Poetry
If I had hollow bird bones,
you’d find me
in the corner,
filling them with buckshot.
Oh, I still want to fly.
Far up, higher
and higher
until blue air thins
and lungs catch fire
for scarcity
but you know
I’d never
come back down.
Weigh me here
with heft,
with burden,
crow’s feet
that never leave
the earth.
She lies against the curve of the sea’s hip,
clothed only in sand.
and never before have I envied
crushed quartz,
but I envy the dust that supports her.
When the tide thieves it away,
I shall drink one of those graced grains.
I’ll pack that sedimentary sentiment
into my shell.
I’ll study it well,
though it burns my tongue.
One day,
a suitor with a shallow knife
will cut her from me,
just to admire her beauty.
Were I he,
I would do the same.
The shapes of a small woman’s bones
twist on an empty isolated floor
and I wonder if she still inhabits them –
if the girl that flesh was made for
still yearns for the pleasure of
making love to sunlight and rain,
for the unexpected bliss of
hearing her own heart beat
in the silences of stolen breaths.
The stepping-stones of her ribs
wear the ghost light of seclusion
more than they wear
the vital membrane of her flesh;
I want to paint with my fingers
the parts of her that have lost their color:
her stepping-stone ribs, the lone hip,
the single ear defined only
by the shadow it casts in the light.
I want to paint them
in the messy radiance
of warmth and invitation.
I want to give her one bright flower
to wear in the valley of her shoulders.
I want to give her a poem
and a candle to read it by.
As the sun sets,
old mother oak tree
shakes the rain
from her limbs
and stretches her
roots down and down.
On the ground below,
all her tiny little children
with brown round caps
snuggle down into
the softest earth
and dream of the leaves
they’ll have one day.
From time to time,
when you have wandered
away from a person,
you wander a little further
and feel the slightest tug
at your ankle.
Looking down, you find
a thread, red or maybe
blue, barely seen,
barely there, tied
gently and trailing
as far back as you
can see and you know,
instinctively, where
it leads.
It brings you to a choice:
to take one more step,
snap the thread and
leave it where it lay,
or return from whence
you came.
Sometimes, the one’s
the best choice;
sometimes, it’s the other.
I think you learned to love people
by watching hammers love nails
You bury them in succession
one after another after another
and you never expect them
to get back up.
Some do, of course.
It takes them years.
Decades, sometimes, but
they wrench themselves out
of the holes you put them in
with their heads still smarting,
so you go back.
You love them down again. Harder.
You put all your weight into it,
just to make sure.
I know what will break you.
One day you will love someone
and they will go crooked.
You will love them
and they will twist at their shank.
Bent over, hunching their back,
they’ll take you on their spine
and let you hit as hard as you like.
They’d rather be mangled
than hidden away.
What will you do
with a love like that?
Forget all else I have told you.
There is no calm inside me,
no serenity
no silence.
I have told you
I have nothing more to say
but I do
I do
and it comes out
only in wails at myself
when I get away from you.
I have hidden what I am:
a teething child
snapping at tombstones
and bricks.
I have chewed a box of knives
down to their handles,
gnawed curbs and sidewalks
for the taste of the moss in their cracks
and the feet that tread them.
I have ground my teeth down
to a mouthful of grit
and bloody nubs of gum.
I polish the back of my throat
in swallows.
Even that brings no quiet.
Call a dentist, please
please please.
Build me
a new grin with pieces
of chalk.
I was born with
a blackboard tongue
that needs scrawls
bitten into it.
Today, I found
a shoe box
under the bed,
full of post cards
sent to you
from people
who loved you.
Postcards from a gas station
in downtown Paris,
from a smoky Amsterdam pub,
from a little village an hour
from Sao Paolo
where the water is drying up
and the children
have eyes like coal.
Handdrawn artsy cards,
five dollar museum cards,
art deco cards, cubist cards,
dada cards you have to stare at
until you start to think of them
as something beyond paper.
Kitsch cards, sentiments,
and Hallmark rhymes,
and a dozen cards sent
from some marina tourist shop,
the same sparkling blue water
and the same white sailboats
and the names of so many
little coast towns.
All these cards,
and on each, scrawls,
“I wish you were here.”
I never sent you a postcard
from anywhere. I never
wanted to be anywhere
you were not.
Oh, I wish you were here.
When I am ash
and they pour me
into the greyfoam sea,
wrap yourself against
the salt wet wind
and turn an ear
to the lies frothing
out their mouths.
They will say
I loved this world
and all the people in it,
that I found beauty
and words to birth it
in the mind.
I tried
oh, I tried,
but the world is a carious tooth,
crag and rot-yellow,
the nerve exposed and raw.
Have mercy.
Have rage.
Have from your silent depths
the good sense
to rip it from the
throbbing mouth of space,
to grip the pliers tight and
crater the bloody gum
so the universe can heal,
and grow a voice that does not
make it cringe to speak.
A sound of you
spectres itself
in the walls of this house
something like a sigh
something like a breath
I strain my ears
to hear it again,
trying to shush
my rushing blood
like a librarian disturbed
and hear you again
beyond me.