Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

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.

After they scanned your skull,
I took you home, and I bathed you.

I poured cupfuls of hot water over your hair.
You barely moved, but the water churned,
turned murky with suds and bubbles:
small squall waves crashed on your thighs.

I scrubbed your scalp with my fingertips,
explored the contours of your cranium,
the tiny bumps I’ve never seen, but will.

I thought of the map of your brain
the oncologist placed on the backlight,
of the white mass he touched his finger to,
knowing, even before he spoke a word,
what it said:

Here There Be Monsters.

You’ve asked me if I love you
monogamously.

No. No.

I love you when I find your hands
in a barista pouring a cup of coffee,

when your laugh bubbles up
from the mouth of a flight stewardess
30,000 feet above New Mexico.

I love you when your smile
peeks out on a grandmotherly
grocery-store cashier’s lips,
because you might be twenty-three,
but you have a smile born in 1939.

Every woman I fall in love with is you;
you are every woman I fall in love with.

Your father’s truck
coughed once and died
and he rumbled out
to clank and bang and curse
beneath the hood.

We sweated
on the bench seat.
We said nothing,
sat hip to hip,
your skinny bare leg
pressed beside mine.

You still smelled
of the springs: fresh and cold
and full of minnows

and in my head
I begged the truck
to stay broken

and buoy this moment
until you were done
swimming through me.

It is not just a quiet.

It is a fog bank,
and through it you fumble,
grasping at things that are not there:
the phantom pings of new emails
that have not arrived, the
I-could-have-sworn-I-felt-it buzz
of a cellphone receiving a text
from seven hundred miles away.

Your heart leaps up
and then your heart sits back down.

I have one picture of you still,
out of all the ones I took of you.

Just one,
taken down by the water
at Little Bear Creek
and you are out of focus,
turning away,
half-obscured by your hair
and smiling.

I have lost all the others
and kept this one
because
it is how I remember you:

a blur
and the shape
of your lips.