a dime in the asphalt

It was a day to celebrate but you were so quiet,
eating your Cheerios as a new president took the stands,
your coffee cooling as words spread out into the freezing morning
over a million huddled close, waving their flags.
You felt disassembled, disembodied, not having slept
very well the night before (you told yourself) but really,
let’s be honest here, you felt like you were just
missing the party, too far from the center of things, a negative
ion abandoned, inadvertently, by electrons, and that feeling
clutched at you all day, through a parade and scores of marching bands,
through hand-waving and photo opportunities and
evening gowns and first and last dances.

Maybe it will always be a little like this, you thought
on your way to the car after the sun went down.
Maybe you will never quite touch down into the nuclei
of crowds, never land dead center in a room where
the heat holds itself in the most, never get your lemon tree
to flourish on the back deck, where the sun won’t
land on it long enough. You will have your moments, of course.
You will feel a small glow in your solar plexus,
feel a lover’s tongue on your neck, drink good wine
in front of a winter fire, have a strange dog nuzzle
your bent knees and eat from your open hands.
You will feel such luck, sometimes, the cables of a bridge
rising out of heavy fog, the road hugging your wheels
toward home. Sometimes, it will be slim, this light,
this window, this fragment of suspension. Sometimes,
it will be just a dime in the asphalt. It doesn’t matter.
You will see yourself in that island of nickel and copper,
bordered on all sides by rock and gravity, and that will be enough.
You will lean down and reach for that bright coin,
tuck it in the right pocket of your jeans and think yourself
worthy of this tiny fortune, and know all at once you are proximate
to everything, even when you can’t quite touch it.

hallucination / resolution

One thought she could always lose a few pounds.
Another thought she should be making more money.
Still another doubted her talents, her hope, her heart.
There was another who felt she should be building houses
in Africa, or tutoring the underprivileged. She believed
that unless she saved something, or someone,
she wasn’t doing enough.
Another kept picking at her skin, pulling grey hair
from her scalp, contemplating a chemical peel or Botox.
Still another berated herself for her lack of motivation,
her television watching, her near-addiction to the screen,
how much useless trivia she knew about movie stars.
There was another who kept standing perfectly still,
waiting for the light to change, but would look up, disappointed,
when it didn’t, and felt impotent.
Another wished she was a better cook, a better writer,
a better wife, or lover, or mother, or daughter.
And another chided herself daily for not taking the singing lessons
she'd been thinking about forever, or kickboxing, or sculpture.
Each felt a little less than, unremarkable, anemic in their power.
They did not know that the others existed.
They sat in their living rooms and the couch was like an island
they imagined no one had ever heard of.
Their little cups of tea would grow cold, and they rose, uncertainly,
from their cushions and entered their bed and slept, eventually.
And when they dreamt they dreamt of their wholeness,
which is to say they dreamt of their nothingness,
who they were without what they firmly believed to be true
of their lusterless, shameful existence.
Asleep, they forgot exactly what it was they were so hell-bent
on transforming, and during that first hour after waking,
it stayed with them, this amnesia, through the stretch out of bed,
and the shower, and the first mug of whatever it was they drank.
And thus forgetting, they gazed absently through the kitchen window,
and a stream of light beamed down
and stayed there just long enough they could feel a warmth there,
a small circle just for them.

full and empty

I wrote them all down
my fears and failures
my self-flagellating insults
my leveling criticisms that, let's be honest,
reduce me to a pulp.

I added on panic
and shame and isolation.

I threw in my lack of faith and vision
the paralyzing sensation that I was not only alone
but that no one else was.

The paper, muddied with abuse,
looked like the mark of a crazy person
and I suppose, for all intents and purposes,
I had gone a little crazy.

Still, I made myself a good dinner
and ate it calmly as I wrote, and afterwards
I felt full and empty at the same time.
Cleansed, but brimming.