one paragraph at a time

to love what we love

2011-12-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

In the retelling, we’ll say we surrendered. We’ll say it was fate.
There is the sweet narrative we’ll draft from the complicated geography
that somehow pulled our continents together. We’ll chart the tides,
the turning leaves, the particular intelligences responsible for how the story
found its edge, that pivotal moment of knowing.

But first, what must birth out of us is trouble,
heart-legs buckling under, the muscle shoring us to solitude
sliced limp. The devastation will not be minor.
We will cut and claw ourselves away from the sharp, new light.
We will brutalize ourselves with escape.

But out of this flight and anguish a vacancy will appear,
hollowness we will mistake, initially, as loss. Here, here is where
the real beginning begins, swiping us naked from our hiding place,
imprinting the true permeability of our skin. We will be astonished
we are even alive. The cold air will feel like the slimmest kind of luck.

And then, this: A space will warm and soften around us.
We will gather the silence in at the corners.
We will squint at this unfamiliar shape of peace.
And from here, fresh breathing room for love, our bodies leaning to a steady
fibrillation, the hum of a radiator underneath the floorboards,
our mouths petal-wet, opening to the first, honest kiss.

We won’t be able to stop it. Coming alive is impossible to fix
into a single embrace. The dismantling will pull the river out of us,
and we will fall against the other in a wellspring of raw relief.
The language will be a stranger on our tongues but
we will understand it perfectly: to love what we love
is an undoing, a deliberate fall with our palms out,
hunger with the grief torn out of it. If it is surrender,
it is to the confession that we are worthy. If it is fate,
it is to the irrepressible freedom that bubbles from our darkest places.

There is no going back, our gaze wrenched away
from a lock-jawed past, the bones of us already fusing,
the sky wide above in the perfect V of flocking geese,
and a clear and faithful morning
welcoming us awake.

bold

2011-11-30T15:43:00.000-08:00

“So,” I said, swiveling on the barstool.
It was a Monday night, ordinary as laundry.
“Do you think we’ll live together?”
I took a long pull of my IPA.
It was only slightly on this side of bitter.
Her eyes crinkled. Her dimples deepened.
The subtlest film of moisture appeared
at the root of her lashes. She took the hand
I had put on her lap, traced the skin there.
The bar was filling up, college kids
on a study break. The glass
was pressing a groove into the napkin.
“I love how bold you are,” she replied,
then swallowed hard. I saw the ripple
of her throat, the movement down her sternum.
We were inches apart. We were apart only inches.
She opened her mouth to say something,
but not a syllable came out.
Her eyes never moved from mine,
and that, that
was how I knew.

luggage

2011-11-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

Luggage like history, like stories you carried
that said something about the places you were willing
and unwilling to go.
Luggage like roadmaps, like stop signs.
Luggage like loss, like yearning.
Luggage like weather, the sky a continuous unfolding
into gray and storm, wind that would uproot trees,
leave the fields flattened.
Luggage like the home you never bought,
the ring you never wore, the child
you never had. Luggage like the missed foul shot
and the final game of the season.
Luggage like an empty tank, and you driving on regardless.
Luggage like the wounds you were dealt by love,
unsuspecting as you lay yourself bare for more.
Luggage like broken. Luggage like dead.
Luggage like a tumor lodged in the middle of a spine
that insisted on bending through the pain.
Luggage like family, like lack of family,
like too much and not enough.
Luggage like bad directions and threadbare and absent.
Here’s what I am carrying, what you are carrying
despite ourselves, despite everything we want to forget.
And yet the moment I come to you with all that rawness and wrong,
I know nothing will keep you from seeing what I hope
and have always hoped to be seen.
The simple fact of this body reaching out, just wanting
to be held.

yes

2011-11-09T18:33:00.001-08:00

yes
yes
after a violent rain,
bloody battle on the roof
mud-inked, wind-broken
roots chunked and hazardous
the velocity of the river a cause
for posted signs and nervous dogs
yes
yes
to blisters on shoulders from too much
sun, mouth woolly, limbs limp
as old dandelions yes
to skinned knees and black-bruised
egos, shyness and tongue-tripping yes
yes yes to the slow crawl of indecision
to remorse to hideous mistake
to saccharine and over-salted
to no vacancy and lost chances
yes to the ugly failures in front
of the hometown crowd
to oversized and under-whelmed
to cheats and lies and cowards
yes to the rips in your new silk dress
to torn up and torn down
yes to the conversation
you didn’t want to have
to irrational, irreconcilable, irreversible words
yes to cracked throats and busted ankles and spent light bulbs
and burned batteries and whatever dies after
it has lived
yes
to a broken promise or three or nine hundred
yes to the time it takes to tell the truth
yes to desert and dry spells and lunacy and lost hope
yes to the middle of a blind-white October
yes yes yes
to sharp and scrape and cauterize
to discard and done for
yes to ducking under yes to darkness
to breaking in two
or more pieces
than you can count
yes to the disappointing lunch
to the disappointing summer
to the disappointing marriage
yes to the seesaw fear of stillness and escape
yes to the bad haircut in eighth grade that ruined your chances
yes to the fumbling in the back seat that led
to your bad reputation
yes to beyond repair
to what’s done is done
to a change of heart mid-stream
yes to bad art
to old age
to out of shape and shapeless
yes to where have you been
and why didn’t you call
and how many times do I have to tell you
yes all of it yes
not a moment too soon or too late
this yes, this yes
this ripe and mad and fleshy terror of a thing
this yes will save us
tie our restless shoelaces and stroke
our fevered cheeks and pay off our
inglorious debts
this yes, this yes
this aching starved animal
will bear down until we open ourselves
to its wet mouth and slip our skin
under its teeth and feel its dark heart beating
ruthless against our lungs and let our heaviness fall
like a string of dominoes until we sing
our fragile, damaged beauty
into the waiting arms of the world.

the crossing Yom Kippur, 2011

2011-10-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

After the guilt borne like oxen,
hungers denied their proper lungs,
and honesty flatlined out of fear.
After the inadvertent knifings of the heart,
words rifting a cellular divorce. After the pockmarked disturbance
of disappointment, the intimate failures carving their grooves
into shoulder blades and the narrow spaces between ribs. After the graceless
uprisings that resulted in a house worn down to the nubs.
After the leveling waves of shame and sorrow.
After loss.
After the itch of misgiving, and the strangely winged
freedom that nevertheless pulls the body under.
After all that was wrong had been teased out,
and the great list assembled and filed in a box labeled “history.”
After the box had been hefted into the garage
for the next trip to the dump. After the rumble down an uneven road
that brought the car to a standstill at the foot of a pit
spilling with lists, trails of flawed reasoning and unmet longing,
burnt offerings from the frontlines.

After all this, there was nothing to do but walk the woods trail
with autumn drifting her scent among the leaves still clinging,
to take care with the roots underfoot
on the way to a river marked by swiftness and sound,
and to concentrate on the important matter of forgiveness.

Then watch as late afternoon light passes almost as if by accident
on a detour, the foliage thinned enough to convince a path
from what had been certain – by all appearances – to be a dead end.

Once you have let go, you are not empty.
Once the skin of your unease has molted, the flesh reveals
its secret elasticity and knowing.

And so, it is with unusual new grace that legs bypass
rain-rotted half-logs and trapdoors of tall grass camouflaging mud.
An invitation articulates itself, weaves into October’s sweetened air,
and that is enough to make the advance to the outer bank,
the S-curve fenced by still-lush maples and exclamation points
of mushrooms and bright red berries unquestionably lethal.
A felled trunk lies equipoised between shorelines,
like a doorway, a release from all that was, and the imperative
is clear and simple.

It is not a dance, a balancing act, a levitation, a circus trick
involving stilts and an absence of gravity. It is gravity incarnate,
torso in blunt contact with bark, knees pinning inward
to steady the last half of the body. The crossing happens
in inches, time irrelevant as dust, and underneath, urging,
the chill and swirl of river water and slicing edges of rock.
You cannot not look down or up or back. It is this:
one quadrant of log and the next, nothing more or less than
the available strength of arms composing each shift forward.
The forgetting will begin soon enough but for now,
you will understand this moment
exactly as it is:
your life, being felt,
being lived.

maps

2011-10-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

It would take less time to return to my mother’s house,
the Mass Pike so close I can see it around the corner,
and yet I look at the atlas because I don’t want to get there
too quickly, the day not even half over. And there it is,
Route 20 east, a small green line squirreling toward Amherst,
and I know it will be slow, 30 miles an hour, 45,
the towns in between pacing the drive. But on the road to my right,
a tag sale, the Premium Outlets of Lee, an Appalachian Trail picnic area,
where I imagine someone, having come out of the woods,
is resting and eating their lunch,
thinking about the rest of the route, and what they’ve left behind.

I wonder what I’ve left behind, what I might have taken with me
on that fast highway which I decided to untake. And now the car,
almost as if it were new,
finding a fresh way home.

orientation

2011-09-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

For nearly a week, it was the lake, ovular and clear-bottomed, dotted
with small islands spreading west. I could see it peeking through the pines,
the gloss of it rippling in the early fall wind. Small waves slapping the dock
were like soft clearings of the throat: ahem, ahem, and in the dark,
with the moon blanked out by rain clouds, I could still tell where the trail ended
and the water began. Afternoons, my fingers wove a porous net
as I dipped and glided around the cove. Summer’s last mosquitoes
hovered like Harpies around my ears, but it was no use. I had already fused myself
to the strokes, made an arrow of my legs, found a rhythm in my lungs.
Even weightless, even groundless, I was certain I would never be lost again.

the bar

2011-09-07T14:16:00.000-07:00

Because I told myself not to have that second drink, knowing it would blur
my courage, make me forget the history between us that had nailed the coffin
of our efforts shut for good, I am rigid on the stool, arms square
against the glass, sipping, sipping, like I’m counting old coins one by one.
You are so loose in your seat, catapulting your hand on my wrist
for emphasis, throwing your head back as you chuckle at some small story
in which I don’t quite belong. And I’m remembering the morning we kissed
for the first time, after that night at the bar where two martinis let us hurry
through niceties so that our knees could touch and our beginnings could begin.
The way our lips opened like the gate they were to let our tongues slip in.

Now, I clamp my teeth around the rim, tilt the glass for one last quaff,
and a drunken maraschino slides against my mouth, sweetheart-red,
stained saccharine. It’s time to go, your clutch empty, my own laugh
flatlining, and whatever still breathing between us as good as lost or dead.
We’re like a legless insect, making turn after turn but spinning, futile,
into the same tiny radius. I try to knot the cherry stem but again
the ends won’t thread, and I wonder how long it will
take us to stop meeting like this, how many more folds the napkin
has left in it. When we say goodbye, the hug is chaste, our touch threadbare.
Outside, it’s just begun to rain, and a heavy scent - like whiskey - fills the air.

sting

2011-09-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

The first thought is of the creature that coiled itself into her bra
as she sailed down the Norwottuck Trail on an afternoon blissfully free
of obligation. The sting was not immediate, but she knew it would come.
The poor thing flailed and fought its way out with no success.
By the time she stopped the bike, the agitation had mutated
to attack. The wasp thing stung her by the heart and initially,
it was just that - a sting, a pointed, poignant arrow at her skin.
But hours later an ache had spread to the left and right of the mark
as the poison leaked deep, and to fight it she thrust her feet
more vigorously into the task of pedaling,
as if distance would keep her ahead of the pain.
But the further she went, the larger the bite swelled,
a red and raw reminder.
There was a price to pay for letting go.
The wasp escaped, then died behind her.

treeline

2011-08-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

Two days into our trip to Grand Lake,
my uncle said he wanted to get above the treeline.
I was still breathing hard at 8,500 feet, spending
mornings down at the dock, toes squealing at the water.
It was too cold to swim, so I read a book
on the beauty of grief and tried pretending
I was finished with all of it, heart-wound sewn and sealed
like new. But there are some things you can’t will
from cell memory: a baby’s neck,
your father’s cologne, the ridges of a basketball
dimpling your palm, the blue
chlorine of the pool you almost drowned in.
Inside my body, there was a wreck
of longing and countless places needing healing.
The climb begins where it begins.
But there is plenty of air.
There is plenty of time.

prelude

2011-08-23T07:49:00.000-07:00

Nothing is more or less important than this:
that first nudge we make toward the edge of the couch,
the door, the marriage, away from the old story
we can’t make fit anymore.
And then we slip into the larger mystery,
biting our nails all the while,
wondering if we’ve killed our chances for happiness,
if the people who love us most will understand the need
for this strange detour, if the answers will be any less
elusive, if the net underneath will fray and falter,
then disappear altogether,
if our hearts will suffer irreparable damage
from so much longing.
It doesn’t matter,
or it does. We will say it made all the difference,
or we will forget
it made any, because by then,
we will have already fallen.
We will have already saved ourselves.

intermission

2011-08-05T23:18:00.000-07:00

And so they will rise from their seats,
fan out into the hall, head straight
for the bar or the bathroom or
to call the babysitter and check on the kids.
And the stage will lose its currency, its showmanship,
the actors their roles. The story will throw its lines
into the fire. And this act of dispersal
will bring the lobby to life. A hum
will overtake the walls, the marble floor
warming with the to-ing and fro-ing of shoes.
Perfumes will collide and the hems of dresses will touch,
fleetingly, in the foyer of the ladies’ room.
Lovers will mingle unknowingly with widows,
artists with politicians, children of assaultive alcoholics
with secret, sweet drunks. There will be a pinking of cheeks
from the unexpected heat, dollars absentmindedly pressed
into tip jars, and an innocent exchange under a balustrade
will produce a phone number and magical thinking.
Someone will almost slip on a square of dropped ice. Another
will drum up the plot of his next novel or realize that he must stop
writing altogether. Spouses will lean close for one clarification
or another, or try to remember the name of the couple just approaching.
A glimmer of hope will twist and spin from the small space
of held hands. Ghosts of a cottony memory will slide from the balcony:
five years old and the first matinee, 12 years and that unbearable opera,
19 in the aftermath of sex; 23 in the aftermath of their divorce.
The line will seem so long until it doesn’t.
Lipstick will be reapplied, a matte pucker inked into a tissue.
A man will offer a handkerchief to someone unfamiliar.
Bodies will weave and sway like a school of fish around a carcass.
It will not last long.
Disorder is typically, almost predictably brief.
A bell will ring and a light will flicker and they will know
that this limbo between acts is coming to a close.
They will climb up the stairs to their little square seats
and decide which of the arm rests is theirs and they will tighten
one thigh against the other to thwart an accidental touch
with a neighbor. Their gaze will ignore everything
but the stage and the curtains will draw back and the music will begin
and they will disappear into the shadows and be quiet about it
as the spotlight halos down below.
In the dark, their shoulders will hunch down.
The playbill will tighten in their fists,
and the story will rise from the ashes and reassemble,
and the actors will continue their charade.

Were it not for the untidy clatter on hard stone.
Were it not for the weight of shifting legs and the curving line.
Were it not for the fracturing of silence and memory.
Were it not for the unrehearsed.
Were it not for longing.
Were it not for error.
Were it not for uncertainty.
Were it not for collision and undoing and mess.
Were it not for thirst and risk and love,
the show
would never go on.

don't leave now

2011-07-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

This is what must be said, the hour
tinny and hollow as a piggy bank
emptied of its long-held savings.
When bones begin their tired buckle,
resolve caving, courage a matchstick house
too close to the stove. When it becomes so tempting
to let the weather tell the story,
to register defeat from fog,
to translate the absence of a temperate spring as instruction
to bury your head, mole-like, into a tunnel of inertia.
When it feels as if the expense outweighs
the purchase, when weight outlifts relief, when mess
outsizes stillness. When peace seems elusive as a secret,
and happiness a mothball in the basement closet.

Don’t leave now.
This is what must be said
when there is so much trouble and acrimony everywhere –
houses split open from a lightning storm,
drivers abandoning the scene of the injured,
men facing off in a desert,
cancer encroaching on innocent organs,
the order of things dismantling in microseconds.
Our grip on the earth is fraught
with error and bad luck, wrong turns and filmy judgment,
and the million ways loss threatens to ruin us.

It is impossible to stand at the feet of a mountain, untrembling.
But departure will do no good. The path,
catastrophic, claustrophobic as it is,
nevertheless begs us forward.
Look how it curls, a bent and beckoning finger, into the deeper woods.
Look how its ragged, ruthless stones resemble guideposts.
Don’t leave now.
Fold your shoulders under the brambles. The grazing will
make a mark and that will tell you how close
your own body is willing to come. This is no small thing.
This is the beginning
of everything.
You can find comfort in the most improbable places.
Don’t leave now.
Consider the possibility that you are already home.
Make a web of yourself.
It is here that the feast will fall.

toward summit

2011-06-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

You bring a pad of paper, of course, and the good
pen because you imagine the hike will ask for your keenest
observation, and this you take to mean words
you will lay down on that even white acreage. And so you climb
in earnest without a water bottle like some fool thing,
toward summit, pushing your knees through the bush
and eying the blond earth forming the semblance of a path.
Even from here, you can imagine yourself at the higher elevation,
the scansion that view will allow, and the lines that will
river out of you, an ode you will craft out of this mountain,
and how you might – you dare say – turn it even more beautiful,
mythic with beauty. At the first quarter-mile,
you’re already clicking the metaphors off your tongue,
dreaming up better ways to say “green” and “wide” and “wild.”
The rock where you’re heading becomes a man,
a lover, God, beckoning you close, and soon
your fingers are itchy to transcribe the conversation.
There is a poem in your mouth, its scrawny beginnings,
and you push it down against your chest with every step and
breath by breath to make it flesh.

But if you were really here, you would know
you’re not looking where you should. For instance,
there are a thousand ways to break
your leg, and there are the bees to consider,
the flicker of rattlesnake, the ground sand-dry
and near avalanche at the steepest inclines.
There is the nature of this nature.
Three quarters of the way up a thirst encroaches
on your throat. It has become so hot outside,
breezeless, the brush leaving thistly markings on your ankles.
The paper moistens and droops in your sweaty hand,
the pen slips to the ground, and so do you,
landing on the plateau from which the summit
flirts and cajoles. In front of you,
a trail of ants soldiers back and forth,
carrying invisible rations.
You don’t know about ants, if these are the ones
that will level with you with one bite
or simply industrious vegetarians. No matter.
They are ignoring you. You could sit here as long as you like,
eavesdropping. Various birds are circling – you don’t know
their names, but you know, at least, they are birds.
Maybe that is all that’s required, to recognize
what you’re looking at, because your mind is a trickle, now,
slow as summer noon. The poem slips out, unseen,
from your teeth. The word for wild is “wild,”
and the trees below are continent enough.
There can be no more green to this green.
If you could just sit here,
watching them move as they move,
still as they still, breathing your wordless breaths
until your lungs understand, you will have it.
This is the poem.
This.

witness

2011-06-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

I wish you could see this, me hovering over a breakfast
I woke early to make, ripe mangoes and coins
of sliced banana, blueberries, the smell of shallots
sautéed in olive oil, and the eggs waiting for the guests
to arrive to be gentled into the pan, then scrambled.
I wish you could have been here for the small catastrophe
I made of the scones, confusing baking soda for powder,
but how beautiful they were, despite their bitterness.
If you had been here, I would have given you a turn
with the crepe batter, guided your wrists through the swirl
of the pan, cautioned you against waiting too long and
we would have clinked coffee cups, toasting our good fortune
or the still heat of this place, flies catatonic on the deck,
or the way summer uncoils us, softens our grip, makes a smooth
line of our previous disrepair. I would have liked to show you
the fledgling grape vines, driven you to the market and stood agape
at the price of strawberries, wondered aloud if the trail
through the woods led to a waterfall, and turned off the final light
to listen to the concert of crickets. I wish you could be here
as the day unlatches and spreads open, and see the wide green
of the back field as the man on the small tractor makes his
perfect tracks, and sit under these motionless trees, and swat
the occasional mosquito, and read our books until the heat
lays us flat.

I have to remember that solitude doesn’t make the story
less true. The sun births the same sweat from the inside
of my elbows, and the cream has turned my coffee
just as caramel. I am still in love with the thinness
and roundness of crepes and the way they hold
so much more than their own weight.
If I can hold my hands through the quiet.
If I can bless the air with my own breathing.
If I can imagine the possibility of waterfall.
If I can bite into the flesh of this mango
and still know sweetness,
perhaps that is witness enough.

exit

2011-06-02T17:49:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was wrong to have this conversation
in the parking lot of the highest point in the city,
the view spreading out below like caramel praline,
all that coastline, all those hills, that water, those skyscrapers,
the air, pushing through this crack of mountain and radio tower
rifling the tourists’ hairdos and windbreakers
as they sat in silence on giraffe-print seat covers,
a white rose wilting between them.
Maybe the first of June was ill-timed as the day
to let go, admit defeat, cut the story
at its knees and offer the lackluster, conciliatory gesture
of a hug. Perhaps she shouldn’t have worn the blouse
with the flattering neckline, or the necklace with the circle,
green and earthy, at its center, or the cowl-hooded coat
that could easily warm two bodies on such a blustery afternoon.
Maybe she should have waited until they were both home
in their separate apartments and made the announcement
by phone, so when the call ended the retreat would not have included
the loaded silence of the car, or the movie crew cordoning off
the lot below to set up the big shot, or the rescue helicopter
karate-chopping the sky, or the golden spokes of sun
that landed on the dashboard and cast cinematic shadows of their profiles.
Maybe it was wrong to want to end on this note with their bodies
awkwardly proximate, and the sand from their nap on the beach
two days ago clinging to the caddy where the water bottle had been,
and the seagull feather that had whispered thoughts of flight
into her ear now resting comfortably in the center of the back seat.
Maybe it was wrong not to look directly in the eye and say
what needed saying, and instead have the words bubble out
into the steering column, then slant left to the change holder.
Love is never an exact science. The choreography goes
unrehearsed, its arms noodly as a teenage boy’s.
An effort at grace is attempted then thwarted. The perfume
sours, the belly bloats, the syllables sputter and halt,
and she is struck by the incongruities between them now,
the way the news slices them in two, frays them
like spent wires. There is nothing left to do, and that,
perhaps, is the saddest thing, the room of them gutted to the bone,
and an emptiness whistling through.
But this is the only way. She knows this like she knows
the far corners of a basketball court, where the sweetest
shot lives. Like the heat of a tealight in the middle
of a power outage, how the palms could cup that warmth forever.
She knows this like the sound of alley cats and rain and home.
Like that place on the back of the neck that stays
tender and forgiving, ready to arch itself up and stretch its flesh
to meet the next great kiss.

the recital

2011-05-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

The billboard on the highyway said it would be
Judgment Day, so I suppose I should have thought twice
about taking the subway, lest the power fail
and humanity begin its terrible unraveling underground.
But not a hitch delayed the departure
or arrival of the J Church, and I rise out of the
Van Ness steps buffeted by the strong bay wind.
Two miles away, a baseball game
is in its first optimistic innings, but here the streets
are almost deserted, the parking lot of the conservatory
a skeleton of its weekday twin.
If this turns out to be my last evening on earth,
I muse, at least there will be music.
And soon, a young man takes the stage, suit-
and-tied 17-year-old, and begins, by heart,
Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor. I wish my father
was sitting next to me – I can already imagine the
glee in his face, the way his own fingers would begin
their pantomime on his lap, remembering. At intermission,
we would reminisce about the duets we played,
and there would be a moment I’d admit regretting stopping altogether,
watching this boy-man coax stories out of the keys, and wonder
if perhaps I took a wrong turn somewhere, or left prematurely,
fearing the discipline or disappointment, whichever came first.
And then I would remember, no, this is exactly where I needed to be,
listening, listening, leaning back into my squeaky seat and simply
paying attention.

The concert continues, unapocalyptic. The building doesn’t fall.
Night slides by like it always does, one hour, then another.
There is still time enough for everything,
and I know this because when the boy-man takes his bow
it’s clear the story hasn’t ended, all that is yet to be written
and played, waiting waiting waiting, on the tip of his fingers,
at the doorway, on the stairs, in the empty parking lot,
on the rustling tracks and on early summer bleachers,
under this dark and possible sky.

natural state

2011-05-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Because this is not who you are, really,
pale-faced and purposeless, wandering
the tiny acreage of your living room like a calf
strayed too far from the fold and finding itself
in the dregs of the field, where the spring mud
clings and cloys.

No, you are not that animal, not that field,
not that edge, not that muck.

Still, you peruse the catalogue of these familiars –
narratives that make you feel less beautiful,
the drawing and quartering of that which failed
to live up to your best expectations, the ill-fitting
memories from your childhood which,
despite your efforts to render them whimsical
testaments of your innocence and haplessness,
nevertheless have clothed you with embarrassment
that’s lasted for years.
There is a trophy wall of catastrophe and collision
you could knock your head against daily if you wish.

Don’t worry.
This is your natural state, which is to say
you are living between these three stories:
What was, and what is, and all that you carry –
fervently, wildly, unstoppably – in your bones,
the great carnival ride of the who knows what.

Here you are.
A liminal moonscape, a rope bridge of thick,
unintelligible leaves,
a foreign country where you can’t decipher
the train schedule and where the menu
has devolved into a toothy collection
of consonants.

It will be alright.
You will find your way.
The map is in your back pocket,
where it’s always been.

the beauty of grief

2011-04-30T11:14:00.001-07:00

No one knows she cried her eyes out three days ago,
sat in her desk chair and wept, unable to see the screen.
No one knows how harshly she spoke to herself, flagellated
her already fragile spirit, lay on her bed with her forearms
pinching her eyelids flat, and made mad proclamations
against her weak, fractured heart. No one knows the hours
she’s devoted to circling her sadness like a vulture,
the mileage she’s worn into her soles, walking the hills of her city
in a series of unsuccessful attempts at forgetting.
No one heard the keening in the shower, or the thudding
of her fists against the dashboard. No one saw
the resignation of her shoulder blades against the back door,
or her palms curling under the kitchen faucet as hot water
eviscerated the dishes, or the half-moons of mascara
threatening stains on the duvet and her favorite t-shirt.
There are no witnesses to the indentation
her back made on the couch, reeling from the storm,
no audience for the unsent letters pleading her cause, no bleacher
of cheerleaders as she made herself breakfast, in spite of the great effort
it took to crack eggs, spread hard butter on thin toast.
No one knelt before her dabbing a cold cloth on her forehead,
or fed her spoonfuls of oatmeal, or kneaded the soft
tissue of her lower back as she bent, again and again,
to heave trouble out of her way.

She had convinced herself of her own ruin,
a fault line splitting her body in two.
Her lungs felt as thin as moth wings,
and she was certain her bones had been worn brittle,
stilts of a house helpless against a hurricane.

But this is the beauty of grief.

What she saw in the mirror was not
the deep ravine left by loss,
The war she was waging
had not hollowed her cheeks or made an anarchy
of her skin. Her lips had not unpinked from slaughter.

Instead, a pliancy and sheen had birthed from the rubble.
The eyes looking back at her were bright as promises
and it wasn’t the overhead light or the sudden April sun.
Grief had lifted the rawness out of her,
clutched at the throat of her darkness and pulled
until it lay silent and sleeping at her feet,
a feral dog fed and full,
and what was left was neither muscle nor wound
but horizon line, a ripe nothingness
some fresh story beginning,
etching her face clean.

unpublished work

2011-04-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

The hibiscus needs a poem,
the grasshopper too – he looked so unbearably vulnerable
in the middle of that island road.
Low tide deserves a poem about
the importance of retreat, and the woman
who rang up the groceries was carrying a poem
about loss, eyebrows pinching when she gave me the receipt.
The two boys at the playground, see-sawing themselves into a fight,
need a poem in which war is given a long set of parables
from childhood. Breakfast is ripe with poetry, the tangle of mango
and omelet and limbs of sausage and the exclamation point
the raspberry jam makes against the tongue.
Laurie needs a poem, the sweat on her obliques
midway through the workout video, the primitive grunt
at the home stretch, and how peaceful she looks
with that second cup of coffee.
The flight over the Pacific is brimming with metaphor,
the incongruities of small window and vast sky and the glass
barring one from the other. Eli’s laughter is begging
for a poem, the universe of hope it carries with it
and how the tuck of his palm crossing a busy street
delivers an almost excruciating joy. Rain
is ruthless with poetry, that great cleansing of history.
The canyon trail could use a verse or two,
its wildness gentrified by the cellophane wraps
of cigarette packs and tennis balls abandoned
in thickets by dogs weary of the search.
The piano needs a poem, that Mozart duet
unplayed for three decades still poised
somewhere at the edge of the edge of fingertips.
The golf course wouldn’t think to ask
but it needs a poem, too, its green hips flirting
with a ceaseless manicure, the strange marriage
it makes of fact and fiction. The highway
craves a poem, Route 2 carving an additional solitude
from northern Montana, the wearying stretch of the Panhandle,
towns on the brink of disappearance, and dust
heavy on the windshield. A poem lies in this living room,
vacation magazines and sunscreen sharing real estate
with a notebook and a pen that may run out at any moment.
And so the poet, too, needs a poem, to remind herself
of the unpublished work, life waking to its first pulse,
body rising toward inklings of light,
the heart stirring itself open, already knowing
it will break.

placeholder

2011-03-21T16:56:00.000-07:00

Say heater is another word for love
and the rug in the entryway, dusted with bits
of whatever I carried in at the bottom of my shoes
is another word for loyalty. Winter is another word
for patience, and of course kitchen is a combination
of two words - earth and body - and laundry basket
is another word for tired. Television is another word
for forget the story and art is another word
for tell it again. Window is another word for
acceptance and dinner is another word for us.
The track's bouncy pink surface is another word
for return to where you came from, and the callouses
from rock climbing are another word for hang on.
This moment is another word for where did the time go and
the doctor's bill is another word for luck. The bedside lamp
is another word for waiting. Silence is another way
of saying it. Tea is another word for mother.
Orgasm is another word for God.
Ambulance, for gratitude. Sweater, for not ready.
Book is another word for innocence,
rain too, and mint chocolate chip, and slippers, and sleep.
You are another word for me, and I am another word for you.
Dream is another word for fear and hope, and so is loss.
Sunlight is another word for try again. The hail at the cemetery,
for believe in miracles, buckle your seat belts for
don't leave just yet. Late March is another word for
you are where you are. Muscle is another word for yearning.
Mud puddle is another word for permission, and sink
is another word for letting go. Swallow is another word for
breathe, and breathe is another word for one more chance
and one more chance is another word for I will get this wrong again,
I can promise you.
So forgive me. This will all be imperfect.
No matter how I say it, it will never be the same as what it is.
But here. Take this beach pail and the shovel too. These
are other words for come with me, for keep digging,
for we're almost there.

honey

2011-03-17T11:23:00.001-07:00

Susie brought out the big jar of it
afternoon tea and we were gabbing over this or that thing
it was raining, again, the kind you don’t want to be out in
the kitchen stools had gingham pillows
the dog was laying low for a change
nibbling on some matted fur toy
you had not been on my mind
I had driven an hour singing to pop music
then lost the reception heading toward the coast
looked at cows and sheep nonchalant in the storm
the road pockmarked, the wipers frenetic
but inside the car a lack of urgency, all the time
in the world and you were far away from here
the seat empty beside me and that was alright
but then Susie asked, “Honey?”
and you came back in that sweet, thick drip
descending into my extended cup
the tea shedding its purity, making way
just like I did, and willingly
happy for the break in bitterness
and like always I ran my tongue along the edge
wanting that sugar to fill my mouth
the spoon eager, greedy
steam swallowing it in
hot, sweet, stir, stir
my lips, oh my lips, I let them burn
burrowing
because
at the bottom of the cup
I know it
a little pool of you
waiting
like you never did
waiting

still and always

2011-02-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

I’d like to tell you that everything I know about love is in the right hand drawer of that table from India book-ending my living room.

I’d like to say happiness is like a dog sleeping under a magnolia tree.

I’d like the sound of February rain to remind me time is a patient mother.

For the bed to make my wildest dreams come true.

For the day to be peeled slowly, like a ripe apple.

For the daisies to remain in my kitchen awake and supple and perpetually pinking.

I’d like the stretch of Montana when worry hits, the Appalachian view when sadness lifts its little white flag.

I’d like to say the orange chair will hold all the weight, and the window will let in all the light.

I’d like to tell you my heart will outlast every other organ in my body.

And yet.

There are days when love fans out to streets I can’t name.
And happiness is a tired mechanic under a broken car.
And the rain clots the gutters with leaves.
And the bed dishevels the opportunity for rest.
The day, an overripe mango, bruising on the shelves.
The daisies, shedding hopes in petals.
Montana the longest solitude.
The chair hidden under a coat that isn't warm enough.
The window masked by a tangle of power lines.

No matter.

Still, the heart.
Always, the heart.

the velocity of tulips

2011-01-24T17:24:00.000-08:00

It is a strange, unkempt day when you wake into
who you are meant to become. Not that anything
has happened, not really, not yet, but you recognize
how incrementally you’ve been shuffling along,
head down at all the little potholes preventing your full speed.
It is a disembodied, unsteadied moment when you realize
the wariness you have become accustomed to, a sloth-like
over-vigilance, and you wonder now, finally seeing
all the places you exerted yourself, stretched cardboard-thin,
muscled and maneuvered your poor eager body,
shape-shifted, even, your beautifully unwieldy spirit,
you wonder what your heart would do
with an open road.

It happens like this. One evening you are buying cereal
and packaged mushrooms and accepting a paper cup sample
of the store’s decaf French Roast. The aisles are crowded
as always. You’ve just come from the gym. Someone is hogging
the cheese display. You see them shifting their weight between
the triple crème and the fat-free. A mother is wrestling a cart
bearing gallons of organic milk and a squirrelly toddler.
The lines to the cashier remind you a little of those images
following a natural disaster, the filing behind a single water source,
just inches from mayhem. You fall in step like the little soldier you are,
plucking a bag of wheat bread from the tall, soft stack,
zeroing in on a package of free-range chicken thighs,
deciding against the bottle of wine and the sour-sweet jellybeans
and the frozen pizza that previously disappointed.
You remember you’re about to run out of detergent
and you consider the cost of artichokes and put one back.

But then, tulips.

You see them out of the corner of your eye,
yellow cups firing out of a thick stalk of storybook green.
You’d avoided their gaze coming into the store, of course, the signs
with bubble letters chirping their praises. Spring
is not yet here, but the tulips are,
hatched from some cozy hothouse stateside.
You are the kind of person who avoids the cherries
peddled prematurely in a market banking on your ignorance.
You do not visit the Rose Garden in December,
hopeful of a harvest. You are suspicious of the terminally
unripe avocados erupting like Vesuvius down the center aisle.
You stick to timelines, to patience, to the limits of the season.

But where has that gotten you? When you are honest with yourself –
pricking and piercing your industrious innocence –
you see the rug has slipped out from underneath, taking your feet with it,
those tree-trunk certainties of your feebleness. When will you stop
believing happiness will be retrieved only after a blistering trial
of error? You are the instrument, the causeway,
the tunnel, the hand, the song
slicing through that air. You do not need a miracle to see that light.

Something is calling to you. Tulips, and whatever will come after.
It takes just 10 steps of your time to cross the store.
It takes a religious conversion of the most plebian proportions.
An empty vase rests on the top of your refrigerator, waiting.
This is no impotent vessel bridging you to freedom.
This is what will make beauty happen in your own kitchen,
when you come up the stairs after the day has spit you out,
when you have become lost in the woods of your own making,
this is what will greet you:
Yellow and stem and glass and the lifeblood of water.
You are certain of this now, with that clutch of ripe color
in your hands. You are certain this is the moment your heart will break
of its malnourishment and you will lift your fists out of the mud.
You are certain because the door slides open and your body
is already leaning into the breeze
as if it could carry the whole weight of you,
as if it already is.

to the bird inside of her

2011-01-19T12:53:00.001-08:00

to the bird inside of her, she said,
it takes time
this business of flying.

begin here

2010-12-25T20:28:00.000-08:00

When the last seat is taken,
or the key has trapped in the lock,
when the rain has eviscerated your garden,
or your words have run out one by one.
When the packing is half-finished, or traffic
keeps you from your purpose,
when the bright white of your day
has paled and pixilated.
When the grocery bag rips coming up the stairs,
when the telephone bill shocks
and then flounders you,
when love has flown off course,
when your nails are ragged and wanton,
when the runway is slick and the sky sodden.
When the ache for something nameless
fans out into your bones,
when you're hungry, or lost or in need of a hand
across your eyelashes.
When it’s deadline or dilemma
or just you tripping on the stained carpet of your trouble,
begin here.

Place one leaden, obstinate foot
where you can see it.
Gather your maniacal breath,
your little windbags of lungs.
Eye only the square of sidewalk a blink away,
that quadrant of concrete mottled with the dirty
evidence of living,
and go.

When the manual for what’s broken
has been misplaced, when the view is obscured
by a restless construction site,
when your closet is an echo of castoffs.
When the bridge toll climbs and the road
down the mountain is pummeled with snow,
when your face bears little resemblance
to the person you remember,
when the field is populated with abler bodies,
when poems have been written by nimbler souls,
when no amount of squinting
delivers oasis, begin here.

Guide your defeated arms
into a small fit of swinging.
Coerce your hips into the barest
shimmy. Locate the pocket of a single,
deserted minute, its hum of insignificance,
and go.

When cheer cannot cheer you,
when crumbs cannot feed you,
when the storage space in the garage
topples from the weight.
When beauty eludes you,
when the weatherman confirms your fear,
when the doctor bears his wild news.
When you return to the bad habit,
when the current continues its brutal tackle,
when mess is your middle name,
begin here.

Climb onto your weary haunches. Lift your belly
from its mattress cave. Initiate the wholly
unremarkable act of breathing, and go.

When you have had enough.
When you have had too much.
When your fortress has not kept away the enemy,
and the walls are an abscess of rubble.
Do not fling yourself from the gangplank.
Do not hasten your disappearance
with your own cruelty.
Do not mask your ferocity with a collage of good manners.

The death’s door of your failure
is still a door.
Wrap your shaking fist around the handle.
Hear the cricket click of the latch.
And begin.

sitting Shiva for Muriel Katz

2010-12-14T01:16:00.000-08:00

The bowl of fruit on the dining room table
is brimming with kiwi. Outside it is snowing,
New England December in full throttle. She was not
a woman I’ve ever met. In fact, I’ve never been to this house
before this afternoon, when my mother and I came in
with a cake and an offer to help set up the chairs.
Jacqui was home from Rochester, grief
gripping her eyelids. She let me kiss her cheek
as my mother introduced us. I didn’t know quite
what to say. My own grandfather had died the same day
Muriel went under for the last time. They were buried
on a Tuesday, an hour apart. I had been unable to come
to his funeral, and last night’s delayed flight
kept me from sitting the final Shiva. Instead, I was holed up
in an airport hotel in Philadelphia, squeezing a tube of bath bubbles
into a tub too hot to get into.

I wish I could tell you it was Jacqui I came for,
or the memory of her mother, who’d collapsed with a stroke
and never returned. I wish I could tell you I gazed
at the photos set out in the living room as if I knew
what kind of loss this was, as if I could begin to shape
the life they illuminated. But when the service began
I found myself at the outskirts of the circle, on a folding chair set
next to the fruit salad, a stack of paper plates, coffee cake,
spinach quiche, a bowl of dried apricots, store-bought salsa, and kugel.
I said the prayers, rose when the rabbi asked, faced the proverbial ark
where the Torah scrolls would be, but when I turned to sit down again
it was my mother’s face I saw, her hand cradling Jacqui’s,
and I thought to myself, how did she get so strong?

Yet there was something of the survivor in her, too,
the faintest frailty, papery as my grandfather’s wrists.
I felt it in her touch as I stepped off the plane,
twelve hours later than I was expected, the cradle
her hands gave my lower back, the bag she had packed
with a firm, tart apple, a container of yoghurt, the Danish
bought that morning from Henneman’s Bakery.
“In case you’re hungry,” she’d said, as I swung my legs
into the passenger seat and we pulled onto the highway heading north,
and there was a new softness to her voice, a porousness
I took for heartache but which, perhaps, was heartache’s opposite –
the great yielding of love, blood unburdened at last.

Muriel was a woman with enviable eyebrows.
She looked good in a dress. I could imagine her late husband,
Morris, holding onto her arm on a steep flight of stairs.
There was something entirely solid about her.
I wondered if Jacqui had inherited her hands,
those thick fingers. I wondered if she had been handed down
the recipe for the chicken soup now warming in the Crockpot.
There was so much I didn’t know.

My grandfather would have said something about the kiwi.
He would have remarked about the brightness of that green
against the strawberries, the sun-gold pineapple.
He would have taken a pinch of apricots from the bowl,
cut a generous slice of coffee cake, talked to the strangers
in the room about his daughter. “She was a dancer,” he would have said,
before moving onto other things.

We stand for the Mourner’s Kaddish and suddenly
they are both there, Muriel and my grandfather,
each flanking the daughter left among this living world,
and then quiche is served in uneven triangles,
and there is the accidental spill of a plastic cup of seltzer,
and the dog is running underfoot and there is someone
with allergies, and the kugel is cold and no one brought decaf,
and I don’t want to die until I am goddamned good and ready,
and outside the snow keeps falling and falling and falling.

thanksgiving and wreckage

2010-11-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

This day is for gratitude, and I could say something about the snow,
the way it’s descending, these soft kissing wisps.
I could tell you about the slow unfolding aroma from the oven,
the giant bird which will, in a matter of hours, feed nine.
There is, too, the blanket under which the bulk of my body
is now warming itself, or the nest of this room, or the silence
purring through the house. The day is a series of plentitudes,
heaping teaspoons of love and grace and goodness,
primed for clasped hands and laughter and words redolent of cinnamon
and bay leaf and eddies of melted butter. I can already taste that meal,
can already feel that first button on my jeans make its first indentation
in my belly, can imagine the gooey stupor of the guests as they gather
their shoes from the alcove and attempt to cleave themselves
from the toasty kitchen.

Still, I can’t help thinking of you and the table you’ve set.
I picture your thin frame, bent over a stove, stirring something
with apples, or sweet potatoes, shaking in salt or sugar,
willing yourself to forget, to veer away from the pungent
memories of us, all those afternoons we lost ourselves
and how delicious that kind of amnesia was. I see you,
standing before the cabinet where the plates are,
doing the math, frowning then steeling yourself,
almost taking another plate out, then not,
and I wonder if you know an absence is here, too,
the indentation where your body once was,
places you warmed with your breathing,
places I stowed you away for safekeeping.

I know that later, of course, the house will be filled
with voices, and there will be pie and stories, and night will crawl in,
camouflaging loss and regret and everything left unsaid and untouched.
We will find ourselves in a honeycomb of revelry,
and then the pile of dishes will ask for attention
until tiredness flatlines us, and for a moment, I hope,
we will each turn from the palpable wreckage,
this unplaced place setting, and feel the featherdust
of healing, let a lick of warm light
enter into the raw edges of whatever has been broken,
thread itself through,
and stitch us while we sleep.

lurking

2010-11-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

There is a poem here surely, lurking under the dusty
floor coverings in the car, the dented recyclables still
swishing half-inches of water, the windshield thickened
with bugs from the long drive. Behind the jostled luggage
there must be a map folded on its corners, and the blanket
thrown to camouflage the valuables continues its guardianship,
regardless of the dust. Despite the clutter, something of beauty
must be resting in this worn place, keeping its shape, stubborn
with the certainty that it has not buckled under, not even
when the sky was shuddering with thunderstorms, or loss
raked through with sharp, indelicate fingers. The downed leaves
on the road make a fine weave, even as these wheels eviscerate
and scatter them. And I know, in the driver’s seat, though I am
barreling on, eyes on some fresh horizon, there is a soft pocket
of my body holding a memory from which it refuses divorce.
A June day full of sweat and happiness.
Pomegranate seeds fed, one by one, into an open mouth.
Love twinkling with its first sentence.
There is a poem here surely, lurking beneath and behind
the jewel coin ground into the cushions of the back seat.
But the poem is also that seat, those dented bottles, the bag
cresting with laundry. It is the map and the mess,
and I am in them both, slipping among the creases,
fumbling with desire to find my way
and at the same time,
to lose sight of it completely.

take two

2010-11-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

Breakfast again, your order replicated from yesterday,
but you can’t help wanting the same thing and why
shouldn’t you, why the slight shame, the watery
embarrassment at the table, the waitress to your right
scrambling on her pad, so what, what’s wrong with sweetness
and starch, wanting my eggs just so,
the bowl of overpriced fruit, the persistent
coffee refills the busgirl offers, perimetering the restaurant.
You are just as hungry as yesterday,
perhaps even more so given the hour, and you need
the calories, the vitamins, the protein, the reinforcment
for this stranger city you are in, in it and in it,
and aren’t you lucky in the midst of that strangeness,
knowing what you like, knowing what will fill you,
what will feed you?

The day has to begin somewhere.
Why not here, again?

Still, out of sheepishness at the return,
you contemplated the alternatives, the gaggle
of cafes downtown no doubt bearing
better cups of coffee, the fancy brunch spots
with their champagne cocktails and stiff linens.
You’d thought about the farmer’s market, even,
shuffling the stalls to pluck single servings
from the freebee tray, like a crow.

But you knew, deep down, in the fire of your belly,
you knew what you need for the sharp corners,
each razory highway. You knew what grief called for,
what anchored the filmy horizon line of your courage,
what lay the tracks for fresh hope.
So you did not avert your gaze at the waitress,
even when she paused mid-way in her penmanship,
already anticipating the rest. You did not speed through
your breakfast, aiming for a quick getaway
before anyone could further notate your predictable nature,
your unevolved palate, your lack of risk and spice.
You did not apologize – to anyone, to yourself –
for the six half-slices of bread pooling in syrup,
for the buttery eggs and the voluminous coffee.
You did not apologize for the price or the place
or for the instructions your stomach gave to return
from where you had been only just yesterday, at a table
so much like this one.

Instead, you made an alliance with this meal.
You said, “I give myself to you.”
You lay prostrate before the plates with sugar on your lips.

Sometimes, things remain where you left them, waiting
to be of service again. Sometimes, the cure for sadness
is softness. Sometimes, you remember not to strain so hard,
to align with simplicity and the plate right in front of you,
to migrate a little closer to home.

these particular truths

2010-10-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Coffee is better with sugar.
An apple will be more likely eaten sliced.
Even clouds call for sunscreen.
Water makes the headache go away eventually.
There are too many keys on the keychain, doors
no longer yours to unlock.
Altitude will make you tired.
The doctor's bill will make you grumpy.
You could always use more sleep.
The silence of a deserted road is therapy.
October turns you inside out.
Novembers brings you home.
A new city is an exercise in both containment
and sprawl. The last mile of bike ride makes you wistful.
Maple syrup rewinds the clock.
A belly needs fire.
A body needs touch.
Your longing needs a place to land, however briefly.
Medium rare is open to interpretation.
Disagreement is a prism of insight.
It is alright if you have no idea, exactly.
what you want.
The drive will do you good.
No is a yes to something else.
Detours are where the best photographs are.
Your mind is a busy anthill.
Your heart is an obstacle course,
a moonscape of disaster and hope.
Your heart is an army, a cross-examination,
gridlock, a kitchen sink, a hobo
thumbing a ride on the interstate.
Words will take you to the edge,
but it's you who has to leap.
The wail of a harmonica is lonelier than you are.
A hotel room is more forgettable than you are.
The signs on the highway are not metaphors.
Fortune cookies are not instructions from above.
What you know, you know.
Monday is a beginning.
Tuesday and Wednesday are beginnings.
And down the line.
Starting over is an illusion but it is also the truth.
Rice and butter take the pain away. Ice cream
is less effective.
Your mother wants to help.
Your sister sees right through you.
Sunsets are the veil between what was and what is.
You never know until you ask.
You will always be afraid to ask.
Fear is a sign of life, not death.
Your lungs carry grief.
Your lips carry tenderness.
Your legs carry freedom.
You are capable of amazing things.
You are capable of fucking up.
You are capable of forgetting where you are,
what you meant to say, who you were looking for,
what you had hoped to accomplish.
You are capable of stilling your earthquakes,
dismantling your doubt, quenching your sorrow
and saving your soul.
Every vote counts.
Dreams merely offer an alternative.
You will do it when you are ready.
Instinct isn't always pretty, but it's usually right.
Your skin is probably too dry.
Your eyes are probably bigger than your stomach.
Your wildness is probably bigger than you care to admit.

Nevertheless.
You are who you are and
you are doing what you can.
You are doing what you can.

crossing the border

2010-10-06T06:17:00.000-07:00

It hit her, crossing the border into Ontario. The drive from Ann Arbor
had been grey and wet, the rain coming in fat drops,
metronoming her windshield wipers. She'd settled into her seat,
like she'd done for the past 5,000 miles, reached for a stick of gum,
adjusted the radio dial, checked the battery on her cell phone.

The landscape into Windsor was flat, almost featureless,
though the bridge had been magnificent, a real piece of architecture,
the cables long and taut as ballerina legs.
But the strip malls greeted her cheerlessly,
the sky empty of welcome. She drove on, having filled up
on gas at her departure. Finally, the cornfields reappeared,
barns and silos rising out of the land again, and the first
hints of autumn announced themselves in the distant trees.

Maybe it was this particular rain, or that somehow
crossing the border had carried her even further from home,
or that the season's temporal beauty - so splashy now -
would tumble into certain bleakness and cold, but out of nowhere,
she gave the steering wheel a fresh earnest grip,
wanting to hold on to whatever it was
that was letting her go.

And yet, she realized it was time, her own muscles tired
of engaging only to leave her heart frayed so thin.
The exchange was untenable, staying rooted to a past that charmed
and even, occasionally, soothed, but no longer fed.

She had opted for the country road on her way
to the big city, but soon it became clear this wasn't a day
to get lost. The road required an oddly painful slowing. Construction
and idle drivers kept interrupting the steady pressure of her foot
against the gas pedal. The single lane made it difficult to pass.

And though she preferred these roads, their changing scenery and
unexpected finds, she saw the delay they would cost her journey,
and with reluctance, she returned to the highway's swift efficiency.

There is no easy way to cleave the heart
from loving. It does what it does impiously, inopportunely,
uncalendared and unseasoned. What she carried with her she gave
with a lack of deliberation, discretion, scurrying
to greet every opportunity to add to the pile.
But the act of filling had not made her full.

Instead, she was twitchy with worry. Emptiness and sorrow
had attached themselves to her most joyful, generous gestures.
She knew something in her was flagging, losing steam and grace.
She knew she could not puppet this theatre any longer.

The road was wide and clear. Somehow, the rain seemed less
rigorous here, and she turned off her wipers in time
to see the city rise into view, skyscrapers pushing into the clouds.
It would be a lie to say that she was healed, heart full as an udder again.
But I can tell you she was precisely where she needed to be, even
in her brokenness, and she would know where to go
from here.

Yom Kippur at Whitefish Lake

2010-09-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

It came surreptitiously, the rain. I was riding along on bike
but didn’t feel its first dewy suggestion, my eyes trained,
instead, on the lake to my left, an oval of water flirting at me
between thick alpine trees. I was looking for a path
to the shoreline. It was Yom Kippur, and there was bread
in my pocket to cast away, there were things to get rid of,
my heart full of its own weight. Eventually, a detour
came into view, a state park with a campground and possibilities
for fishing, and I swung off the road and slowed for the loose
bits of gravel it turned into. The lake was pure silence,
the wind on hiatus, the water still save an almost
microscopic lapping. This was the kind of day God gives you
when you need it most, a scene of benevolent neutrality,
a lack of any resistance other than your own, and I saw how little
it took for grief to rise to the surface, how quickly
the lake disassembled me. My eyes filled up with everything
I didn’t know the words for. My lungs beat out apology
after apology until there was nothing left but forgiveness.
A bird passed overhead so close I could hear the thready flap of wings,
and I knew it was time to scatter the remainder of the year’s offenses,
unclamp the guilt from my hands. I gave it everything I had,
wound my arm back like a practiced pitcher,
felt every sticky deficiency hiding in its tough shell,
the regrets posing as minor-keyed stoicism,
all the ways I have fought against surrender and courage
and lost, the needles I have poked into my own conscience,
the tendons of faith I have ravaged open, all of this I flung
into the water, and it landed with a tinny plink two dozen
yards away, rippling the lake enough to send the far-off dock
into a brief lilt. I felt an echo of wetness on my sleeve,
and looked down to see thin drops had polka-dotted my sweater.
I tilted my head back and a constellation of rain tickled my face,
and I stayed there until I had returned to the soft, familiar body
I had remembered loving once,
until I was washed clean.

beets

2010-09-14T16:46:00.001-07:00

In another life,
I would sell produce at such a market,
rise before dawn on a Saturday morning,
head to the fields for one last harvest before securing
the back of the pickup and the drive
to the crowds of the city.

The man selling the beets is bursting
with health, red-cheeked and cheery-voiced.
I am a tourist on her bicycle, camera in hand,
asking sheepishly to take a photograph, as if
I’d never encountered such exotics.

He gives me
the okay, and I step back a little
to get everything into the frame,
trying to be the artist, claiming the beets
as if for a family portrait.

I am hoping the man
will sell them all today, even though
they aren’t strawberries or kettle corn or cupcakes,
I am hoping someone, someone else
will bring them home.

look both ways

2010-08-30T00:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, two blocks out of the train station, a man stopped you,
told you how beautiful you were, took your hand and asked
if he could buy you a cup of coffee. The man
had not ogled you wolfishly. He had not cornered you in an alley.
It was a windy weekday afternoon, and the day had roughed you up.
You thought, briefly, about offering yourself.
You thought about the indulgence of limited engagements.
You thought about the flicker in the man's eyes,
how easily you could have given in.

But almost as quickly as his compliment landed,
you withdrew from it, retracted your hand from his,
said something about needing to get home even though
nothing there required your attention.
Scuttling the last blocks to your front door,
you were slightly embarrassed for your hasty escape,
a little sorry for having abandoned the man
and his invitation. But you knew not to go back.
You were certain he was not your destiny. You were certain
you were not going to spend summer vacations
on a New England lake, send your children off to college.
There would be no growing old together. Coffee would have been
the first and last lie between you.

The heart is a ruthless muscle. It doesn't look both ways,
doesn't think twice about the crossing.

Inside, your house was almost punishing with silence, and yet
you were never more aware of your defiance and your hope,
love still like a young bird inside you, a feisty and feral yearning.
And though it seemed like you couldn’t possibly remember it, you did –
that first moment of your wild entrance into the world,
what it must have shaken from you, that tidiness of the womb
vying with an anchorless departure, and how you knew
in your bones, in your blood, that this
was the way of things, this was the exchange necessary,
the requisite divorce from a perfect but isolated
half-existence. This was the gift you were offered,
and you took it, unquestioning, full of momentum, and with a battle cry
of triumph. And you realize, now, that no matter
how long the passageway, you will follow it.
No matter the dim-lit narrowness, the tight corners,
the pull and grief of departure – you will stomach it all because
you need every inch to tell you where you’ve been, you need every
minute to tell you you don’t have a moment
to waste.

evidence

2010-08-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

How can I believe in love,
in hope, in the strength it will take
to carry the load of my load?
How can I believe this hour
is the peace I need, or that the highway sign
isn’t a metaphor?
How can I know where the breadcrumbs lead,
what my hands understand
before my mind does, how sometimes, the weather
is just weather?
How do I stop myself
from stopping,
and instead, simply bend
a little lower to the ground,
watch ants circus their way home,
marvel at the thousand shades
of dirt, and nose my way on?
The buses stick to their schedules
as best they can. The airline barely
apologizes for the delay.
So it is alright if it takes me
a thousand times what it should,
and it is alright to be afraid of
the thousand failures just waiting to snap
their alligator jaws, and it is alright
if I shrink a little at the question
of whether this room could possibly contain
my thousand wild imaginations,
because how can I know unless
I stretch almost to the point
of breaking?

the swim

2010-07-08T18:19:00.000-07:00

It is no small thing to dip into a New England lake
at the first swell of summer, air damp enough
to pool a sweat at the back of the knees
before entering. It is no small thing
to lower the body rib by rib into a crucible of water
sugared with pollen, to wade past a skeleton of twigs,
a charm bracelet of boys daring each other with handstands,
and turn an ear toward the whisper chorus
of dragonflies. It is no small thing to align
with this permeable geography, to forfeit weight
and gravity for dark, bottomless dark, to accept
the mystery of transient borders and an undependably slick
raft of leaves, to eye the opposite shore and be unable
to gauge, exactly, what kind of strength will be needed
for the crossing. It is no small thing to attempt that crossing,
to gather good oxygen and release it in service of a mutable
journey, to move with neither elegance nor cleverness but, simply,
to move, to get parallel with what is being asked, to dim
the body of its adjectives, to unburden the mind of debate
and dilemma, to siphon the clatter out of the lungs. It is no
small thing to submit to a current, however imperceptible,
to fall into and rise out of the surface using only
fingertips, to arrive at the center and realize that a center
is not, in itself, a destination. It is half of one, or a quarter.
There is the next length, and then where does that leave you,
your towel and car keys where you’d secreted them behind,
and so having reached the far beach, an understanding that the swim
is really a series of swims, parting after parting, breath after breath,
and the only thing required – not theatrics, not athleticism –
is a trust in the buoyancy and benevolence
of water.
It is no small thing to receive that gift, so submit to such a kindness,
to recognize that something other than muscle and criticism
can propel a body forward, that underneath the strict machinations
of living, some liquid thing is beating its great heart,
carrying you.
It is no small thing and yet,
it is the smallest thing,
how you bow to the turning of this slow,
unseen wheel, the way you follow
one stroke with another,
your belief in what you are about to do
buzzing like an atom, like a particle of air,
like a lifeline.

was

2010-06-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

In the movies, we would root for the traveler
not to take the flight, to remember
the scarf left behind at the alley restaurant
straddling the old city cobblestones, to pick up
the note scrawled last-minute at the hotel,
pleading for just one more week.
Then the scene would pan out,
and we’d see the other lover with his or her head hung low,
disconsolate over a coffee, cold for hours,
while the rain clouds trembled before the downpour
took them. We’d sit up in our seats, so hopeful,
hearing the music crest and fall. And then,
the cab driver would prove to be a fortune teller
or a therapist, the storm would delay the flight,
that proverbial light bulb would snap awake
just at the last second, and the traveler
would simply turn around, baggage trailing uselessly
behind, and the city would reappear like a golden opportunity
before the credits started to roll.

But here, it’s the Los Angeles airport,
the endless gates and harsh lights
of duty-free shops and cantinas blinking
triple screens of summer baseball,
everything equally garish and discombobulated,
absent of an orchestra to choreograph
the denouement of this story.
And here we are hapless as insects flapping
toward a porch light, our best intentions
leveled by too much heat. I wish
I could find you in this maelstrom,
this labyrinthine love of ours.
I wish a Post-it would slip out
like a tarot card from under the column
of trash cans. I wish the announcer would call
my name and your voice would appear
on the other end of the little white telephone.
I wish the fluorescent strips of light would dim
just long enough for your silhouette
to sidle down the long hallway.

Instead, I am sitting in a row of identical
seats, watching the monitor tick the clock down
toward departure. The wait is not as endless
as I had imagined, and, if I am honest,
not as lonely. There are many of us here,
alert, scanning the ether for direction,
for evidence, for a word to coax us forward,
some gesture we will recognize as ours alone
to take us from what was
to what is,
to that small but necessary glimmer
of what will be.

peculiar and exceptional

2010-06-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

Take exquisite care of yourself
she said, and that day, fighting a cold,
I misunderstood, took myself directly
to bed, then to the kitchen for soup,
then wasted an obscene amount of hot water
on a late afternoon shower.

Later, when the weight in my chest
had cleared, when I could breathe again,
and tell the difference between fogginess and fog,
it occurred to me I had not been listening
for a long time.

Here, she was saying, is the poem of you.
Here is your delicate architecture, you fragile aliveness.
Here are your deer legs, your dandelion heart.
Here are your dormouse tracks on fresh, permeable snow.
Here is the way you sing, your voice millimetering toward sound,
how you hold your gaze on the coastline as if it were
a fiber of gold. Here is your language,
thin as a moth wing, your kiss a whisper
of offering. Here is how you cross the street,
how you drive the car, how you throw a Frisbee and bake a cake.
Here are the contents of your purse,
the Chapstick down to the quick
the receipt for midnight groceries,
a square sachet of lavender, a pair of broken
sunglasses still, somehow, salvageable.
Here are the thousand tiny ways you know to love.
Here are your wild little arms,
the soft tentacles of your fingers.
Here is how you sleep and how you wake up,
how you tiptoe toward the edge of the water
like a turtle, a drip of honey, an heirloom sweater
buried in a pile of attic castoffs.
Here are your shoes. Here is the way you eat.
Here are your secret favorite things, the underbelly of clover
lining the deck boards, the moss erupting near the recycling.
Here is your devotion to precision and the giddy, uncontainable
mess you nevertheless effort to contain.
Here are the sounds you make when you’re happy,
the alleyway damp of your sorrow.
Here is the lullaby tucked inside your bureau,
the joy hidden under the last shelf in the pantry,
the smooth belly of peace obscured by traffic lights.
Here is everything you know,
and everything that is still waiting patiently
for you to know it.

And I saw that this exquisite care
I was asked to take was not a matter
of sleep or soup, or hot water,
but an unflagging allegiance to my own wisdom,
the curves and wayward bends of it,
wool-scratched and seaglass-soft
syllabled or a baby’s babble,
however it was shaped and however it shaped,
wisdom, mine, certainty and uncertainty, a light,
however dim, steady and beckoning.

and this too:
loyalty to the peculiar and exceptional
ticking of my heart, which, without any intervention,
knows exactly what it needs
to chase the next breath
and the one that will come
just after.

oranges

2010-05-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

Oranges, overflowing the blue glass bowl. Taken whole,
they are mere ornament, a set stage, a welcoming committee.
They offer a flourish of optimism, the absence of trouble,
a still life. The glass looks shatterproof,
the oranges like exclamation marks.
When you carried them to the end of the table, there was
a bit of the housewife in you, wanting a scene of tidy contentment.
The apron sealed it, the slippers. But of course, taken whole,
you knew the oranges would not entice. This kind of beauty is
impenetrable. It doesn’t ask to be entered.

Sometimes, a thing has to be sliced open,
a knife taken down the center,
and you do, fingers wet with the brutal act of flaying.
And then, everything shatters, as it must.
Everything shatters. We shatter.
Piece by piece, we peel back, spraying our blood, our seeds,
the center of the center of our stories,
and piece by piece
someone gathers to the table
to eat.

listen

2010-05-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Wear orange, her arms whispered. Grab the handrails,
said her neck. Take as long as you need on the downhills,
her knees advised. Her shoulders were hoping she’d
turn up the heat. Her tongue inquired about a sip
of ice water. Shut off the television, her eyes wheedled.
Throw out the old sponges, her elbows urged. Buy a proper
sweater, cajoled her solar plexus. Eat more kale, her skin insisted.

But when the time came,
there was no mistaking the call
of her bones.

Remember who you are, they cried.
Remember what you are here to do,
they pleaded. Remember there is still
so much time left.
And then there was no choice
but to listen.

journey

2010-05-05T02:32:00.000-07:00

It was because of ice cream, the walk,
less reward than destination, a reason
to leave the house on a cool May night.
You thought a scoop
or two of the creamery’s latest attraction –
lavender vanilla, orange caramel, mango and mint -
was what you needed
to lure you out the door. This was a walk
you knew by instinct, a walk your feet
had memorized. There were all the familiar landmarks –
the café on 26th, the Laundromat off Clipper,
the Irish bar with the good lamb pie, the Buddhist house
perimetered by a delicate garden and wrought-iron
fencing. There were places on the sidewalk
someone had etched a love note, a line
of poetry, a chalk caricature that had long since
embedded its remnants in the concrete.
There was a bench installed, improbably,
on one of the steepest inclines, five blocks
before the park came into view. Then there was the park,
then the view, downtown rising like a bride.
And two blocks further:
ice cream.
There had been dozens of such walks.
It didn’t have to be summer.
It didn’t have to follow dinner.
It was simply the desire to leave
knowing something about
where you were headed.

And tonight, though everything had conspired
to pause you before the doors of the shop,
lick your lips, lock eyes to the sandwich board
with its dozen drippy offerings, then point,
like a child, through the freezer glass, nevertheless
you did not stop there. Your feet
had not had enough.

And so the scene, inevitably, multiplied.
A tennis court, flooded with light.
A restaurant, empty save its last waitress.
A book store crushed under its own inventory.
A film, having ended, returning its audience
to the street. The cookie shop running out of chocolate chip
and the man behind the counter looking helpless
as the doors kept swinging open.
The plant store display that defied gravity.
A window filled entirely with mirrors.
A man with John Lennon glasses
slurring out a song. Two hours and still,
your legs were not quite ready
to call it a night
until they were.

And when you returned home,
your back a little sore
from the journey, ready for a cup
of something warm, you didn’t
miss the ice cream, and you felt proud
for having doubled the distance
you'd intended, and when you took off your shoes
your feet had not hardened or blistered
but instead lay tender against the carpet,
and you realized that happiness
could be like this, too,
if you just let it take
the lead.

let it be now

2010-04-24T23:43:00.000-07:00

A trail of orange maggots feasting on your potted plants.
The paint peeling from a gap in the walls where rain
rudely sidled in. Dust camouflaging the top of your bureau.
Mail like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A poem
at a standstill, your words like dough deprived of yeast.
The collision of artifacts in your garage.
Sunlight decimating the butter dish.
The closet bulging at the seams.
Your heart, an obstacle course of apology and need.
The front door swollen at the corners,
laundry from your trip barring the beeline to bed.
A freezerful of meals you’ll never eat,
your mind a hamster wheel of what ifs,
the mirror wagging her finger at your deficits,
the way you hum yourself to sleep
with your catalog of solitudes.
The broken handle, spent light bulb, unsalvageable
zipper, cracked dishware, dismantled belief,
hope hiding under a thick blanket of complaint,
how you accumulate what needs discarding,
how you forgive what needs to witness pain,
loss disguising as regret, yearning masking as contentment,
a stain you scrub until your hands are raw,
shoes too precipitous for the long city blocks,
the toaster that keeps burning your breakfast,
fault lines of an earthquake you know is coming,
how you shoulder against sadness, the lies
you tell to gloss over your rubble, the pair
of pants you are safeguarding in the closet
when your body decides, for once, to cooperate,
the stories of your heroic triumph or tragedy,
the dark sky you hold back with the fluorescent glare
of your kitchen, the pages of the book
you fall asleep to but never finish,
the dull newsreel rolling in your mind,
all that evidence of your unmagnificent living.

When are you going to put it all down?
When will you pluck yourself from under the terrible spotlight
you insist on training your disrepair, your unfinished business?
When will you refuse your own brutality?
When will you decide each chapter of your feeble existence
has exhausted itself of endings?

Let it be now.
Let this unheralded night signal
the death of your diminishment.
Let this unremarkable hour
celebrate the close
of every incompletion.
Let this ordinary moment deliver amnesty
from your imprisonment.
Let your body open
to the freedom it can’t even begin
to imagine.

jigsaw

2010-04-21T02:25:00.000-07:00

love and fear
sweetness, tear
fuchsia pink and stone cold grey
inside beauty, too much thigh
close up and longer view,
tinny buzzer, music to dance to,
lion roar, silence golden
drawn-out hunger, quick satisfaction,
believe me and trust yourself
clean out closets, fix the shelf
me and you
me and me
fractured, whole
piece ourselves
despite ourselves
because this
this
is how we fit

orchid, weeds
wants and needs
landlocked, glacier
quiet, louder
impasse, through
scar, tattoo
forgiveness, unforgivable
one song, a single syllable
the bridge, the great divide
stay here, what’s on the other side
I always want what I can’t have
bleed the wound, find the salve
me and you
me and me
epicenter, galaxy
fractured, whole
piece ourselves
despite ourselves
because this
this is how we fit

cloud and cloudless
blank slate, mess
desert, monsoon
far away and much too soon
winding road, a bull’s-eye mark
a spotlight, hidden in the dark
what’s changed will always be the same
what’s your poison, what’s your game
blurry vision, needle stitch
mosquito bite, a lingering itch
me and you
me and me
come together, fall away
white-hot metal, cooling clay
patience patience, don’t delay
piece ourselves
despite ourselves
because this
this
is how
we fit

and no one can make sense of it
entirety or one small bit
can’t remember, can’t forget
a jigsaw puzzle not to quit
one whole life in every minute
we fit
somehow
we fit.

poem after surgery

2010-04-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Tablespoons of chocolate pudding.
Gospel music slicing through rain.
Tabloid literature on the coffee table.
Three o’clock in the morning and still awake.
A bright red shirt.
A new pair of walking shoes.
Sex.
Avocados.
Tomato soup.
The two blocks to the train.
The sound of the doorbell.
The heady smell of the cheese shop.
Laughter.
An oval tablet four times a day.
Glasses and glasses of water.
A vase of orange tulips winking open.
The careful art of bathing.
A scar you already love.
Pomelos in the green bowl.
The cry of a distant ambulance.
Scavengers rummaging the recycling.
The twinkle of glass.
The deck, sodden and gleaming.
Dreams of swimming and giant movie theaters.
Your father, the evening before departure.
The heft and softness of his shoulders.
Your mother, fixing up a salad.
The slow peeling of bandages.
Tea.
The back of the woman you love.
Her fingers threading your hair.
A slim filament of moonlight.
Slippers.
The slide toward sleep.

You could start anywhere.
Start here.
Because you know
nothing
will be the same again.
And you know the body
is just the beginning.

Small acts of redemption are hiding
where you least expect them,
inkling seeds burgeoning in the dark soil,
an unseen greening,
in you and out of you,
even if you couldn’t quite bring yourself
to believe it. Believe it.
All that is alive, alive, alive.
And there is no choice now
but to walk into that life,
that infinitesimal,
unfathomable geography,
and allow yourself
at last
to be healed.

the luxury of failure

2010-03-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

After the cake had fallen.
After the vase shattered and the vacuum had died.
After she had miscalculated how much water
even the cactus needed. After a poem
had slipped through her fingers.
After she had broken someone’s heart.
After the taxman had taken her savings and the rain
had wiped out the garden. After the apology
didn’t come. After no one noticed her new dress.
After her body became a series of disappointments.
After she had run out of ways to save him and the cord
of her bedside lamp had frayed beyond repair.
After the bolts of the garage door had buckled
under the weight. After she had buried her wild anger.
After the doctors had reached an impasse.
After the weather showed no signs of improvement.
After the coffee failed to revive and the stranger
did not rescue her from loneliness. After desire
had not met with fulfillment. After the moon had
winked out and the sky became a wail of question marks.
After the detour had ended in a mud puddle.
After the horse would not come to feed at her hands.
After the baby refused to be held. After the tear
in her shirt had widened irreparably and the muscle for patience
had exhausted itself. After she could hold her breath
no longer. After winter had pummeled her with frost.
After the hill proved too much for her bicycle.
After the front door swelled and stuck and the window
was a cemetery of moths. After the wind
swallowed her whole. After love was a carpet
of potholes. After even escape eluded her.
After she could not bear another almost.

She did not despair but instead
welcomed the luxury of failure,
the velvet of it warming her skin,
how easy it was to slide into its open arms,
and nestle against its breast.
She thought it would take everything she knew
to fling her weight against it, shoulder it
from her path, sandbag the corners of her house
to keep it from leaking in and drowning the furniture.
She imagined its animal clutch at her throat,
the feral mewling in her ear, the cadaver scent
of it putrefying the air. She had pictured
its hulking footsteps presaging an earthquake ruin
for what she had worked so hard to keep whole.
She had armed herself against the possible wreckage,
kept the medicine cabinet replete with bandages,
left a surreptitious trail of breadcrumbs behind her.

But no.
It turned out failure
was a tiny slip of a thing,
a drop of water that could topple
an army,
a clear-eyed note slicing a thousand cacophonies,
a single seed offering this magnificent invitation:
Again.
Begin again.

let the world spin as it spins

2010-02-19T18:05:00.000-08:00

Eat the last cookies in the box.
Wear the same pair of jeans two
weeks in a row. See the orchid die, leaf
by leaf. Wipe the countertop carelessly,
so it’s sticky as spit the next time
you lean on your elbows wondering
what’s for dinner. Watch hours
of television. Call for pizza, for Chinese,
for the cable company to give you even
more channels. Drive by the gym
without skipping a beat. Wash your hair only
when it starts wilt, when the mirror
produces someone who doesn’t look like she wants
to get laid. Think about sex constantly.
Order cocktails. Play pool. Spend your money
on a massage, on t-shirts from the warehouse sale,
on inflation-priced bagels from the café down the street.
Ignore the obvious fact that the sheets
need changing. Occupy your bed gratuitously.
When you’re done reading for the night,
flop the pages open, straining the jacket.
Allow the avocados to ripen beyond repair.
Stain the kitchen sink with grape stems,
mango peels, olive pits with the meat
still clinging. Use vast quantities of paper towels
for a simple spill of water.
Lavish attention on the minute landscape
between your eyebrows.
Lose time. Ditch the mail into the bulging
plastic bag near your desk. Almost mistake it
for trash. Abandon the task of fixing
the dresser drawer. Turn your car
into a wastebasket.

And when it comes, fall with extravagant
ugliness. Grieve noisily into the balls of your fists.
Push your heels against the carpet, your chest squirming.
Feel the walls of the house vibrate with your pain.
Make pockmarks of your heart.
Collapse if you have to. It is like this.
The world spins as it spins.
No one knows,
even though we all know
this is between
you and you alone.
So yield. Commit your entire body.
Recognize your own astonishing anguish.
Tear it from your skin like a wolf
eviscerates her trapped leg. Shriek like
the downed bird you are.
Invest wholly in your damage.
Lap up each tumescent despair. Swallow
the pinbones of your loss. Caress
every razor edge of not enough. Gift yourself
long, bruising hours of hopelessness.
The world spins as it spins.
Your life is on that same axis,
half shadow, half radiance
and turning, always turning.

what brings you to the next morning

2010-02-09T18:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe someone sang you to sleep.
Or there was a blackout, and you couldn’t articulate
the hand in front of you.
Maybe the bedroom floor was a deserted beach,
your house a moonscape of solitude.
Or clothes had spilled like a rude volcano,
wine glasses from dinner were scattered
on the coffee table and stained with lipstick,
still holding a thimbleful of revelry.

It could have been one of those nights you needed something
you couldn’t name, a close-knit warmth, a Kleenex,
moisturizer, a lullaby cradling your eyelids.
Or else you were claustrophobic from attention,
the hairs on your arm standing on edge, rebellious,
your body tired of life under a microscope
and something of you desperate for escape,
anonymity, a Yosemite field in the thick of winter,
some carcass of a campsite where you could start again,
build your own small, unseen fire.
Maybe you were stranded in between, your heart caught
on some fishing line, half of you wanting a kitchen stool
to lean against, the other half wildly unfamiliar with the act
of staying still.

What I want to know
is what brings you to the next morning.
How you open one sleepy eye after the other,
part the Red Sea of your comfort and let the air,
graceless and obstinate, pull you into the day.
How you accept the hand that may offer either feather
or thistle. You ask for nothing, not a promise
or a warning or a little party celebrating your entrance,
and instead you heave your weariness from the room,
gather your limbs to the center, and rise.

Tell me what keeps you from plummeting backward.
Tell me on what hidden plume of air you allow yourself
that slim caesura of trust.
Tell me the story of your great impossible hope.
Tell me how your face tilts,
squinting for light.

the sacrifice

2010-02-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

I count myself lucky. It was just a few bad cells
threatening an inch-sized plot in the center of my forehead.
I did not run screaming as the roof of the house
I had built with my own hands came plummeting.
I did not watch my mother or daughter disappear
under the rubble. I did not lose a limb, or a life.
Hunger did not set in, the searing in the belly
driving me toward thiefdom. I did not have to wait
for the sky to drop cargoloads of dried beans.
I did not lose my shoes in the furious race
toward water. I did not find myself sitting
in the same row with a stranger who would,
in the name of martyrdom, destroy an entire busload
with a single detonation. I was not a soldier
patrolling a line in the sand on his first deployment,
fingers skittish on the trigger. I was not an orphan
raising siblings in a brutal tent city. I was not
that tent city, teeming with desperate acts of simple survival.
I was not held at knifepoint and robbed of my innocence.
I was not trampled in the heat of hysteria.
I was not sent to my death because of the God I prayed to.

No, I lay there, trusting of the hand slicing into me,
the scalpel so precise it would leave only a trace of itself
after the bleeding stopped and the stitches woven through.
In a week, I would tell the story of the operating table
like an offbeat joke. I would barely remember the trickle of blood
at my temple, the tug at my flesh. The debauched cells
I will have surrendered to the lab and I don’t suppose I will ache
for their return. I will think not of this as a sacrifice,
will forget the temporary frailty of my body to manage
its dissidents, will go on about my business with the same alacrity
and cheerful ignorance I have greeted every other day of my life.

But for now, with the sutures still embedded,
a fresh bandage I fashioned this morning,
and rectangles of tape holding the wound closed,
I am in that rubble. My boots shifty on the sand,
eyes scanning the clouds for the big planes
to come in with reinforcements.
I am sitting on that bus, doing my best to keep track
of who’s climbing the steps and what they’re carrying.
I am keeping a close watch on my water supply,
listening for sinister footsteps behind me,
praying to a busy God for a scrap of salvation,
everything in me clinging to the uncertain, inexplicable fact
of living.

little fish

2010-01-22T17:17:00.001-08:00

As if birth weren’t enough.
So soon the swimming begins, the forage,
the panic of shelter and safety,
cures for hunger and loneliness.

And yet survival
isn’t the answer entirely.
We want a theme song,
God beaming down backstage,
a waterfall confirming our singular bravery.

What are we to make, then,
of our disasters? Are they not equally
spectacular? Can we not thank God
for spinning the story southward,
hellward, away from our golden halos?

Even darkness has its defiant pleasure,
its outrageous glory. Without a flag to herald
our descent, without lyrics to lessen the fall,
without poetry to take the sting out,
we fling ourselves against the current, our muscles
all twist and torque, the body of our heart
shuddering in cold solitude.

We cannot live through anything alone.
The islands we think we can claim for victory
are castoffs from the mainland.
We cannot live through anything alone.
From sheer rock someone articulates a profile.
We cannot live through anything alone.
A desert interrupted by oasis.
We cannot live through anything alone.
Each cry of despair
has an echo.

Here. Take this hand.
It is big enough
for all of us.

emptyfor my brother

2010-01-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

I can imagine your hands, tight against the bathroom walls,
water hammering the sink.
Maybe this is the only place you allow yourself the luxury
of desperation.
Then, inevitably, you leave the door behind,
and each hour piles up like a sword pointing at your gut.
Like the Gladiator you are,
you try to keep up with the carnage.

Last week, we sat on the couch in your living room
and I could feel how tired you were,
something in you heavy and flagging,
but still you stretched your lanky arms around my back
until they gathered me in full, and you were 10 again,
or I was, and I forgot what the story was.

And yet, the narrative insists on telling itself,
and days later it was this embrace that I forgot.
You were careening through so many cracks,
it would have been an act of military precision
not to fall.

Of course, by now, you are only trying to outrace
yourself.

Brother, if I could do anything,
I would take you to the Sierra road I saw this morning,
show you how after so many hours of snowfall,
everything had disappeared – the 18-wheelers’ chain marks,
the tracks of the highway patrol cars barring the smaller exits,
even (I suppose) the carcasses of winter creatures
darting across for home.

All of it empty, wiped clean of noise and mud and ruin,
with nothing but the invitation to come closer.
Even if what would come was pain or heartache or failure,
nevertheless a road, hushed, laid bare,
waiting for you to take it.

strong

2010-01-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

You don't have to be as strong
as you think you do.
You can come limping up the stairs,
stagger into my kitchen for water
and drink it as indelicately as a toddler,
and I will gaze at you with the same wonder
that broadsided me when I first realized
I could love you.
It does not matter if you are lost, or sick, or scared,
if the words you utter are gibberish or song,
if waking up makes your hair look funny,
if you forget the keys, if you burn our dinner,
if disaster is your ally.
You can enter my house like an elephant,
leave dirty handprints against the wall,
chew the mint directly off its pot
and I would whisper your name
like the caress it always is.

Love, I will falter too.
I will drive down a street that says
"Do Not Enter" and I will have missed the sign.
I will bump tender hips into the sharp corners
of every piece of furniture in the house
and curse louder than necessary.
I will make irreversible errors,
clutter the countertop with my messy heart,
leave wounds brutal and bleeding.
I will not fold the laundry into neat corners.
I will step haphazardly into a field of nettles.
I will almost ruin myself to catch you for the split second
you are catchable.

We don't have to be as strong
as we think we do.
If we wanted, we could fall
as easily as plastic soldiers.
We could slide our feet into the gutter
and wait for the rain,
sit so still our breath would sound
like a waterfall miles away.
If we wanted, we could unmake the plans
that married us to safety.
We could take the next exit
instead.
We could feed the world with our spectacular frailty.
We could start all over again.
We could let the glass shatter
into sand.

something for everyone

2009-12-22T18:30:00.000-08:00

I want the water to fill your glass the moment
it sees your thirst.
I want the staircase to meet your footfalls.
I want the line to the freeway to move like breath.
I want the wind flattering your hairline, the rainshower
a welcome refreshment. I want the parking space to fit your car.
I want the birds on your back deck to warble in the exact way
they did during your childhood. I want the photographs
of all your holiday dinners buzzing with a certain unnamable
happiness. I want the dry cleaners to understand
your outrageous requests.
I want the man calling your house to survey
your thoughts on phone companies to remember
the evening is precious as silk. I want your new jeans to not
come undone in the wash. I want snow to land on your eyelashes
like it does in the movies, an etheric, slow-moving kiss.
I want a letter to arrive the moment
you feel most unwelcome of your own company.
I want the scent of lemons in the air. I want the power lines
overshadowed by the view your neighborhood offers at twilight.
I want the downtown ice rink to keep your fantasies aloft.
I want the moon to articulate your most punishing silence.
I want the willow tree revived and teeming, the broken daisies
resurrected and obstinate with brightness.
I want the labyrinth of what ifs narrowed
to a single, poignant sentence.
I want the tulips to be wild as clover, as fog, as good intentions.
I want your heart to cut through its own brutality,
for your body to see everything about you that’s beautiful.
I want love to come at you in thick pats of butter,
in strands of spun sugar, heavy and light as cream.
I want it to bathe your skin until you are nothing
but forgiveness, until your shadows have disappeared,
until all of your perfect right angles have collapsed,
until you are a curve of a curve,
and your hands slide forward and open
and are able, at last, to feel everything.

believe

2009-12-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

Maybe the camera crew is at someone else’s house,
a spotlight haloing over another’s fleshy story.
Maybe the mailman is delivering the good news
to your neighbor, or a different city entirely,
and you come home to a rash of catalogues,
the second notice for a doctor’s bill, a plea
from the do-gooders for whatever you can spare.
Maybe you haven’t cleaned your kitchen floor in weeks,
forgotten to nourish the front garden, spilled too much
coffee in your car, weaving through traffic.
Maybe you are 10 pounds heavier than last year.
Maybe your skin is betraying your age.
Maybe winter is ravaging your heart.
Maybe you are afraid, or lonely, or furious, or wanting out
of every commitment you entered with such vigor and trust.
Maybe you’ve bitten your nails down to the quick,
chosen your meals badly, ignored the advice of those
who know you best. Maybe you are stubborn as a toddler.
Maybe you are clumsy or foolish or hasty or reckless.
Maybe you haven’t read all the books you’re supposed to.
Maybe your handwriting is still illegible after all these years.
Maybe you spent too much on a pair of shoes you didn’t need.
Maybe you left the window open and the rain ruined the cake.
Maybe you’ve destroyed everything you've ever wanted to save.

Still.

If anything, believe in your own strange loveliness.
How your body, even as it stumbles, angles for light.
The way you hold a dandelion with such yearning and tenderness,
the whole world stops spinning.

alliance

2009-12-08T00:16:00.001-08:00

“You have to make an alliance with your anguish,” he said,
“not wage war against it.” And I thought of all the fists
I had shaken at misfortune: games lost
because the shot clock ran out,
a good meal scorched in a forgotten oven,
money dropped on a dress worn only once,
the bully in 6th grade, the math test in 9th,
the wrong outfit at Halloween.
But of course, this isn’t what he meant.

If I were brave enough, I’d tell you how my heart
has raged for love, stretched thin as a high wire.
If I were brave enough, I’d tell you
how my body has been fighting to stay upright
on every precipitous downhill the city
throws at it. If I were brave enough,
I’d climb into your lap and weep with longing.
All I can say is that any attempt at beauty and hope
is land-mined with failure.
And so the perilous track-making begins.
Wending our way through,
there are possible clutches at sunlight, at windows, at yes.
We are each of us inches from death.
We are each of us inches from life.
We are each of us inches from one another.

prayer for my legs

2009-11-11T10:20:00.000-08:00

Carry me back to the Umbrian countryside,
its sunflower fields and coils of hay.
Return me to that restaurant spilling
to the cobblestone street, the wine
we drank slowly to make the money last.
Bring me to the dark courtyard where a family’s
weekend laundry hung and we shared
an impromptu kiss that reminded me
summer wasn’t yet over.
Walk me to the moonlit bridge, the ancient, ambient river,
the carnival, the cones of gelato faltering in the evening heat.
Deliver me to the farmhouse villa, the bread oven
breathing out drifts of red onion and basil and garlic.
Guide me poolside, then in, for leisurely laps
until four o’clock signals our siesta.
Wrap your inches around her torso, the teepee
of her ribs, her supine back.
Lead me to the beach where the water-foam
recedes to reveal a whole city of pale, pink shells.
Hurry me up the train platform just before the whistle blows.
Shuttle me down the aisle of a plane
that will cross the Alps.
Pull me through the apse of a thousand-year-old church,
the Uffizi’s snake of tourists, the fragrant chatter
of a late summer farmer’s market.
Stomp me through puddles of new rain, fresh snow,
a thick pile of maple leaves.
Stay with me through a hard-earned win on the court,
a bike ride along the California coastline,
a peace march, the zigzag down Lombard,
the Green Street stairs, afternoon rollerblading
under the Golden Gate, the climb up the trail in Fairfax
that ends at a waterfall.
Anchor me to gravel, to a surfboard,
to the 31 steps from my kitchen to the front door.
Bend me to the whims of yoga and snowshoeing and the Lindy Hop.
Follow me through six hours of a holiday party,
a babysitting job, an interview in heels,
the elliptical machine at the gym, the blocks
to the butcher’s, a morning of blackberry picking,
the rise of Chenery Street toward cinnamon rolls,
an impromptu jog around the stadium track.
Tiptoe me through the room where my nephew sleeps,
past a family of deer, through a field of the season’s last harvest.
Hold me through long lines at the movies and crowded
downtown trains and gondola rides
to the top of Heavenly.
Fasten me to water skis and costume boots.
Glide me on the ice rink come winter.
Slip me under the tongue
of basketball shoes.
Come. Follow me. Stay close.
I have so much still to tell
even though
I keep forgetting
to thank you.

pear

2009-11-04T07:59:00.001-08:00

These last weeks, it’s been the pomegranate
stealing her attention with its circus of bright seeds.
She has made fancy drinks with it, crushed fistfuls
into a shaker glass, stained
the last millimeters of her fingernails.
Prayers have been made
in her midnight kitchen, tiny jewels
fed into the waiting mouth of a lover,
the counters flecked crimson,
summer swan-diving into autumn,
everything in her flayed open.

When she saw the pear,
she did not take it home thinking it would buy her
time, a better career, more money in the bank.
Though it would be easy to lavish praise
on that first bite, its tart smack against her teeth,
it was not a bible or soothsayer or a pile of stones
pointing northward.
She could extol its hippy silhouette on her windowsill,
but she did not imagine her reflection in its burnished frame.

Still, she could tell you something in her transfigured
before that particular section of the produce aisle,
how among the dalliances of citrus and artichoke,
the set stages of broccoli and purple cabbage,
the comic blunders of peas,
what she saw was an army
of mothers.

signs of autumn

2009-10-28T10:57:00.001-07:00

the first day the scarf comes out
apple cider on the stove
heather grey
rust orange
aubergine
clouds like drifting punctuation marks
the couch
a good book
the coffee table kissed by heels
deep sleep
dreamless night
slow mornings
breath
hands pressing on the car heater
soft skin
chapstick
midsections
casseroles
long embraces
the magic carpet of a leaf pile
children and the first runny noses
store windows announcing Halloween
letting the jaw go slack
wrist-warmers
thick socks
the wind kicking up a notch
the view from Mt. Monadnock
movie rentals
Rt. 128 North
Rt. 2 West
the train tracks in Leominster
Bursey's farm stand
results from the algebra test
tryouts for the winter play
Parent's Weekend
soccer games
wool
afternoon light
a path in the woods
time like gold crystals
the slim margin between evening and night
letting go
winding down
turning in
saying yes, come here,
come here.

Breakfastor Meditations on love

2009-10-08T14:43:00.001-07:00

1.
Butter. Thick cuts of it into a pan.
Two eggs. A white bowl.
The kettle onl.
Espresso teaspooned into a French press.
Twenty rotations of the wrist,
the eggs poured in.
And then, all of it, waiting.
It is a matter of time, of course,
but still. Waiting.
I am waiting.

2.
I do not want to order the complicated pancakes
with the sour cream batter and the stone fruit compote
or the omelet bulging at the seams
with a small farm of fall vegetables.
It’s a shame. This restaurant is known for such specialties.
The chef has won praise in the local press,
a legion of devotees, a street named after him.
The tourists keep coming, the menu keeps growing,
the kitchen staff forced to keep up with the demand.

3.
My father was a magician with maple syrup.
He made it, from scratch, every Saturday morning,
while the French toast soaked in its egg bath.
Water, sugar, maple flavoring.
It took me years to realize this wasn’t the real thing.

4.
New Year’s Day. By the stove, a stack
of crepes. On the counter, smoked salmon,
three kinds of cream cheese, bagels,
fruit salad. Bottles of Prosecco chilling in the fridge.
I am ready.
In minutes, the house will be full of hungry bodies.
The disassembly will begin.

5.
When we drove across country, my sister and I disagreed
on only one thing.
She would rise, grumpy, not hungry at all.
I insisted
on breakfast.
While she sat and I ate, a silence swelled between us.

6.
On a friend’s refrigerator door, family snapshots.
A magnetic alphabet. Drawings from preschool.
A shopping list. Coupons. A reminder from
the dentist. Birthday cards from a recent party.
On mine: a calendar too small to write on.
A schedule of gym classes
I have no intention of attending.

7.
My mother eats an apple every morning.
“I want to be an apple,” she says,
and at first I'm confused because
the only words I can think of are “round,”
“ruddy,” easily bruised.”
But then she elaborates.
It has something to do with the tree.

substitutes

2009-10-07T16:37:00.000-07:00

When I want to remember I am not alone,
apple cobbler.
When I want to act like a teenager, or a kindergartner,
throw fists against a pillow,
four double-chocolate Milanos.
When I want to know that God is listening,
Earl Grey with honey and cream.
When I want to forget the argument,
cucumber, sliced on the diagonal.
When I am ready to face the fear,
lemons.
When I want your teeth in my neck,
a ribeye steak.
When I am ready to say goodbye,
cast one last glance before the daisies fall,
Montefalco at the kitchen window.
When I want to swim the wide channel,
stay parallel to shore,
a fistful of grapes, a thick wedge of Manchego.
When I want silence,
a glass of Armagnac.
When I want noise,
two raspberry-peach Cosmopolitans.
When I am tired,
cold milk, cornflakes in the orange bowl.
When I am impatient,
tangerines.
When I want to make everything disappear,
climb back into the womb,
a trip to Mitchell’s for mint chip.
When I want the moon a little closer,
carrot-ginger soup, a dollop of sour cream,
an intimate pinch of chives.
When the light is too much to bear,
scrambled eggs, wheat toast, apricot preserves.
When I’ve had enough of the rollercoaster,
the ache of the climb, the precipitous pitch into the abyss,
ice water, grapefruit, multivitamins.
When I want to start over,
white rice and butter.
When I couldn’t be happier,
wild salmon, fresh ginger, radishes.
When I miss my mother,
broth, maple yoghurt, sautéed cauliflower, unsalted almonds.
When I miss my father,
Rainier cherries, roast potatoes, fried chicken,
a single square of dark chocolate.
When I miss myself,
tomatoes, mozzarella, basil,
drop after drop of olive oil.

first love

2009-10-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

In her mind’s eye, she is perennially 12, eyeing the basketball court, white sneakers on parquet, shorts hugging her thighs, just before the shot clock begins, all that electric possibility. She is a dreamer yes, but there is a fierceness to this particular dream, a kind of clinging. Her body, fluid but precise, her legs purposeful, trustworthy. She was not a dancer, but underneath these fluorescent lights, before an accordion of bleachers, she could dance. She remembers the strides she took down-court, how it felt like slow-motion even though it wasn’t. She remembers an animal certainty about where she needed to go for the shot. She remembers the ball like home, her body squaring to meet it.

You could say this was her first love, her first contact with something both outside and inside of herself. It was that kind of symmetry. It was that kind of longing. On Saturday mornings, when the games were held, she would arrive at the gym with a small tremble in her gut. The gym was large and loud. There were islands of chaos everywhere, but she steered through them. Game buzzers and referee whistles cut rudely through air, but she didn’t hear them. She maneuvered through these minefields as if nothing in the world could touch her, and found a spot on the sidelines to tighten her laces until she could feel the tongue of the sneakers groove into the tops of her feet. She remembers the smell of the waxed gym floor. She remembers the waistband of her shorts against her stomach. She remembers the prices burnt sienna of the basketball, its thin black stripes cutting into eighths. She remembers her hands like sticky tentacles. She remembers the freckles on her calves, the beginnings of hair on her shins and knees. She remembers the three blue stripes on the top of her socks. She remembers how hungry she was.

Twenty-five years later, she takes to the court like a cautious mother. There are others there, younger, sprightlier, braver than she. It is hard not to worry that she will get hurt. It is hard not to worry that she will get tired. It is hard not to notice the dim wash of pain in her hips, the hiccup of her legs. The sneakers are cement, trapping her ankles. Her shorts swallow her thighs. She is tall and exposed a willow tree. Now she notices everything – the hollow echoes of the gym, the harsh spotlight of the overheads, the heft of her opponent – and she has become the unwitting distraction, the perilous island she must navigate around, her body in a kind of raw anarchy, the parquet too slippery, a scene of possible disaster, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, her love stubborn and exquisite as ever.

strand

2009-09-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Last night, a single strand of her hair
surfaced on my pillow. All day, on the boat,
as I tried righting myself on waterskis, and failing,
I had begun to convince myself
that whatever momentum that had carried us all year
was beginning to sputter and topple.
I gripped the rope as if my life
depended on it, and still, it flew out of my hands.
On deck she was as beautiful as ever. It was not hard
to keep falling in love. When she took to the wakeboard,
her skin gleaming in the Delta sun,
it was almost heartbreaking how easy it looked.
She was floating. She was an angel.
I wanted to dive in after her like a dolphin, follow her trail.
I couldn't.
After all of my attempts to rise above the surface,
I was shivering wildly, my grip
reddened and sore. I climbed into my towel and stayed there,
head down, legs goose-pimpled. She rubbed my back
as if I were a child.
I was.
I told myself it would always be like this,
me trying to hold on to such an unwieldy ride, and she
already aloft and steady, eyes pinching the horizon.
When I came home, I thought,
Maybe this is the beginning of the end, and I began
the terrible act of curling back inside myself,
reeling my heart back in, stowing my memories in the dark.

But no.
I pulled back the cover of my bed, and there it was.
A strand of her, a slim remainder,
a micron of her body resting squarely
where her head had been just last week,
as I lay against her on a Tuesday afternoon.
And I knew
that something of her was still with me,
singing me to sleep.

the larger conversation

2009-09-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

It was not the man on 24th and Mission asking for change.
It was not the baby, sleeping angelic in her stroller.
It was not the trees, the sunshine, the cloudless perfect sky.
It was the coffee menu at Philz.

For the 20th time or the 1000th,
you might have ordered the small decaf French,
just like you always did,
medium cream, light sweet.
It had become a small habit, like taking your shoes off at the door,
flicking the day's mail on the kitchen counter,
shutting the drapes before bed.

You grow accustomed to things so easily,
turn them into a kind of lifeline to order and security and sanity.

You didn't even know what else was on the menu,
would call out to the barista in a voice not unlike
a robot, flat and meaningless.
You thought you sounded determined, certain, confident, hip,
but really, you were unimaginative, plain, paper-thin.
Someone or something could topple you any second,
you knew that, so you clung to your small decaf French
because you were in the market for anything you could rely on,
that wouldn't destroy the slim grip you were keeping on everything.

And yet, today, without thinking
you uttered the words "Ethiopian," and the woman behind the counter
reached back into a different jar to gather up the beans.

It was a small thing, really, but you saw it
for its metaphor, for the larger conversation
you were beginning to have with yourself.
"Look up," is what you were saying.
"What else is there to see?"

close enough

2009-09-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

Because the lighting had struck so suddenly.
Because you came back to the hotel exhausted from the wedding.
Because of the heat.
Because of the strip malls and airfields and the Burger King just off 179.
Because your lover was in another state, waiting for your call.
Because you had had half a glass of wine too many.
Because of the dress you wore, its plunging V.
Because your mother had told you you looked beautiful.
Because of the outline of ponderosa just past your headlights.
Because it was Sunday evening.
Because it was the middle of July.
Because you were 37.
Because you were exactly where you needed to be.

Whatever it was, you looked up, and the stars
looked close enough to touch.

tangerine

2009-08-26T00:22:00.000-07:00

the world, whole and waiting.
a surface entered with a mere fingertip.
hunger and what follows it.
one piece, then another.

and yet, I keep trying to be
the rocket scientist, the chemist, the mathematician,
wanting to make better sense
of what is already so obvious:
circle. skin. orange. sweetness.

Sometimes, what matters
is to eat, and be fed.

life lessons from the street musicians

2009-08-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

The man playing drums outside the Ferry Building
was not asking for change. Instead, a with a set of earphones
spilling music only he could hear, he kept time
on a makeshift snare, a collection of empty buckets
turned on their heads, little tin pans alongside, and bells
strapped to his feet. A handwritten sign out front spoke of his defiance.
“In these tough times,” it said, “I refuse to accept defeat."
And thus the man carved beats out of the early Saturday morning.
The music did not criticize the economy, or his bad luck
on the job market, or the string of misfortunes getting in the way
of health and fiscal happiness. Instead, it shouted its joy into the air,
punctuating the footsteps of everyone within earshot—
the bright-eyed tourists, sweaty joggers, the wild-haired women
selling cheap jewelry, the homeless, the waitress on her way
to the lunch shift, the meter maid, the fortune teller with her
worn tarot deck, the cab driver punching in his first cup of coffee,
the parents juggling twins in a double-wide stroller, the boy
biting into his first summer peach—the music landed on everything
it touch. And it was impossible not to get swept up, too, to start to believe
I had an equal power to ward off the dissonant assaults of the day.
The man did not see me reach in my pockets, nor did he see
the coins I slid his way, but I understood. This kind of music
requires full attention, and he had to keep playing.
So the song stayed where it was, inside the drummer man,
but the echo his hands made couldn’t contain itself,
its sweet rebellion following me home.

falls from grace

2009-07-31T00:57:00.000-07:00

because of the noise she makes in the morning
because of her insistence on closed shutters
because of the way she hesitates before a map
because of the indelicate way she drives
because of her need to be held and touched
long after the argument is over
because of her breezy handling of conflict
because of her conservative approach to a dinner menu
because of her wild swings between hunger and overindulgence
because of the faultlines of her boundaries
because of her unwillingness to bend toward weakness
because of her unawareness of her own body,
her clumsy negotiation of a sidewalk, a bedroom, a door
because of her easy criticisms, her punishing eye,
her self-diminishment
because together they could not always line up the story
they'd begun with, a cozy scene of sexy familiarity
and a smooth stretch of time when there was nothing to do
but lap up their beauty, their stunning possibility
because together they were not as they had once thought,
a pair of puzzle pieces locking swiftly into place
because they were fragile and imperfect and foolish creatures
destined for certain doom and disaster
they were now, and would forever be, taking these falls from grace,
tumbling from the heavens each time they managed to climb back up,
into a clammy, crumbly earth below where, unbeknownst to them,
something was stubbornly, and beyond reason,
taking root.

a light capable of change

2009-07-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, it's just the slant of sun the morning, or a reunion with an old friend. Sometimes it's just good coffee, or a compliment a stranger offers ooking your way. Whatever it is, you realize you've had enough. The fine focus you keep giving your little frustrations. The casual fuming you fan out about your bank account, your job hunt, the condition of your body. All of this adds up, or rather, subtracts into, a flimsy existence, a half-life, an embattled, embittered center of disequilibrium. How can the world not suffer under your dark cloud? How can the bathroom mirror rid itself of all those grey smudges? How can the lemon tree on your back deck not plummet from neglect? Arrows in your foot, at your back, in your heart. Something loveless and uncertain clinging to your neck, dragging you down into the mud. Enough. The light is changing. You are a light capable of change. There is a glow in you hungry for air. There is air in you fiery and free. The street you have been walking leads to nowhere in particular, to a dense dark wood that is better left unknown. Do not mistake that darkness and density for opportunity, for eventual renewal and your ultimate heroism. Turn around. Look up. A sky awaits, an impossible, possible blue.

with the wineglass almost empty

2009-07-06T22:02:00.000-07:00

I am looking at the moon's slow rise
above this city, this windswept hill,
this winding block, this square house,
this little body breathing, unselfconsciously,
into the final stretch of evening. I want
to pray correctly to such a gift, fold hands
together with discrete reverence, bend slight as a breeze
to the window and send a soft song through the glass.
I want to remember how fragile and perfect time is,
how the world's furious moments can fall into a lake-calm,
how clouds like flour can dust even the dirtiest passage,
how the heart can curve into a conch shell,
echo wetly and warmly the ocean it came from.
Love, your fingertips have been here, your lips
a stain of easy welcome, something of my body
imprinted with yours, our various surfaces colliding.
The way we cup around each other like circles.
The duvet of cheek against cheek. The giggle of eyelashes.
How I have begun to taste you even in sleep,
a single bud-drop expanding on my tongue,
sweeter than anything that came before it.

in the last (possibly) last summerfor Margaret Atwood

2009-06-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

1.
I want to love as if I were dying.
Even if you don't know, touch my shoulder
indiscriminately, like an accident
or a small error of space.
I want my heart clawing the air,
gouging into your neck, your
soft eyes, your anything,
devouring what it can.

2.
Broken into, dissected, flayed on a white platter
with blue flowers, the tomato is not greater or less than
the cucumber, the carrot, the yellow pepper.
At the first mile, I had to remind myself
I was not alone. By the last,
I had forgotten aloneness.

3.
A spider in the bed, a spider in the shower,
a fly preening itself on the bedside lamp.
A beetle doing a slow shuffle near the pillow.
They don't know from my morning rituals,
my nighttime reading, the mattress
where my body will slide into sleep. Still,
I want to get a Kleenex, initiate
disposal. But they can't help themselves,
and I know that if I wait a little,
they will move on, perhaps find a way
outside. In the meantime, the house alive
with legs, moving and resting and moving together.

managing the return

2009-06-12T17:58:00.000-07:00

Of course, everything has become a little less lovely, the bananas
ripening too quickly on the kitchen counter,
the pile of mail precipitous and wasteful,
the deck paint cracked and peeling.

Climbing the stairs, it is evident
a molting has taken place here, too, but it isn’t the same
at all. Instead, a fault line, a recession, the body of the house
gone soft. The air needing windows and more light.

The first morning is a rude awakening, an insult
of disproportion. Someone is demanding a refund,
upset with their breakfast order, screaming
from their car.

It continues. Urine trickling from planters,
Trashcans pregnant but neglected. An arrogant blaze of neon.
The city is graceless, unforgiving, full of ways
to go completely wrong and pay for it.

Love, too, has headed a little south,
kindness, forgiveness, awareness, thanks –
it turns out these were rafts to hold onto in the flood,
but here the dirt is parched and wanting.

So here’s what’s left: the moon,
her bittersweet face gazing from above,
something in her eyes saying,
Yes, I know.

freedom

2009-05-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

The courts here said no to certain marriage, but maybe
love is always a matter of time and this isn't the season just yet.
I'm imagining a day when pronouns won't matter except for "we"
and "us," and the protest lines will disappear or better still, unite.
Until then, bibles trotted out, pronouncements made, sides defended,
and a flurry of reasons why matrimony shouldn’t be bestowed on those
who can commit to it in earnest. But when the dust settles, and this battle ended,
love will be an outstretched hand, a proffering of peace that has no foes.
And we will understand the state of this more perfect union:
Each new morning, a fact of freedom. All that sunlight tumbling in.

dayenu

2009-05-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

if only for this plank of deck.
if only for this arrow of sun.
if only for this cup of flour, this couch cushion, this arch in the foot.
if only for eight in the evening.
if only for a measure of drumbeats.
if only for a dab of cold water on the face.
if only for yesterday.
if only for never.
if only for “how are you” and “come here” and “please”
if only for an hour’s nap, a scattering of birdseed, a full rotation of gears.
if only to remember the letters of my first alphabet.
if only for the deepening lines in my forehead.
if only for scars, for errors in judgment, for leaps of faith, for intuition,

for fresh footfalls on an old path.
if only for a river of insects, electrified by early summer.
if only for the outline of mountain, the sketch of a word,

the thinnest suggestion of moon.
if only for pound cake, for a flat of strawberries,

a stiff wedge of cheese, a glass of pink lemonade.
if only for thirst.
if only for sleep.
if only for death.
if only for a climb to the waterfall, a clutch of fur in a pine tree,

a story, a fable, a dream.
if only for the pit of one mango.
if only for a splinter.
if only for a soft hand on a sore shoulder.
if only for a purple shawl over an old bureau, a box of yellow tablets,

a haircut, a hiccup, a headache.
if only for a dim but precise memory.
if only for lost and tragic language.
if only for an unsent letter, or too many letters.
if only for a late-night dance.
if only for a lie.
if only for the long and lonely walk home.
if only for a clatter of seabirds, the first bubble of coffee,
if only for drowsy, for hungry, for can’t get enough.
if only for love.
if only for stones skipping across a pond.
if only for a narrow light in the hallway at midnight.
if only for a single, slippery yes.

I must offer myself.
whole, shattered, fleshy, full of disaster and ache and fury and spectacular neglect.

here is a thing of beauty. I must take it.
here is a thing of sorrow. I must take it.
here is a body in all its innocence and failure. I must take it.
here is a raw heart, breaking but alive.

I must stay close. somewhere a piece of music is buried in the rubble,
a steam of fresh bread is rising from the oven,
a sliver of dust is flying toward the stars.

instructions upon waking

2009-04-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

Ignore the balls of dust on the rug, the laundry pile metastasizing, the reams of mail spilling from the kitchen counter. The blanket on the couch does not have to be folded into four perfect corners. The dishes from yesterday can stand another soak. A shower is unnecessary. Overlook the uneven, mismatched topography of the living room, the coats you have cast off on your writing chair, the knapsack of dirty gym clothes, the books you haven't read, the wrinkled inserts of magazines littering the coffee table.

Turn the heat on. Make coffee. Look out the window. Consider the contours of your body. Put socks on. Know that someone else is thinking of you, as they dress and gird themselves for the day. They are thinking, perhaps, of your lips, or your hands. They are thinking of your warmth, your long limbs, your smile, the way you know exactly how to touch them. They are not scanning the house for crumbs, urging you to vacuum. Imagine this a day of no fault-finding, no derision, no pulverizing ache to do a better job. Make breakfast. Eat until you are full.

and when we are through

2009-04-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

and when we are through there will be singing and silence,
the book we were reading open to the particular page we loved,
the mug we drank from daily stained with our lips,
the bed embedded with our soft imprint.
there will be a great lifting of hands and wine glasses,
stories resurrected and sifted and catalogued,
the flag with the family crest flown and saluted.

and when we are through there will be what we cannot
take with us: children dipping toes into the first pool of summer,
the garlic fields down 101 and the air heavy with their perfume,
an urge to take a midnight walk, the curtains billowing with spring,
the sound of the guitar after months of neglect.

and when we are through there will be too much and not enough,
the coffee pot will be emptied and refilled, desserts surrendered
to the long table brought in from the garage, a new geography of photographs
in the living room, prayers rendered into song, hands on the backs
of the chairs of strangers, an entire room contained by memory.
there will be dancing even, spontaneous twirls in the kitchen,
or under moonlight, or in the shower, getting ready to greet the guests.
there will be private moments of anguish and the small disasters of grief.
a strawberry will fall from the pyramid and threaten a stain on the carpet.
cracks will appear on the ceiling, in the tub, on the steps leading to the front door.

and when we are through there will be an echoing house, piles of paper
to sift through, phone calls to return and notes to write, a diminishing stack
of dishes. there will be objects found behind a desk, small tokens of fresh value,
a song that will begin to take on meaning, a favorite chair left permanently empty.

when we are through the weeds will flourish, and algae will threaten the pool,
but someone will enter the house as if it were a church, an altar, a rite of passage,
and feel the walls visibly pulsate, as if they were still breathing.

right in front of me

2009-04-09T20:52:00.000-07:00

The note says, "Come," and I don't hesitate. I put on my orange jacket and go outside, where a carpet of daisies winds around to somewhere unseen. It is a path but also not a path. Order and also disorder. The grass below is a pulse of green. No one is around but I hear something. Or maybe it's the wind. Or just me, moving my way through the field. I look down again and the note says, "Let it out." Let what out, I wonder, and then I realize I am holding my breath. I let it out. I look down. The note says, "Now what?" and I want turn it over to get the answer but there is none. I want someone to show up like magic and give me a shopping list. I want a loudspeaker to come on, directions from Mapquest, an instruction booklet with finely rendered drawings showing me the hardware I need, my father's voice, the outlines my high school English teacher made us draft before starting our book reports. I'm looking all around, almost frantically now, for where to go and what to look for and how to move and what to say, thinking that I am behind, lost, out of touch, all wrong. And when I look down again, the paper has gone blank, and then it starts to disintegrate right in my hands, and then it's a shred of thing before it disappears entirely. Then it's just my hands, and now all I see are the lines there, arched and curved, railroad-tracked, hieroglyphs of unknown origin, and at first I think, I can't possibly read this, or understand it, but then I do, and I do.

how to get everything you’ve ever wanted

2009-03-31T11:53:00.000-07:00

First, you must believe yourself worthy.
This is not the same as deserving.
This is not a promotion, a raise, a graduation.
This is not the prize you win after countless attempts at winning.
This is you standing naked in an empty house at midnight,
the street below dark and silent, the fruit bowl in your kitchen
brimming with oblong shapes that eventually you recognize
as bananas. This is you aligning yourself with the stationary and the shifting:
the broken light bulb, the foghorn, the water tower, the power cord,
the orange chair you write in, the carpet stain that won’t disappear,
the sound of morning cars on Guerrero, the swaying palm tree, the laces
on your basketball shoes, a stack of paper, a water bottle snapped to your bike,
a piece of lint your lover removes from your cheek, that cheek, that lover,
the new blossoms on the lemon tree, the toilet that needs to be flushed twice,
the grooves on the coffee table, a calculator that needs only sunlight
to turn it on, the man who cut your hair, his pierced lip, his quick scissors,
the letters your grandfather sends, the gas pump, neon, frozen waffles,
a stack of martini glasses, doorways, picture frames, kitchen remodels,
long white envelopes bulging with receipts, a backpack filled with dirty gym clothes,
an apple tree in hibernation, empty check boxes, the steps outside City Hall,
a balloon escaping the clutch of a 3-year-old, tears barreling down her cheeks,
an anchor, a crossing guard, a detour, a yield sign poised on the lip of the highway.

Forget the pulverizing mirror, that blistering microscope of discrepancy.
You are not less than but equal to.
Throw away the movie reel casting you as the villain, the buffoon, the mistake.
You are not less than but equal to.
Turn from the narrow dead-end road book-ended by barbed wire.
You are not less than but equal to.
When he tells you you’re beautiful, say thank you.
When she holds your hand driving across the bridge, say yes.
When the morning opens, say hello.
When the light flickers out, say sleep.

my new poetry project - VERSE PURSE!

2009-03-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

Introducing Verse Purse, original and inspirational 10-line poems for reading on the go! Choose an entire year’s worth or pick your theme:

relationships / love
personal reflection
spirituality and growth
food & travel
writing / creativity
the seasons / holidays
the environment / nature / animals
athletics / sports
politics / current events

prices:
$19.95 for each year (2006, 2007, 2008 available)
$12.95 for each theme

Verse Purse is printed on glossy, double-sided thick-stock paper. Two sizes are available (small & medium print). For more information, call me at 415.265.0085 or email maya@pursenverse.com.

no place else

2009-03-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

you see it always, can’t help it, even lost, you see it, tiny light down the hallway, a place to tiptoe toward, the hint of a destination even though you know it’s not the real one, not the final landing spot, resting place, not home exactly, but somewhere in between, and what’s lucky about that is you don’t think the world is out to get you, beat you down, encourage your failure and ultimate demise, which is why you allow yourself the luxury of waiting just past when others might flee, which is why you can keep yourself from fleeing, and here you are. not fleeing, even when one of your friends cautions you against staying in a relationship that may not have a future, a relationship in which the odds are stacked firmly against you, and if this were her she would have left long ago, but then again she never had your willpower, your trust, your faith in the unknown, your love, even, of uncertainty, and how odds stacked against you is to you a perfectly reasonable way to proceed, you have always been stubborn, and now, now that you have found a place for your love to land, you are even more stubborn, even more willing to test the faith of what you can’t control, and when your lover called you yesterday afternoon, when she dialed your number from a hotel three thousand miles away in order to talk to you, to hear your voice, to find a place of rest and assurance there, you saw it again, a tiny light down the hallway, something telling you not to leave just yet, not to abandon ship, not to get out while you could, when you might salvage something of your heart, and you realized that this was the only way choice, to come forward, crawling if you had to, out of the dark, toward that light, that there was no place else for you to go.

clarity

2009-03-01T10:46:00.001-08:00

One does not always have to leap,
full-throated, into the fire.

This morning, the rain.
Fat drops of it on the ceiling.
Other than that, a silent house.
Such a gift, this solitude, this baptismal wash,
this lack of fire. From each still room,
I could see almost everything.

all that light

2009-02-22T08:46:00.001-08:00

even if it's not possible
to start completely over,
there is still this:
the day, opening into itself
and you, parting the curtains,
seeing all that light come in.

inventory

2009-02-12T00:29:00.000-08:00

this love
is enough
to fill everything.

thanks to the body-delivererswith a nod to Sonya

2009-02-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

Thank you to the basketball, the frying pan, the bed.
To parquet, to Teflon, to the count in the thread.
To the court, to the kitchen, to a sphere of moonlight.
To the arc, to the flip, the caress in the night.
To speed, and to patience, and tenderness too.
To teamwork, to solitude, to me and to you.
Thank you to fingertips, to taste buds, to tongue
To shot clocks, to timers, to alarm bells unrung.
Thank you to warm-up, to bite-size, to kiss.
To mascot, to fork, to the hand you can’t miss.
To rules and to recipes and the laws of attraction
Thank you to instinct and fervor and action.
To wins and to clean plates and perfect romances.
Thank you even for misfires and failures, last chances
Thank you to solid, to liquid, to skin.
To outstretched, and outward, and always, within.
Thank you to grace, and to nuance, and subtext.
Thank you for this touch, and the next, and the next.

let each gift take hold

2009-02-03T00:31:00.000-08:00

Stop moving so fast, racing past street signs
like a runaway. Don't abandon your luggage
at the nearest depot. Unclench from the desire
to diminish, then disappear.

Come inside. Take off your shoes. Stay for dinner.
Here is a cup of tea, an oatmeal cookie, a novel.
Here is a fireplace, a pair of slippers, bed.
Here is the moon, and above that, the heavens.
Here is a good dream you might wake up from.
Here is everything you see, and everything you
can't quite. Now lift your head up,
with your hands if you have to,
and let each gift, singly and in its own time,
take hold.

a dime in the asphalt

2009-01-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-08T22:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T21:08:00.000-08:00

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.

"Everything you need is here"a song I wrote that needs music(with thanks to Jean R. for the reminder)

2008-12-25T09:33:00.000-08:00

You walk down a rainy street
Looking at the fallen leaves
and think of all the crazy dreams you had

You can't find a bit of moon
And winter has come too soon
but it's never really all that bad

chorus
Because everything you need is here
even when the sky refuses to clear.
Everything, everything you need
is here.

You wish you'd chosen something else
You keep tripping on yourself
Just trying to keep the horizon in your sight

You think your grass is hardly green
You're sighing at the things that could have been
You're never still enough to see what's right.

chorus
But everything you need is here.
Not yesterday, tomorrow, or next year.
Everything, everything you need
is here.

If you don't know where you are
just look at your feet.
If you don't know what to say
just say what you mean.

You saw what you thought you wanted
But you stood by the door and stayed outside it
You feel so far from where the road began.

You threw your pennies in the river.
You want more than this but think you'll never
But somewhere there's a voice that says you can.

chorus
Because everything you need is here.
Your life is calling you my dear
Everything, everything you need
is here.

Everything you need is here
even when the sky refuses to clear.
Not yesterday, tomorrow, or next year.
Your life is calling you, my dear.
Everything, everything you need
is here.

beginnings

2008-12-21T23:32:00.000-08:00

At 10, she rode her bike fearlessly, even though it was just the streets of suburban San Luis Obispo, even though her neighborhood was flat and sleepy and without any visible drama; she made it happen on her bike, turned lawn spigots into an obstacle course, used the gravel at the end of her driveway as a place to practice skidding, riding hard in what the highest gear afforded her before coming to a jarring stop before the low pile, sticking her foot out on the pavement, threatening herself with a sprained ankle, a broken wrist, skin torn into bits.

How she learned to ride this way, enamored with danger, she can’t remember. She can remember, at 5, plummeting from her bicycle on a steep downhill and landing flat on her face, her bottom lip a balloon for almost a week. She can remember how loudly she screamed when she tumbled and her body hit the pavement at full speed. She can remember how much it hurt to fall like that, but what she can’t remember is how she ever got back on, and how, five years later, she was attempting a set of tricks on a different, faster bike that would undoubtedly cause her more harm, that could lend itself to further disaster. And yet, she rode.

More importantly, she wonders how she can replicate that same fearlessness now, that charge ahead, that feeling of sheer capability and nerve. She wonders how she can get that kind of wind back in her sails again.

. . . . . .

Let’s start over. Say you are a girl of 10. You are a tomboy. You are a little afraid of what other people think of you but what you aren’t afraid of are the elements. You will run around in the rain for hours to see how soaked you can get, so you can see how much your mother will gasp at your foolhardiness once you get home. You will leap from enormous sand dunes without looking where the bottom is. You love getting dirty, cleaving buttons from their notches when you play an impromptu game of softball dressed inappropriately. And yes, you will get on a bike and attempt a trick you have no experience in executing, nor any teacher to help you out with the particulars. All you know is the picture you have in your mind of your bike catching air, your legs splayed like the ones you’ve seen in those posters of Motocross professionals. All you have is your bike, and a Sunday afternoon, and an empty driveway and a quiet street. No one is watching, and that has no bearing whatsoever on the kind of risks you are willing to take, because all that matters is that picture you are carrying, you being airborne.

. . . . . .

Let’s start there. No one watching. Quiet. Emptiness. Sunday. Just you and your bike. You can use another word for “bike.” Any one will do. You and your heart. You and your love. You and your poetry, your hands, your eyes, your desire, your wisdom, your lack of wisdom, your simple but urgent instinct to leap, change shape, improvise, reimagine, recreate.

Let’s start here. An act of creation. Risk. Forgetting that you fell, once, long ago. Forgetting the injury, your fat lip, your skinned knees, the gravel still embedded there. Knowing that each fall was unavoidable and perhaps even necessary. Seeing the intelligence of the fall, and then forgetting even that. Starting over. Starting now. Starting here.

ice skating

2008-12-07T19:54:00.000-08:00

“Just fall,” she said, and of course, at 13, falling’s easy.
You do it everyday, ballooning embarrassments
in the locker room, in English class, singeing your hair
over the Bunsen burner 6th period, a mispurchased outfit
calling attention to your breastlessness, your too-bony hips,
a school dance dismantling your chances for a boyfriend.
the lack of everything you wish would hurry up and get here.
So when she said it, her stare widening under arched brows,
there was disbelief and impatience in her voice, in the way
she eyed my frame, how she couldn’t understand the difficulty
in allowing this self-induced tumble, a brief horizontal flirtation
on the outside corner of the rink, where there was no one watching,
no one there who would stare at me with their leveling ridicule
as I lay on my knees to get the idea of what falling would feel like.
She didn’t understand my hesitation, didn’t understand why I didn’t
just shove off and go, speed down the lane like the rest of the skaters,
make long wide arcs in time to the Christmas music blasting out
the speakers rink-side, didn’t understand my wobbly comportment,
why I kept looking down but not out, why I insisted on being left
behind while she and her sister glided past like little snow angels,
like mini Olympiads. She couldn’t see the lock of my ankles
against the skates, didn’t know the heat of my back at the inside of my jacket,
my stiff arms, my flighty, fearful heart doing its best to keep me upright.

“Just fall,” she said and I couldn’t do it, not even when she showed
me how, splattering herself comically on the ice, buckling her knees,
stretching her arms flat against the cold wet, not even when it looked
so easy to just give into the rules of gravity, that sweet slip earthward,
a tumble to elicit giggles and revelry and a reason to form an impromptu
snowball to hurl at a younger sister, not even then. Standing rigid
on her right, never too far from the edge, my palms outstretched to
ward off any possible fall, I had never felt so fragile,
so far from safety, ice so slick, a sea of skaters swimming by,
“Just fall,” she said, “so you know how it feels” and instead I thought
about the poem I could write about ice skating, a beautiful poem
about grace and twilight and December and the visible air
coming out in bursts all around, small children squealing their
way around a circle, teenagers holding hands shyly, an old man,
maybe a grandfather, teaching his granddaughter something of his
past, I thought about that poem, and perfection, and the glide
and symmetry of skates, and how white the ice was, and the
mother grip of winter, and the warmth inside afterward, hot
drinks sipped gratefully, all this love intact and pure.
And then, lost in my own impossible dreaming,
I fell.

at first, I envied them their easy love

2008-12-01T17:42:00.001-08:00

at first, I envied them their easy love,
their spot of sun, their sand-kissed boy,
their wagging dog, their picnic sandwiches,
the blanket holding a cache of toys and sunscreen
and novels still stiff at the spine.

at first, I envied them their sweet lemonade,
their wide rectangle of soft, forgiving grass,
their roomy car, their sweaters waiting in the back seat,
as I rode past, solitarily, on a bike
that would take me, straining,
up the long hill to a long bridge,
where traffic and a strong headwind would offer
little in the way of a beautiful distraction.

on my back, a bottle of tepid water,
my license, a credit card, two dollars in change,
three small tangerines rolling about vulnerably,
a thin cotton shirt that would not lend itself to warmth
if the weather turned sour.

on the return trip, riding back toward the water,
sun dipped low but not yet down, I passed the spot
where two hours before, a family had frolicked perfectly
in the wide swath of Sunday. They were on their way
back to the car, now, but I heard them before I saw them,
the toddler, too tired, screaming his last exertions,
Dad heaving the carcass of the picnic over his shoulder –
a dirty blanket, Tupperware minus their lids - and Mom,
balancing the boy against her torso, had to let go
of the trio of pails and matching shovels she’d hoisted
in her fist. The novels, unread, got lost somewhere
in the shuffle toward the car.

I was still armed with half a bottle of water, had spent
none of the coins on frantic calls to friends, was never sidelined
by a flat next to an unfamiliar street corner, had not needed
my license or the credit card to get out of a bind. The tangerines
I had eaten somewhere between 1 and 3, and now their rinds
lay flat and serene at the bottom of my knapsack.

Coasting past the family, I saw Mom swivel in my direction,
and Dad eye me as he popped the truck and ditched
the dirty things inside. At first, I envied them their easy love,
but riding, solitarily, on my sturdy bike, arms free
to steer my wheels anywhere I pleased, I wondered if, in fact,
they envied mine.

immersion

2008-11-17T08:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you have to blend in or disappear,
glaze over, hide, be silent, be unremarkable, lose
the way, feel impotent, forget the point, get dirty,
trip over your tongue, overestimate your power, underestimate
your exhaustion, fall behind, not know the language,
break your stride, stub your ego,
come panting in in last place.

This morning, I couldn't help myself.
I saw the Atlantic and just leapt in.

To my left, a god slid through the waves
like a seal. To my right, a ballerina
pirouetted around ropes of seaweed.
In front and behind, a cache of children,
giddy with sun, bobbed through a line of foam,
their innocence intact.

Flapping my arms in saltwater,
I was neither the picture of achievement
nor grace.

But no one was watching.
They were all too busy
swimming.

eternity

2008-11-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

Of course, we haven’t been promised a thing,
not forever or next year or even tomorrow.
This moment, this half of a half of a second,
is the only thing we can ever truly call
ours.

It’s not that I don’t want
the sun’s full capacity, or the waterfall at it’s boldest roar,
or a forest of birdsong and deer prints,
or the ripest apple from the season’s first harvest.
One could always imagine a lighter, fresher version of here,
dream a little wider, fashion more art from the long,
grey sidewalk.

But this is what happens when I allow time
to slither by instead of muscling it forward:
The peanuts on the flight to Miami, lunch.
The serpentine line at the bank, rest. A crowded bar,
heat and kinship. Your kiss,
one lucky eternity.

clover

2008-11-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

It grew, without intervention, in the front yard,
despite the less-than-fertile soil, despite the first
unexpectedly arid weeks of autumn, despite the garden’s
dangerous proximity to a litter-strewn street,
despite dog droppings and sticky sap, despite
telephone wires and a carpet of fallen foliage left
to rot and disappear into obsolescence.

And yet, unaided, unwatched, untended,
the clover insisted, answering this spectacular neglect
with a steady, steely patience, waiting
for a rare rain or the fickle generosity
of a stranger emptying the last inches from an old water bottle.

So now, November, and an anachronism of spring
has sprung. What was barren has entered into the thick
of an immaculate conception. Something fleshy is on the verge,
sprouting its bright green wings.

I don’t know how long you will stay close,
warming my skin with yours, breathing into me
your moist and swirling air.
But I am certain that even this brief oxygen
will be enough.

this day opens

2008-11-05T08:20:00.001-08:00

I don't think it is possible
to want too much.
The morning isn't even here
but already my heart is racing.

We can't always make sense
of what we yearn for, but the act of yearning
is what keeps everything alive.
Even the silence of 2 a.m. is full of promise.

This day opens like a poem
waiting to be written.

whisper

2008-10-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

how you lay your cheek against mine in the dark,
slid a soft hand behind my neck,
bent so close to my ear, I could feel how deeply
you were breathing.

you said nothing,
not even a whisper,

but I knew exactly
what you meant.

I wanted the birds to tell me something.

2008-10-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

I wanted the birds to tell me something.
Two birds, pre-coital, on the wire,
their wings in a frenzy, while we ate,
nearly silent, on the deck.

I chuckled at their brief but passionate display,
the metronomic tilt the wire made
as they whipped through their routines.

I thought about how simple love is
for certain creatures. How sometimes all it takes
is to say "I see you. Do you see me, too?"

The birds didn't stay long, through two or three bites
of steak, our forks scraping the white plates,
but sometimes it's brevity that's most exquisite,
that leaves the deeper mark.

I didn't know whether, later, your hand
would reach for mine, or if I would call your name
with new tenderness.

I wanted the birds to tell me something,
but they flew away so quickly, and the wire, eventually,
returned to itself, and I finished
the last of my dinner, still
a little hungry.

untitled

2008-10-15T12:36:00.001-07:00

It’s not that that the world will snap into place
like a Tinker Toy or a long buried puzzle piece
rummaged, at last, from behind an ancient
cushion. It’s not that the fruit will fall from the tree
at its pinnacle of ripeness and leap, plump and perfect,
into your waiting hands. It’s not that the line will part
or the gridlock evaporate or the fog fissure into
clarity. It’s not that October will segue into bright blue
summer. This is not how it works. The light at the end of the tunnel
needs a tunnel.

how we are not alone

2008-09-30T09:17:00.001-07:00

because a light on the other side of the street reveals
someone more insomniac than you.

because the camera made its way into the carry-on,
not for the traveler, but those staying behind.

because the daisy, its boastful yellow,
begged for a closer look.

because you found yourself being stared at
by horses.

because the church bell rang precisely at noon,
and all of the stores slid closed.

because someone else’s charcoal fire
made your own mouth water.

because you are afraid of losing him
in a crowd.

because of the mournful sound of train whistles.

because your father let you see him cry.

because a palm against a cheek
steers the world into softer focus.

because the poplars insist on
weathering the winter.

because of lighthouses.

because of shadows.

because of a shared memory of perfume.

because of the sound of feet on cobblestones.

because of window boxes.

because of the man spinning pizza dough
like a circus act.

because the apple tree freed itself of dessert.

because you could hear the waterfall
from a mile away.

because she understands
your every look.

because the martini glasses came in fours.

because the cashier’s hand grazed your palm,
despite the coins between you.

because even if the first words fail,
the next ones won’t.

because the car in the next lane signaled left.

because of the stone wall you found in the woods.

because the dog returns at a single
whistle.

because of the brilliant descent of leaves,
and the pile that beckoned the neighbors.

because a handful of blackberries saved you
the last miles home.

because the stars look as if they’re winking.

unintentional lessons

2008-08-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

how the redwoods, though burning, left roots enough to bear generations.
how the mint has begun to grow in a jar of water.
how the cat came back long after you’d believed it gone.
how even a moonless night can reveal a road, a mailbox, a house.
how a freshly painted wall is the map of your freedom.
how the wind dislodges the honeysuckle but leaves the sidewalk intact.
how a song released in a highway car unburdens the lungs.
how the silence of the phone is its own currency.
how easily sunlight tilts a face upward.
how the long walk toward ice cream cancels the guilt.
how the wisteria kept crawling skyward despite the neighbor’s chemical assault.
how a piece of paper can enrapture, consume, and disassemble.
how the light never goes off in the refrigerator.
how you said “yes” but meant “not really.”
how the gut delivers the truth.
how you let the peach ripen until it was as sweet as you wanted.
how you need a key for your car, then gas.
how much better you see yourself naked.
how the new furniture arrived just in time.
how you needed a push to make the trip.
how ice hovers in a glass, then disappears.
how a left-hand turn into traffic leaves you exhilarated.
how his smile made you forget how old you were.
how sand is easier to walk on barefoot.
how you forgot your wallet in the car for a whole day.
how after she said the words, “I’m always anxious,” both of you felt better.
how you didn’t need a second cup of coffee to wake up.
how 31 stairs separate you from the front door.
how it’s better to look down than look away.
how your mother saved the fallen plums, lay them in a white bowl
at the foot of your kitchen window.
how you didn’t even have to ask.