not the poetry I wanted

Saturday, the hint of bad weather, waking warm
in a bed with your legs still imprinted,
a slight groove in your pillow. You woke
hours ago, from a nightmare, while I dreamed
of wedding outfits, of arriving late and underdressed.
By then you were purging a bloody scene
into your notebook, shocked at the horror you'd conjured,
and maybe that's why this morning, despite the easy lyricism
of a weekend, despite the long stretch of a Saturday,
I'm finding love off-kilter, tender to the touch, a bruise on my skin
whose origins I can't identity. This is not the poetry I wanted,
even rising out of a less-then-perfect sleep, but here were are,
love and I, facing each other distractedly and with a little suspicion,
and all the while the clouds overhead are thickening, weighted down
with the pummel of a storm last night's news forecasted, and I know
it's coming but who knows when, and I wonder if you will stop having
such terrible dreams, and if I will be able to arrive fully dressed
to the day of reckoning, if we will fall into each other like the last lines
of a poem, a pair of branches swaying, persistently, in the heaviest rain.

her love is a mountain (for e.)

She didn't think she could love more than this.
She had stretched wide and deep, down to her gut,
down to the shimmying molecules of her blood.
She had walked into the darkest room, seeing nothing,
not even a finger, and still she edged forward.
She had tiptoed naked in a field of nettles, every step
a coiling uncertainty, and still she stepped.

She didn't think she could love more than this.
She had run on the slippery boards of the long boardwalk.
She had curled herself into a thousand question marks.
She had made the spectacular gesture of saying yes.
She had cut fresh strawberries into the shape of a heart.

She didn't think she could love more than this.
She had bought furniture, had made a thousand breakfasts,
had placed her fingertips on another's skin, memorizing each inch.
She had found new words to assign to things, had discovered
a metaphor for marigolds, for deer, for wind, for the purr of a car.

She didn't think she could love more than this.
But even mountains, in their ageless, intractable design,
manage a few centimeters each year, croaking a little movement
from their bones, as if they hadn't quite finished telling their story.

Her love is a mountain, pushing forward by degrees,
resolute in the certainty that there is still more ground to cover.
And even though she didn't think she could love more than this,
she has. And she will.



















sdfs

three sets of 10

The weight machines at the 24-Hour Fitness
at Larkspur Landing look a little damp, sticky even,
but I'm wearing a new set of workout pants
and a bright white tank and I feel like a rock star
stepping foot in the place, waltzing right past
the stair climbers and treadmill walkers with their
4-inch television screens and swinging earphones,
toward the back, where the big boys play.

In fact, I choose a contraption that demands, ideally,
a few more pounds of muscle weight, because even setting the bar
at the lowest resistance, it becomes clear my body
has a long, long way to go.

This should be familiar by now. I don't know how many times
I've imagined myself a climbing guru, a tennis whiz,
a basketball pro, rollerblader extraordinaire,
and pulverized myself with a few too many hours in the hot sun,
or on a court with bad shoes, or on a granite face in
the Berkeley Hills against which my knees collided and bled mercilessly.

After these heroics, this fanciful athletic dabbling,
I return home exhausted but glowing, grateful that I made the effort.

And then my attention slips, like my memory for birthdays,
and time passes, and I return to that frustrated state
between longing and inertia, clinging to the idea
rather than taking the unforkable road that could lead me there.

So now, this new but sadly unoriginal thought of biceps,
of a fabulous ass, of harder and tighter and stronger,
and this crazy machine could do it, it could...
well, this and the rowing one, and the one
that works the thighs, and that one over there,
with the straps and the whatchamacallits,
and that one with the chin-up bar, and the stomach cruncher -
this room is bulging with an apparatus for every muscle group,
and I feel it again, the old daring, that part of me that refuses
the adage of "slow and steady wins the race," that sees only
the shiny, tantalizing dream of prowess and glory,
and I know it will take everything I've got -
not for these three sets of 10, this afternoon's dizzying
obstacle course - but for those that would have to come afterward,
on a return visit, on a less fair day, without the flimsy bravado
that accompanies an early love affair, with my whole heart in my hands.

how easily she crumbles

Just a flick of the wind, sometimes,
an errant and indelicate move
on the part of a cloud, some listless piece
of the stratosphere moving on - that's all it takes
to unfasten her.

It's deceptive, this body, this knotty collection
of bones. In truth, she is nothing but a pile of sand,
privy to the shifting whims of the tide.
But earnestly, with full belief in her grip,
she clings to the cliff side, watches the seaweed
swishing weakly against the shore, no match
for the froth and tumble of the waves, and thinks,
that could never happen to me.

But then, in her pride, in the act of claiming
herself invulnerable, ox-like, intractable in her solitude,
in her distance from all that is ebbing and flowing below,
the high perch from which she cups the world in her hands
(it looks so small between her fingers, how could she not
think it possible?) becomes, suddenly, as fissured as a dead
tree trunk, vertical but incapable of bearing any real weight,
and how easily she crumbles when so little
can keep her fixed to such impossible altitude,
when she is this far away from the ground
she came from.