Poetry
I made a pact with the birds when I was a little boy.
I fed them crumbs of my grandma’s cornbread
and memorized their colors and their names.
I promised to pick up their fallen nests and put them back,
if they’d just pop in and pipe at me from time to time,
when I am sad, when I am in love.
Morning licks
the nectar of Night off her fingertips
and hums content.
She sucks on dew, bites the lip of dawn,
she moans into the mouth of the earth,
waking the world with the waves of her hips.
You are the sea:
a hush of waves on the surface
but you go deep and deep
and deeper than the light,
a belly full of strange things
beautiful without the sun.
You wore gold eyeshadow
in fall, and green in spring
and in winter you wore
no eyeshadow at all.
In summer, you wore the sun
and all year, my love, my love.
Kiss me; my chest is a lantern
I am sundown with love
I am marigold with love
I am raspberry with love
I am blood orange with love
I am embered with love for you.
You decided to teach yourself
how to flip pancakes
until the kitchen and the cat
and you and me were covered in batter,
until you whooped in joy, cheering
in excitement, dropped your one success.
To keep the gloom at bay:
laugh every day.
Laugh a Herman Munster laugh.
Laugh a colorful painting laugh.
Laugh a marshmallow sugar laugh.
Laugh at your own jokes.
Laugh at mine.
Laugh until your ribs are so full and aching
there’s no room for the wolf under them.
You love like this: a headfirst love, an outright love,
a vigilant, attentive love,
a stubborn love, a headstrong love. You love
the way I have always wanted to be loved:
with all of your insides and with all of your outsides,
you love with your careful fingers;
you are always untangling the tangles of me.
These are the colors of your love: your lips
part from my mouth flush claret, your teeth beneath
my ear clip pearl, your hands wander blue
beneath my clothes. Your voice is citrine and daffodil,
your skin scours blush by desire’s rag,
you peak and shudder through saffron and indigo;
you give me a palette of lights and ask me to paint.
We kiss,
my stomach
full of seashells
and saltwater,
my mouth a cavern
where coelacanth and nautilus
tell secrets of the origin of the earth,
my mouth a living fossil,
your mouth a storm.