#jeff mcdaniel

by Jeffrey McDaniel

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice

the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive

insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

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of a long tunnel.  Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt

in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds

of women - those you write poems about

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and those you don't.  It's true.  I never brought you

a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.

My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

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lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,

whiskey doing push-ups on my breath.  But I worked

within the confines of my character, cast

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as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan

of your dark side.  We don't have a past so much

as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

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never put to good use.  What we had together

makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught

one another like colds, and desire was merely

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a symptom that could be treated with soup

and lots of sex.  Gliding beside you now,

I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

-

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune

to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed

antibodies for your smile.  I don't know how long

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regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.

I don't know how many paper towels it would take

to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

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of a candle being blown out travels faster

than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,

but I do know that all our huffing and puffing

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into each other's ears - as if the brain was a trick

birthday candle - didn't make the silence

any easier to navigate.  I'm sorry all the kisses

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I scrawled on your neck were written

in disappearing ink.  Sometimes I thought of you

so hard one of your legs would pop out

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of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press

your face against the porthole of my submarine.

I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years

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to reach you.  I wish that just once, instead of skidding

off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding

over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate

-

to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy

of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph

from the volumes of what couldn't be said.

There's a woman I'm in love with, but I forget what she looks like, so I take out my paintbrushes and create my image of her. Your eyes are blue like the morning of going. Your ears are tender twists of logic. Your thighs are impossible avenues my car swerves out of control on. I want to cut the silence with your shoulderblades, blow moon-shaped kisses to orbit your skull as you sleep on the highest ledge of my insomnia, but I'm a broken promise in a pawn shop, and this is just a secret that happens to involve you.