters and idle strollers made me feel like I was witnessing an act of God, but it’s hard to say this without sounding dramatic or corny or Californian. Except there was something holy about it, something of a rare purity and grace, and I felt my heart lift and open, transcended to a place of sanctity and alignment I have almost forgotten is possible.


What was it, exactly? The delicacy with which she held onto her shirt, the way she angled through the minefield of noise and near-collisions? Her innocence, the desire to cherish and save and secret away the small treasure she’d found? The glee of discovering that which had gone unseen by others? Whatever it was, the girl reminded me of what I have overlooked and tossed aside, the parts of me that have grown hard, how I am getting less inquisitive these days, less adventurous, less capable of noticing. I envied this girl her bundle of chestnuts, her clipped daisies, her irretrievably wounded bird. She had in her hands a precious thing, and she knew to keep it there, to save it as best she could, to make her way back to her father and share with him her amazement, her beautiful discovery, the treasure she alone had plucked from a ripe and generous earth.

flight

It’s not that the plane is crowded or that you will be stuck in it for the next 10 hours or that you will not sleep because of the crying baby three rows up or the cramped seat or the fact that you simply never sleep on planes because of the twisted anxiety-fantasy you have that your help will be needed in an emergency and you will be one of the few people calm enough to do so, will have your wits about you, will know how to activate the exit-row doors and help the elderly out of the seatbelts and into the evacuation slide.

It’s not the one wobbly overhead compartment and the strange noise coming from the engines or the flight attendants’ falsely cheery faces or the lack of general ventilation or the tight quarters of the bathrooms and the unreasonable fear you have that the bathrooms at the end of the plane, where you are now sitting, are just barely holding on, could fall off in a heartbeat.

It’s not the occasional turbulent patches or that you will be flying with no visible land mass beneath you or your general lack of understanding all these years about how planes even work, how an aircraft carrying more than 300 bodies and God-knows-how-many thousands of tons of cargo manages to stay aloft in the first place.

What it is is that there’s a man sitting one row back and to your right who is frantically, obsessively swaying back and forth, rubbing his hands over his forehead, looking skyward and chanting what sounds like a rush of Arabic because you think you hear the word “Allah” a couple of times, and as the plane takes off, the man’s voice rises in pitch and intensity, and his eyes roll back into his head and his whole body shudders epileptically, and suddenly he grabs for something in his front shirt pocket, something in a small round tin box, which he clutches to his face and rubs into his cheeks, and there’s more chanting, more chanting and eyes rolling heavenward, and you have no idea what’s in the box, or what he is getting so feverish about, this ever-so-slight wailing erupting from him, and you look to your left at your lover who is calmly reading the dinner menu and adjusting the overhead fan, and your mind races to a moment that may or may not come, and you wonder if you have it in you to wrestle an old man to the ground, plying from him the piece of business he holds in his hand, you wonder if you could throw yourself to a task like that, disarming a dangerous stranger spouting Arabic to the heavens, and most of all you wonder if you will recognize the moment if it comes, when the balance will tip enough to force you into action, when the chanting, rocking man will leap out of his seat and do something to change your life forever.

But then the plane stops climbing and levels at last, and the dense white clouds are far below, all those miles already behind you, and everything just pure blue sky now, the engines relaxing into a hum, the baby nursing or asleep, and the man with the tin box and the heavenward eyes and the urgent Arabic is now adjusting his earphones and tuning in to Shrek 2, which is to say he is no longer posing an immediate threat, because his arms are lying still on his lap and he is silent, his small tin package disappearing back into his shirt pocket. You see the small bulge there, an outline of silver metal tucked away behind a film of Egyptian cotton and you think about the green glass ring you have brought on board, this augury of safe passage you always carry which you have secreted away during takeoff in the palm of your hand. You think about the small prayers you have released in tight and dangerous spaces, the fibrillating pleas you have uttered into the darkness, what you have clutched to your body in your hour of need, every bargain you have struck with God to keep you awake and alive and here for another day, and then another.

lush

it is lush, this life,
lush with accidents and midnight moons,
car rides and grocery lists, appetite and
wishful thinking, the sound of our own voice
buzzing in our ears, locked doors and moths
hovering dangerously close to death, piano music
trilling out of an upstairs window, fear and opportunity,
the careless disposal of compliments. it is lush with lies
and question marks, indecisions and impossibilities,
fortune and fury, the startling whiteness of eyes, the ringing
of unanswered telephones, retail catalogues, failure, whimsy,
the one mosquito we cannot seem to kill. this life is lush
with wind and silence, reams of lined paper, broken zippers,
socks in need of mending, apologies, lust, sudden disappearances,
the cold coming in, breaks in the weather, last-minute
plans, first kisses, farewells, rude awakenings, the words
we think of saying out loud but don't, one-lane roads,
bridges, last calls, rivers teaming with fish, vertigo,
choices, exit signs, tight spaces, electricity, deoderant,
toast, bedside healing, embraces, embarrassments, fresh air,
fucking, bird calls, receipts, pens leaking ink, bandaids,
worry, hope, green and yellow and red and orange,
casseroles, regret, cutting corners, chocolate,
goodbyes, kindness, i love you's and everything after.

there are fields of nettles and wild blackberries,
rain showers, bulbous clouds, endless patches of blue,
playground slides, sand castles, wet leaves, old piles
of firewood, spiders, skinned knees, wild throws
that somehow make it in, slides toward home,
ill-fitting jeans, champagne toasts, haircuts,
missed opportunities, bakery smells, 25-cent lemonade,
swimming lessons, shoelaces, friends, foreign countries,
implausible endings, the last letter in the shoebox
on the upper shelf of the closet that makes us weep,
eye exams, speeding tickets, airplane blankets,
handmade blankets, odd gifts from grandparents,
blisters, glasses of water, adolescence, waiting rooms,
bad spelling, cereal boxes, half-finished novels, longing,
hide-n-seek games, flimsy constructions, annoyance, anxiety,
high elevation, generosity, unmet expectations, panoramas,
juggling, first snows, final countdowns, merging lanes, investigation,
luminous mornings, faulty memory, kindred spirits, envy.

and so, my love, not a moment’s unraveling, no keening
of displeasure and lost chances, no mourning of all that
seems not enough or just barely or never again.
from the center of the darkest ashes there is
something reminiscent of the heat and light it took
to get here, even if the glory of first fire is irressurectable,
even if new wood must be gathered
even if another decisive match needs to be struck.

luck and other variables

You were not on that SamTrans bus heading down 280
that caught fire after a late-morning collision
with the blue Corolla. You did not have to be
snapped out of your seatbelt by a frantic passenger
when you turned, white-faced, away from the flames.
You were not rushed in a racing ambulance to San Francisco General,
where surgeons worked on your body, doing their best
to piece you back together.

Neither were you on the bridge in Minneappolis when it collapsed,
sending its human cargo hellward, tipped into gape-mouthed river.
You were not in a Utah mine, breathing your last hours in darkness.
You were not in a 12-seat chopper screaming toward Afghanistan.
You were not caught, held, lied to, raped, distorted into death.

You were somewhere suburban, ticking off your shopping list,
returning the late videos and stopping for ice cream.
Or, having decided to let rush hour do its thing without you,
you left the house at 8:30 instead of 8, and got to
squeeze on by the blackened wreckage on the side of the freeway.
You were watching television, listening to the radio, reading the paper
with its overlarge fonts and daily permanence.

You were lucky, or late, or 6,000 miles away,
or born in the wrong decade, or a red-haired woman,
or near-sighted, or left-handed, or in the bathroom, or something else.
But another was not spared these small discrepancies, and for that
you are wringing your hands in disbelief, and a sadness
you don’t quite know what to do with but hold, like a tiny broken bird,
close to your hot cheek, your dark blue veins,
your stubborn, indefensible aliveness.