Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

Even when the whales
abandon their bones on seashores,
and red sunsets burn their ghosts
away to croon at the moon’s gibbous breast,
I will tend the harbor of my heart for you.

Open up your sails;
skim high across the frothy waves,
so fast your keel kisses their peaks
like an infrequent lover,
like my infrequent lover,
always dashing off to some new untamed cape
or blushing virgin peninsula.

Your infidelities and trysts are your own,
but I am your stalwart lighthouse.
I will draw you in to berth
in the harbor-womb of my heart,
or birth you back into the sea
when the harbor stifles your naked hull.

Call up your anchor and embark.
Open up your sails;
skim high across the frothy waves.
My harbor-womb heart will wait for you.

My belly has a glacier
crawling through it

and the only fire
that can melt it down
is miles away —

so far,
I can’t even see
the smoke of her
any more.

Today, you sent me a box
full of chocolate and poetry
and beautiful things.

You must have known
your gift was unwanted.
You must have.

You must have known
that I would read your name and address
with dread and a hint of panic.

That I would tuck the box
beneath the table and try
to ignore it for hours,
until its presence
needled me like a thorn
needing to be plucked out.

You thought you sent
love and affection in a box,
but you sent a reminder
of wounds and worry,
a reminder that
gifts and well-wishes
do not heal bruises.

I would send it back
full of wolves if I could.

If you’re going to love me,
love me like I might break.

Love me like I am a bird
and you are a highrise window,

like I am an amateur electrician
and you are a frayed live wire,

like I am a moving van
pretending to be a sports car

and you are winding road
above a mountain gorge.

Love me like I am frat boy
jumping off balconies

and you are a hotel pool
too shallow to jump into.

The year winter decided to play
in the sundresses from spring’s closet,
we left the windows open
to enjoy the breath of January azaleas
blooming in the flower beds.

A cricket snuck into your craft room,
and sang to us for hours,
somewhere under the stacks
of colored paper, under the bottles
of orange paint, the bits of curled wire,
the forest of projects you grew
behind a decorated door.

We searched for it for hours,
until my hands were glittered
and red yarn tangled your hair;
we even let the old mother cat
try to flush it from its artsy haven,
until her white fur was chalked
to pink and blue cotton candy,
and the cricket chirped at us.

That night, I curled beside you,
my hand on your breast and
your breath in my ear,
awake with a winter spring song:
cricket song, white azaleas asleep,
you asleep, a last jewel of glitter
bright on your breast beside my hand,
thinking I might let more crickets
sneak into the walls of our house.

Like the taste of wind escaping my hands.

Like tea gone cold, too steeped, unsipped.

Like letters, writ large upon a wall, such that
they can be read only one at a time
and the complete word never grasped.

Like time-travel science, sabotaged by itself
and terminated before it could learn its own extended secret.

Like a fat cat’s dream of gazelle in savanna grass,
interrupted by the creak of a tuna can lid opening.

Like graffiti on train cars, constrained to tracks,
observed and forgotten at the momentary
crossing of paths, but remembered,
perhaps with regret, by its artist.