poetry

A slackening rain offers its small rhythm to the rooftop, a soft shudder runs through the house. On the radio, Roethke is reading of a woman he knew. You are wearing one of my shirts. Now, I know it’s no more possible to own a moment than a person, but sometimes we can settle into one, like a tide returning from the shore, a soft relaxing back into the sea. Wind slides the unlatched door open, mist from the rain catches the ends of your hair. On the tips of your fingers, my body seems achingly beautiful. Today, we could begin to grow back every limb we have lost.

what i never learned from my mother was that just because someone desires you does not mean they value you. desire is the kind of thing that eats you and leaves you starving.

Trees talk to each other at night. All fish are named either Lorna or Jack. Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose. Tiny bears live in drain pipes. If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky. The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago. Everyone knows at least one secret language. When nobody is looking, I can fly. We are all held together by invisible threads. Books get lonely too. Sadness can be eaten. I will always be there.

Promise me no promises,  So will I not promise you:  Keep we both our liberties,  Never false and never true:  Let us hold the die uncast,  Free to come as free to go:  For I cannot know your past,  And of mine what can you know?  You, so warm, may once have been  Warmer towards another one:  I, so cold, may once have seen  Sunlight, once have felt the sun:  Who shall show us if it was  Thus indeed in time of old?  Fades the image from the glass,  And the fortune is not told.  If you promised, you might grieve  For lost liberty again:  If I promised, I believe  I should fret to break the chain.  Let us be the friends we were,  Nothing more but nothing less:  Many thrive on frugal fare  Who would perish of excess.

The moon in the bureau mirror  looks out a million miles  (and perhaps with pride, at herself,  but she never, never smiles)  far and away beyond sleep, or  perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.  By the Universe deserted,  she'd tell it to go to hell,  and she'd find a body of water,  or a mirror, on which to dwell.  So wrap up care in a cobweb  and drop it down the well  into that world inverted  where left is always right,  where the shadows are really the body,  where we stay awake all night,  where the heavens are shallow as the sea  is now deep, and you love me.

Just once I'd like to be a danger  To something in this world,  Be hunted by cops  And forced into hiding in the mountains,  Since if they left me on the streets  I'd turn the country around,  Changing everyone's mind with a word.  But I've lived so long a quiet life,  In a world I've made small,  That even my own mind changes slowly.  I'm a danger only to myself,  Like the daydreaming night watchman  Smoking his cigar  Near the dynamite shed.

We walked our final street like mathematicians writing poetry with our bare bodies. This was after the coriander and dulse, the paprika and alum, even the garam masala. Your long black jacket that complemented your hair and the night. This was after calculating the figures we were. Your shoes left marks everywhere but in racquetball courts. The stitches in our clothing and flesh. Your parents said you asked for a ram instead of a pony. The chivalry I feigned and the bones I broke. I did not purposefully hide the flyer about the free hayrides. My subconscious purposefully hid the flyer because it hides all flyers and not because it has anything against riding in free hay. We searched for horseshit in the road. I managed to say nothing in thirty-three syllables. You responded with a gamut of words I’d never heard you use before, including gamut. We inserted interjections. We swallowed insertions. I claimed all of your sentences had three meanings. You claimed you weren’t speaking in sentences. The long black night complemented your jacket and your hair. I memorized the percentage of cotton in each of your shirts. We rode our final train like poets writing equations with our bare feet. Where had all the horseshit gone? I wore shirts made from the percentage of cotton your shirts lacked. The bones I feigned and the chivalry I broke. You kept adding water to dilute the flavor. We figured everything had a solution. We would have made amazing locals. Congratulations would be in order. Everything would be in order. Everybody would say congratulations. We would never learn the word interminable. You taught me how to pronounce and spell interminable. I dog-eared the page. I ate the page. I refused to acknowledge the existence of the page I dog-eared and ate. I played more racquetball. I will only ever play racquetball.

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave. Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great. Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire. The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then. There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets. The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak. I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive. Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don't know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die, and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at, and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

  I know I promised you I wouldn't make a scene in front of all your friends but is it so wrong if I write your name across my shoes & sit by you at lunch is it so wrong if I want to stand next to you in gym class O your legs remind me of a river bed I would do a hundred sit-ups for you & whisper your name & kiss my knees pretend- ing they were you * do you remember the Halloween I went dressed as a cello & you were a postcard of the Chicago skyline O that was the most fantastic night you were all lit up & I played the same three notes for you over & over again but now I've forgotten what you said when I told you my heart had been welded shut I think you said something about symmetry or else you laughed & told me I should have come dressed as a bullet wound * I wrote your name on all my folders & drew your silhouette like a bruise on the back of my hand O you are an arrow in my wistful heart you are a radio that keeps me up each night in bed but once upon a time you were a girl with wings & you let me trace the fissures in your spine O why can't we go back to the time when you were a cloverfield & I was a meadowlark in the engine of your delicate teeth * Miranda I said Miranda why do you insist on calling me by my name when I asked you please to call me Ferdinand to show me your teeth & show me your fists goddamnit there are still some bones in my chest you have yet to break if you want you could use my ribs for a cage in which we both could live O if only you'd draw a big black x & take that fucking pickax & swing

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

I am so lonely And have a lot of problems Be my Valentine? A message to snails Evolution has failed you Your shells are a joke Asked the universe To please stop sending me signs Has not responded A pack of Wet Ones Inadequately sealed shut Is pack of Dry Ones He has those two eyes So very much like I do It’s destiny-ish One in five experts Agrees that the other four May well have a point Wearing fur’s okay If the animal was killed In, like, self defense When old people fall It rips my heart to pieces Yet they still do it There once was a girl And she lived in Nantucket And that’s all I know

1. when i was in high school, i had to memorize the conjugation of the latin verb "to love." 2. i have no idea what happened to my mother's wedding ring. last night at 12:17 am, i really needed to know. 3. "beautiful" and "amazing" just mean "beautiful" and "amazing." nothing more. 4. i memorized the latin verb by singing the forms to the tune of "the mexican hat dance": amo amas amat amamus amatis amant 5. someone called at 1:19 in the morning. the area code is from somewhere in arizona. i don't think i know anyone in arizona. there wasn't a message. 6. if someone lets you sleep over and has to go to work while you're still asleep and they let you sleep in even though though they don't really know you, it's nice to leave a thank you note. or make their bed. 7. i haven't been beautiful in days and i need more sleep. don't think about it too much. it doesn't mean a thing. 8. i have had my shirts altered so i can wear my heart on my sleeve. 9. told me i'm beautiful and amazing and where are you, who told me i'm beautiful and amazing, next time please write it down, i will be beautiful all day after i make the bed, amazing after i throw the latex away; how is it, the everywhere of our hands and no trace of handwriting anywhere 10. i still sing: amo amas amat amamus amatis amant

The good thing about friends is not having to finish sentences. I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud and watching the small chunks slide into the water and listening to them - plop plop plop. He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know... like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...' We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon. I first thought there was a sad thing about friends when we met twenty years later. We both talked hundreds of sentences, taking care to finish all we said, and explain it all very carefully, as if we'd been discovered in places we should not be, and were somehow ashamed. I understood then what the river meant by flowing.

Be fog someday, and you will have nothing but clouded thought and muffled whale talk, everything seemingly removed but close. The old philosophers were right: everything you need is within but they never mentioned the terrible ordeal of location, the lack of landmarks or that you could spend your life listening to something very near, yet never touch it. Forget insight—you are lucky for the lighthouse and the fog horn. If the sounds of grinding steel and rock never arrive then it is a good life with gulls and pelicans somewhere above, the lap of the waves feeding at your feet. When you have nothing, you have it all—without the gritty grip, the glitter show, the bending of your life to hold all those things you should never have called your own.

                                                  When time is broke and no proportion kept!                                                                                                -Shakespeare                                                                                                                    Relentless, I love relentless: relentless doors and windows unhinged with their ways to open. Thinking that cannot stop or that bee-hurry, honey-havoc hive.  Some simple cogs and wheels; something is always on. Live sea that cannot stop  breathing, dog chasing its scrap tail, red bird at the wind, always one flying  from the sky’s china arms. Chatter, ants, television.  I know no place like it. Relentless Earth and no other way out. Incoherent as seed and as close to the ground. Someone will come to dig there with relentless tenderness.  Flowers, in their relentless kept beauty, will wait.  There, disembodied as doubt,  the fog will double in, even try to convince itself indebted blind, of its own way. To outdo any word of mouth or maintenance of mind the dream keeps relentless time. Dreams keep relentless white air for you to breathe and without any hope of departure, they keep the love that will strike its blue match  over and against your heart without bearing broken from one world to the next. I sleep out of this inconsolable chaos, without a roof where there is no proportion kept, until troubling the abrupt reeled-in hour,  I alone might appear as a matter of fiction  for this relentless will to forever have and have me again, till it has me, to hold.

My friend, who was a heroin addict, is dead and buried beneath trash and broken bottles in a prison field. He died, of course, because of the way he lived. It wasn’t a very good way, but it kept him alive. When it couldn’t keep him alive any longer, it killed him. thoroughly and with great suffering. After he had made certain choices, there were no others available. That’s the way it is with certain choices, and we are faced with them so young. I have few friends, and none of them are replaceable. That’s the way it is with friends. We make certain choices.

Bad things are going to happen.  Your tomatoes will grow a fungus  and your cat will get run over.  Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream  melting in the car and throw  your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.  Your husband will sleep  with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling  out of her blouse. Or your wife  will remember she's a lesbian  and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat— the one you never really liked—will contract a disease  that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth  every four hours, for a month.  Your parents will die.  No matter how many vitamins you take,  how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,  your hair and your memory. If your daughter  doesn't plug her heart  into every live socket she passes,  you'll come home to find your son has emptied  your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,  and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.  There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.  When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine  and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.  And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out  and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point  she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.  She looks up, down, at the mice.  Then she eats the strawberry.  So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse  in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,  slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel  and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.  Oh taste how sweet and tart  the red juice is, how the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth.