Take Me Easy & Leave Me Light

Don’t you know I love you but am hopeless at fixing the rain?  But I am learning slowly to love the dark days,

She says:   I gave my tongue to love   and this makes it hard to speak

god of smoke and watered down vodka. god of mirrors and god of fathers dressed in bent coat hangers. god of boys who stripped off their skin. god of closets and plaster replicas of gods. god of weighted scales and homes transformed into catapults. god, why do you let some boys float and some go to mud?

A man once told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian’s yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historian’s joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable, makes it natural. There are more sunrises coming, but even dreams could be emptied out.

…the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

…But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled.

… the past splits in two:           one stays in the past and dies one past shape-shifts    walks with you.

Our bodies move progressively Through time, vessels within which We cannot regress back To warming under the light Which can be seen before we exit our mother’s womb, Yet We witness that light Again. & again By crawling through Life’s exit wound Stage left. The ones who have come Back for us (if we are lucky) shrug shoulders & In prophetic displays Say, “I suppose it was the flicker Between this life & The next.” For a brief moment We are nothing, we take refuge In the gash of our absence & Make that nothingness a home. They say we do not get to choose When progression renews itself, Restores you. To have a choice would implicate Control. No, The light appears. Sight seeps in, A type of mother tongue, & then Your father is teaching you His language.

One night, maybe our third date. He and I lying in bed. The room sketched by moonlight. The street outside in a deep sleep. Snowing and we didn’t even know.

I am torn in two / but I will conquer myself. / I will dig up the pride. / I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. / I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken / pieces of God in me. / I will conquer them all and build a whole nation of God / in me — but united, / build a new soul, / dress it with skin / and then put on my shirt / and sing an anthem, / a song of myself.

I want the half smoked Cigarettes, the tobacco rush From ten years past. The yellow glow of neon lit your face In the Chinese food place Down Spadina. Your teeth claimed Twelve reflections of me & I did not drink more than Was becoming of a gentleman this time. Still, I don’t remember inviting you Back to my apartment to talk above The thunder of the subway line. Waking up to sunlight felt good this time. It’s been less than thirty hours of it this month Except last night, when you managed to swallow That light and keep it whole inside of you. & do I recall something about dancing? Us, two average Joes kicking dust In the dark corner of the dive bar, Smoothing the sheets of our faces While the neon scattered everywhere.