Poetry
Do you remember
the time we walked
after the rain?
Earthworms slunk
up through the mud
and the crows in the trees
shook droplets from their wings
before swooping down to eat.
You hopped like a child
through the puddles,
so proud of yourself
with every splash
and I thought of winter,
always rainy here,
and maybe we’d have to
bundle up against the chill
but there might be more days
like this in store for us.
I used to think a hole in the heart
could be patched like drywall.
All you had to do was
cut lines of poetry out
of a library worth of chapbooks
and weave them into a mesh.
Place it careful over the hole,
don’t let it bunch up and fold.
Stir up a spackle of music
and nature: rainstorms and Vivaldi,
maybe, or crows and The Crows,
trowel it on thick and layer it
over the sorrow hole,
over the ragged edges
of the leaky wound
and seal your worries in,
seal your fevers in,
seal your rage and your love,
remind a heart
it is the thing that holds it all,
and when you are done
sand it all smooth,
cure it over with a coat
of the most colorful paint
you can find in the art shop,
red if you want to be traditional,
but damn, just go with whatever,
if it strikes your fancy.
That’s all a little wrong, of course:
you heal by days,
just days and days,
but it doesn’t hurt any more
to beauty them up while they pass.
You can feel a city ache
if you stand on its streets
in the middle of the night,
when all its citizens
sleep quiet in their beds.
You can feel it, a creak and a groan,
almost titanic, almost tectonic,
a body of concrete and bone,
every street light clicks automatic
through its colors like a heartbeat
and you can stand there in the stream
of it, learning to loathe yourself.
Understand you are not the only one
hating yourself into the asphalt.
You are not the only one
pulling skyscrapers down on your head.
You are not the only one
crying out to the newspaper boys
on their early morning routes,
read all about it! read all about it!
Here is a man who breaks his ribs
from the inside.
Here is a man who gnaws
on a mouthful of teeth.
Hush. Hush.
Oh, it hurts,
but the whole city hurts,
you are not alone in it,
and even if they sleep
while you wander mad-eyed
and awake through the empty streets,
remember:
You are a fine thing.
You are constructed well,
brick by brick and bone by bone,
remind yourself how tall you stand,
how many people scurry into you
to find shelter,
open every story
of you and let the breeze
wash the stale out of you.
Tell the newspaper boys
to rewrite that goddamn headline:
Here is a man
who makes it to sunrise again.
I.
I cannot write your name
without tearing the paper
and now there are piles
and piles of torn pages
and nothing of substance
written on them.
II.
Your name, spoken,
is to lick a lit candle:
fire and light and
the taste of wax melting
into the haze and snap
of pain.
III.
I would christen ships with you
to sink them. I would make
reefs of them, teeming with
the life of the sea, and then
I would slash myself open
on the coral in the deep,
conjuring sharks
and the teeth of sharks
into the blue-red-blue.
IV.
I would chisel your name
into foundation stones
to bring castles to their knees.
V.
I would bite your name
into the skin of my lover’s wrist
to break the bones beneath.
VI.
Whisper it;
scarce out,
to tear tongue
from the cave of mouth.
VII.
Think it;
aneurysm
and burst.
My love for you is an ocean,
fathomless fathoms
of blue black sea,
but if my love is an ocean,
you are a shore of crags.
You are a snuffed out lighthouse,
a vacant tower on a beach
of rocks, lightless and hushed.
You cast out no warning
that I should not sail near.
You shipwreck me.
You claw my hull open
on the sharp corpses
of dead coral, on shark’s teeth,
on the glass knives of obsidian
islands belched up in smoke
from the volcanic deep.
All my treasures have spilled out
into your treacherous shallows,
swallowed by surf and tide,
to sink and whirl in the eddies
among the hulks of others
who ran aground you before me.
My love for you is an ocean,
and you have a mad captain’s graveyard
where it meets the earth of you.
The first time I told you
I wanted to set myself on fire
you said you wanted to be
a rainstorm.
The last time
you wanted to be
a match.
I need you to kiss me
like my mouth is a timebomb
and the only way to defuse it
is to clip the red wire
of my tongue with your teeth.
I’m teaching myself
to love broken things.
Books with loose bindings
and misplaced pages.
Coffee cups with chipped
lips and snapped handles.
The rusted old tractor
in my grandfather’s yard
that hasn’t rumbled in years,
and the sparrow nest
in its belly full of eggshells
a tabby cat tore open.
A burnt patch of grass,
a pile of glass taken in
by a family of gravel.
An old red oak,
opened and weeviled,
that becomes a home
for new and varied life,
even if it cannot stand up
any longer.
In the movies, when your lover
is about to board a plane to a place
they may never return from,
you are supposed to jump barriers.
You are supposed to dash through
security checkpoints, knock over
the guards who stand in your way,
damn the consequences,
and tell them you love them,
and then they will stay with you.
When I tried that,
they pinned me to the ground
and you still went to Afghanistan.
I drove past the old
skate center today.
It’s been closed down
since we were children,
the door tagged with graffiti
and the parking lot
full of wet pot holes,
but I remember being ten
and begging
my parents to take me.
I never skated a day in my life.
Wheels on my feet have
always terrified me,
and I was good enough at falling
without a free pass for gravity.
I just went for the arcade,
a fistful of quarters jangling
in the pockets of my shorts,
for bad nachos and diet cokes,
and for you,
a gangly girl
with bandaids on her knees,
with red braids and braces,
pirouetting to pop music
on rented rollerskates.