Category Archives: Poetry

From you, I learned the world

does not allow both
in single trunk of flesh,

no matter how many
sun-charred children
you gather under your
wide-swept branches,
no matter how many
crinkled leaves of gold
you rain down into their
hungry open mouths.

This kind of healing
puts a dose of poison
in the roots, it comes
with sterile soil,
with a daily loosening,
and they will never know it,
not even when the trunk
begins to list and groan
in the wind issuing
from their wailing throats.

It would be such a simple lust,
to ache for aching
like they do,
to just give in to it
and ache like they do,
to swallow no one’s pain
but gallons of your own,
to feast on yourself.

Forget this strange nutrition.

Even if it lets your roots
knot their worried fingers
deeper into the hair
of your lover the earth,
even if it brings strength
beneath the earth,
it withers the limbs above.
It shades no one.

It would heal you with a cost:
a shrinking ring of shade,
and the sun rises ever higher,
it burns ever hotter
and here it never sets.

It lays hot on your back, yes,
but it sears these children
of sticks, and they are
already smoking.

Let them huddle closer.
Stretch your limbs
to encompass as many of them
until your bark cracks
with the strain of reaching.

Bathe their bodies, feed them,
and grow dizzy with it,
feel the earth kiss you
even as she loosens your fingers
from clutching so tightly,
teeter and hunch and splinter
but never stop shielding
the blistered beneath you.

How valuable is a shade tree
if it could not
come crashing down
one day?

Call in sick today.

I need you to come with me
out to the waterfalls near
the county line.

Tell your boss
the accounting reports
can wait: there is green moss
that needs to be between your toes
and a hundred thousand gallons
of water crashing
over a limestone lip
into a ice-cold basin
calling your name.

In fact,
tell Human Resources
they may want to go ahead
and start processing your resignation:

I’ve found an old Indian hunting cave
hidden behind the cascades,
and there are too many flint arrow heads
for me to pick through on my own.

Way in the back,
the only thing you can hear
is the water crashing down
and the sound of your own
body breathing.

I could orbit you forever,
like you are Saturn,
and I am an ice particle,
a speck like the other specks
you ring yourself with.

I want you to reach out
and let me streak into you:
melt me, let me rain down,
drink me up, drink me up.
I only need to be a star
falling like a papercut
across your atmosphere.

I don’t want to linger.
Just to fall into and for you,
so fast you will only notice
if you keep your eyes on me
and never blink.

Keep a wish ready.
I can only fall for you once.

For weeks, I have looked up
from my writing to see you
walking barefoot through the yard,
your toes disappearing into
the grass and the dirt,
and in your hands, a small
garden spike and a bag of seeds.

You flit about, barelegged,
magpie thrusting your sharp beak
into the fertile earth.

This morning, I woke up
to find a mad painter
had spilled his paints
all over the yard.

I think I want you to break me open.
Like a pomegranate or a chicken egg
or a bank vault full of golden bars.

The shell is just there
for the satisfaction of getting past it.

The seed wants to be found,
the yolk to be spilled out,
the gold wants to be pilfered,
though it might not know it.

Push yourself into one of my cracks
like a wedge and chisel me open.
Use a knife, use a granite countertop,
use a hundred pounds of dynamite,
use whatever you need to open me up
and make me teach you myself.

Everytime you say you love me,
I want to catch the words in my mouth
and stuff them into my cheeks.

I want to keep them there
until I can find someplace to hide them:
a mason jar, a hollow tree,
the dusty corner of the attic
behind the dresser your mother
said came from Antigua,
the one we have not opened in years,
where no one else will find them.

I want to do this so I can make sure
I will have enough of your love to get by
if you decide to stop saying it.

Crow hops through the wet
parking lot, steam curling up
past his wings, pecks a cup
abandoned near a white van.

The sky is cloudless now,
but moment ago, it began
pouring out grey fans
of rain on the hot asphalt ,

and crow hid himself from
the rain. Not crow’s fault
that the rain had no alt-
ernative but to fall down,

and now that the rain is
gone, crow hops around,
pecks at cups and frowns
at all the customers.

Instead of writing poems
about you, I should busy myself.
I should distract myself from
this persistent missing you.

I should buy groceries.

I should navigate my wire
cart through aisles of boxes
and cans, past old church ladies
and acne-faced stock boys
and piles upon piles of produce,

but this old wheel is stuck
in a turn. I’m going in circles.

Wave off the store clerk who asks
“Sir, do you need help?”
She can’t rid me of you.
She can’t rid me of you.

Fifth time past the yellow onions
and the garlic bulbs, another
damn poem about you
creeps into my head.

I wish you were as easy
to peel off my memory
as skin from garlic clove,
as skin from onion bulb.

Take off your clothes.
Leave them on the floor,
cast open the window,
and stand before the world.

Be gawked at by passers-by.
Wave, if you like, or just
stare resolutely through them
until they hurry their steps
and shuffle, red-faced, away.

Walk out onto the yard.
Marvel at the sun coming back
to parts of you the sun has
not enjoyed in a very long time,
if ever. The sun does not
hurry along, red-faced.
The grass does not shy away
from your nakedness.

The mailman is coming up
the road. Smile, take your
letters and bills from him.
Watch him decide where
to put his eyes. Let him
look at you, if he will, but
he will scurry away.
Call after him, wish him
the greatest of days.

He will look back.
He will look back.