Poetry
Tonight, I watched the sun bleed
down through the trees: burnt orange,
yellow, long amber horizon cracked
and splintered with silhouettes
of trees. Winter is passed, and those
silhouettes swell day by day, cropping
out in tiny bursts of leaf-shape shadows.
Inch by inch, the day melts dark.
In the silence
after we finished fighting
you grabbed your notebook
and drew a picture of a girl
with a big black ball of scribbles
for a head.
You stabbed her with your finger
and you said “Look, look, this is me.
I am all tangled up. I am messy,
I am a mess. I cannot sort myself out.
I don’t know the way out
of this labyrinth of my head,”
and then you threw your notebook down
and went to bed, you left me to flip
through your sketches,
trying to think of a way to tell you
my poems are self-portraits
with scribbles for heads, too.
The weather crouches
and readies herself to leap
into the basin of warmth and rain.
She loosens the towel of winter
at her waist and lets it fall.
I wish I were a lifeguard.
I wish I could loose a shrill blast
from an orange whistle,
seize her wrist,
close the pool:
lock us on the cusp
of the last cold snap,
all because spring is coming
and all the days of it
will slip by
with you in your city
and I in mine.
My hand is empty.
How can I walk
through the garden
and show you
the fresh buds ready to burst?
the purple gillyflower,
the pink ranunculus,
the white lisianthus
with the tips of her petals
dipped in paint?
The bees like little doctors
have begun their rounds,
and today, a grasshopper
tanned his long legs
on the porch rail.
Pause the seasons
until you are here
and I can share these
little beauties of life
with you.
I don’t ask much.
Let weather only wait
until we are together again —
then she can dive,
then can spring wash us
in hot greenery,
in the blossom of the sun.
I saw on the news
that scientists have learned
to grow the cells of a heart muscle
in the cellulose left behind
when you suck out
everything that makes
a leaf of spinach
a leaf of spinach.
Hollowed out, limp white, the ghosts
of greenery can be seeded
with the tiniest dose
of humanity, a scattering
of frightened cells that grasp
the vascular scaffold
and cling for dear life —
these wisps of blood remember
another time when we huddled like this,
against the walls of ventricular caves
back before time had a name —
our cells huddle and cling
until plant and muscle merge
and chlorophyll learns
to give up sunlight and sustain
itself on the thu-thump thu-thump
of pulse and bloodflow.
It turns out you can transform
all sorts of vegetation into veins: parsley,
sweet wormwood, arterial jewelweed —
even the straight column from twig or stick
can be worried down to translucent shell
and taught to become a vessel of blood.
That night I slept and dreamt
of red vines that crept aortic at my ankles,
of lush capillary jungles, flooded, throbbing,
of a garden of wild muscle —
a place where the sun rises cardiac,
red on petals engorged, a place where,
when rain showers gently down,
you can stroll among the stems,
run the tips of your fingers across
the veins of the leaves,
and feel heartbeats in the blossoms,
in the four-chambered pistil and stamen,
in the breath of pollen, a mist like copper.
This tiny thing sleeps on my chest,
fitful sleep,
his mewlings birthed by
what dreams I cannot imagine.
The curving sole of his foot,
pressed against my hand,
lacks the callous of tomorrow,
lacks the cracked abrasions
we older souls
borrow from the ground.
His mother tends his sister upstairs,
and I am left with this
unfamiliar child
clinging to me,
left grasping for lullabies
I don’t remember how to sing,
and I fear the gallop
of my unsettled heart
beneath his head will wake him.
His fist encircles my broad finger–
and my finger has never before seemed broad–
with the surprising strength of infancy.
His head settles
into the cradle curve of my throat,
and he is quiet,
he is quiet,
a tiny thing asleep on my chest.
Someday does not arrive with fanfare.
It does not arrive with trumpets,
with high-stepping horses
and ticker tape raining down.
Someday does not announce itself.
Someday does not mark itself
with a large red X on your calendar.
It does not ask if you can fit it in
between Hair Appointment, 10:30 a.m.,
and Job Interview DON’T BE LATE,
it does not care
if this is a busy week
and you really just don’t have the time.
Someday slinks.
Someday creeps
Someday knocks on your door,
unexpected, when the house is a mess
and you are hungover
and when it does,
you must give it
your full attention.
Early this morning,
you stepped out of the shower,
lifted your hair, still dripping
with tiny clean jewels,
and showed me the back of your neck.
You said you felt a sting sometime before dawn
and asked me if I thought
some insect had bit you in the night;
after all, we had left the windows open
to enjoy the cool breath of spring
and the whispers nesting down
in the oak trees outside,
so any manner of tiny bug might have
snuck past the window screen
and found its way inside.
I know what sunk its barb in me —
the scent of your soap,
a snap of lilac and lavender,
and under it your fresh-scrubbed skin,
still hot to the touch from the spray.
I ran my fingers across your neck,
searching for blemish or sting.
I didn’t see a bite mark,
no red welt or irritated bump,
but my fingers itched,
and my mouth itched for more
when I kissed the back of your neck,
standing in the bathroom
before you had to leave for work.
There is a no-name gas station
on the north end of town,
11.9 miles out of the way,
out past the corner where
John Roe sits all day in the sun,
spits tobacco and sells onions
and oranges out of the back
of his rust red pick up truck.
There are bars on the station’s windows
and jars of pickled eggs on the counter,
right beside herbal male enhancement pills
and crack pipe roses. Pork rinds.
Refrigerator egg salad sandwiches
reserved for the brave or foolish.
There’s an old condom machine
in the men’s room, two feet to the left
of the pocket knife graffiti that says
JESUS SAVES and KKK 4 LIFE.
Half a roll of paper towels, no soap,
and the faucet just trickles,
no matter how the handle is set.
The attendant has a face
like the inside of a cigarette.
She runs a hand through
brown grease pit hair,
charges 5 cents more per gallon
than anywhere else nearby,
and she never says a word.
There’s no good reason to come here.
There are better gas stations,
closer, cleaner, less treacherous,
but you ought to know
that every time the needle
on my fuel gauge leans towards E,
I drive up, pull in past the jagged potholes
that get deeper every month,
to suck on hot petroleum fumes
and top off my tank,
listen to standard unleaded
slosh down rubber hose,
and to enjoy, for a brief moment,
that I am a little nearer —
that for these few minutes,
you are 366 miles away.
You are only 366 miles away.
Every night this week,
I keep dreaming
that you throw me out
the open door of an airplane,
into 30,000 feet of blue —
You fling me out head first,
without altimeter or oxygen,
no tandem partner lashed to my back.
You cast me into solitude and blue,
not endless blue but ended blue,
a sharp-capped blue, a snapped-shut blue,
30,000 feet of blue and love
before the blue stops.
You cast me into solitude and love,
into 30,000 finite feet of your love.
This must be the weightlessness of your love.
This whirl into vapor, this vertigo.
A broad gasp of green looms up
to crack me open and I do not know
whether the stones in the ground,
whether the tiny houses, the lines of roads
are supposed to be a map to find you again
or just a picturesque countryside
to lull me down.
Is this the anxiety, the panic of your love?
Your love hammers the ribs in my chest;
your love is a scarcity of air, a burned lung —
a strained muscle, air pressure blowout–
I am trying to tell my body
we are all falling here at once
but some parts want to fall faster for you.
I cannot find the up of your love.
I am all turned around, I am whirled
head over heels over head
over heels over head
and there’s no way up,
no way down but down, but gravity
into slashes of blue and slashes of green
that circle and blur and whirl.
I am whirled; I am a world of your love,
a dead weight blackout of love,
a terminal velocity, a body dropped of love.
Every night this week,
I snap to wake as body breaks ground,
your name the cord of a parachute
clenched white-knuckle tight,
never snatched.
— Adam Kamerer
Vocabulary misplaced.
Brain forgets to go looking.
The muscles
know what words are
but forgets their shapes.
An open mouth:
white noise.