12 March 2020

Poem for that time you said you don't understand half of the poems I read to you

What you should know, on the eve of quarantine,
is that poets really should live on their own planet
and send missives back to earth.
We need landscapes noisy with genetic novelty,
merciless juries to sentence the trite,
time to mourn the slaughtered lambs 

and the stillbirths.

I told you I'm not sure understanding is the point,
and I meant that under anything is not the point.
It's all surfacing.
In a poem, you can say only the minute at great length,
the profound in one broken clause,
the confessional in riddles,
and the obvious not at all.
You may not understand,
but you will try to picture it
if you trust me even a half measure,
and that is really the whole of the thing--
carving a new channel in the neocortex
and trust, which is the next best thing to love.

I will tell you the trade secret
that obliterates the whole enterprise,
but you have to swear not to repeat it.
Our best poems are never written exactly
but dictated onto the breathing surfaces of leaves
when the sunlight passes through them
and they have promised not to fall this season.

I don't write and rewrite, read and reread,
explain and avoid explaining these words for you
so that you can understand.
It is so I can hold you hostage for a little while,
here on this other earth,
where we can walk the long trails of doorways,
drink jasmine tea with cayenne,
and kiss like thinking grown-ups, 
like Sunday mornings spent reading in the park, 

the oak-lined pathways dappled with sun, 
the not yet halcyon days we were sure
would succumb to the asteroid

before we could see them.
It is a hope that you will think to yourself--
back home when there is nothing but steel sky
and the dull hum of compromise--

That was interesting.
I should try on some new words
and send her a note.

26 February 2020

Fog, Four Ways

i.
This morning, the fog hung
so heavy and so close
that I didn't see the 100 feet of mangled guardrail
until it was running alongside me
like a hurricane crest that jumped the dune
and regretted it.

No rogue engined beast
could have twisted it that way,
like macabre ribbon.
Only the living
can do that kind of damage.

ii.
Fog is matter's purgatory--
liquid that wants to be air,
air that wants to be liquid--
the wandering progeny
of the distant mountains,
too busy with earth-breaking
to notice it's gone missing.

iii.
There was that day we found the Golden Gate
through the upright ocean of fog
so thick that when we pulled off to the overlook
that was not,
I couldn't see all of those things I wanted
that you were not.
We had to stand chest to chest
to see each other at all,
and that only ever goes one way.
You noticed my earrings
picking up impossible light from somewhere,
and for then that was close enough
to noticing me.

iv.
I had a dream last night that we were flying,
and I didn't know you,
and we got married.
Which all sounds very meaningful,
but it was Brooklyn,
and I was just there in real life,
so that likely doesn't mean much.
And while we were flying,
we were talking about how you
have to imagine that you're actually
just right above the ground,
because otherwise you'll be too afraid
to keep going.
And we were getting married
in a kind of storefront,
in a ceremony that cost $36,
which will probably just be
what I happen to have in my wallet
when I find it,
and there was a wait,
which isn't a metaphor for anything
I care to think about.
We weren't anxious,
and we wandered separate directions,
taking turns holding our place in line.
My dress was pretty,
but I didn't want to wear it forever,
and I didn't feel beautiful
the way I did that summer day in Chicago
wearing my first wedding dress,
cut off at the knees,
with turquoise studded cowgirl boots,
blissfully alone in pure sun.
But I knew soon we would be flying
to that spot in the woods
where the dress would come off,
where the pinestraw beds and ladyslippers
were waiting, ribboned in fog.
And surely we were happy,
and I was not troubled to not know you,
because I would come to. 

19 January 2020: Chattahoochee River

Growth Rings 

This morning, I sat on the edge of the Chattahoochee,
where I waded and prayed for turtles as a child. 

The damp sand on my feet reminded me
I can still count the 1,464 days,
a season of my life I have marked off
sometimes in sharp seconds,
now more often in epochs:
the dark age of torpor and tears,
the ice age of vodka and headrush chaos,
the gradual warming, an approximation of patience.

I saw myself on the east bank of the Jordan,
alone in company,
turning over prisms of metaphors
about silty baptisms, plastic bottles with portable blessings,
the tortoise-like armor of Israeli guards
across the tranquil flow of river. 

The next moment could so easily not have happened at all.
I was already home,
no more threatened than any other new soul
unschooled in the body's share of salt.
But I glanced back--
which is maybe to say
my eyes wandered from my work. 
And I saw myself being seen
by eyes dark as the soil
that will eventually welcome me as a feast.

I still cannot fault myself.
I still cannot imagine what sacrilege it would be to resist
being seen from crown to lips to heart to hunger to toes
in the space of a breath.

Sometimes love grows like bamboo--
fast and reckless,
taking burnished height as its due,
rigid and hollow.
The ancient sound it makes
when the wind passes through,
the startling crack when it is broken
echoing off unsympathetic stone.

Some say these reeds--
macheted,
ground to pulp,
pressed into the invitation of paper--
could save us from slowly suffocating ourselves.
They may let us give these now tender oaks
the nobility of old age,
built in proud circles from inside out,
long after we have surrendered
by force or grace. 

2 January 2020

Yes, No, Maybe 

It is true that it is always day one,
if you are feeling philosophical
and a little buoyant.

It is also true that it is always day two,
and, for that matter, day 7,729
from some marker,
and there is no doubt that
you take up this new mantle
with some wear and tear.

Which is what I was thinking this morning
because I have this spot on my thigh
that could be the stubborn memory
of a cigarette burn from those days
or could be cancer. 
And it's fine either way really
because I'm not afraid of much,
there are people who know just the thing to do,
and next to no one has viewing rights
to my thighs these days. 

There are some mornings I wake up
saying yes to anything that will listen,
like when I've been dreaming
of mountain laurel flowers shaped like starbursts
or of meeting a llama in the early morning mist
at Machu Picchu.

There are other days I wake up
saying no,
usually because I am gearing up again
to make that one catastrophic decision--
you know the one
that always wears different clothes
but leaves the same stink. 
The no's rarely stick,
heady resolve notwithstanding. 

It is better to wait on the rest
until we have some time to talk, you and I,
to catalogue that absolutes
that own us in part,
and rehearse the etymology of maybe.
We should decide if it is about 
possibility or permission. 

It's January, and I am now aware
that once you reach a certain age,
the winter is so long in coming
that you lose the autumn expecting it,
and by the time it is in hand,
the daffodils are already announcing its end.
Only the spring goes on and on in real time.

And really all I mean to say
is that you were young once--
no, not a tragedy--
and yes, you will be young again,
but differently, maybe. 

4 October 2019

You had to be there

Occasionally someone will ask
how it feels to be in a season of separation
from my children.

What I want to do is tell the story of my first,
who clung to me even without a heartbeat.
And how after the procedure,
I didn't demand to hold him
as I should have
because I was weak and shy
and somehow flushed with shame.

But that is dark,
and we like to think we aren't made
to walk in the dark.

So instead I try to render a metaphor
about how you pass by your herb garden
in the morning on the way to work
and, unless they are freshly watered
and the temperature is just so,
you don't smell the lavender and the sage.
You double check again
what you already know:
that the sun will hover over them
in the afternoon while you are away,
and that you have sprinkled in the worm castings
when they were due.

But if you really want to mother an herb,
you have to rub it between your rough fingers,
just enough that it releases fragrant oil
and not so much that it falls apart.
And you cook something nostalgically new,
or you hold it under her preschooler's nose
so she understands about soil and sun
and how you treasure the leaves
and her little nose and the moment
without words.

It's rare anyone knows what I mean.
You had to be there.

26 September 2019

Fragile

For a passing moment each morning,
I am riveted by how brazenly we walk through a life
as like to kill us as not:
breathing untreated air,
washing with particles of plastic,
falling in love with strangers,
going to school--
as if the fact that this fragile thread has yet to set us loose
is permission to write a God
who loves us just a little bit extra.

They say that now the children
are more intimate with doom than we imagine.
Their love languages are irony and empathy,
in equal measure,
which I have come to believe
is the most earnestly human
we can hope to be these days.

But maybe that's not doom after all.
Maybe it's the template.
You'll recall the 12-year-old Jesus
escaped his frantic parents for three days
to school the rabbis
with his riff on apocalypse.

This morning, I hurtled north at 80
behind a gently swaying semi,
daring to write this poem on the contrails above the sunrise,
when the words could at any point
have lifted me from my body,
the very one that steers itself through the landmine.

All the while, the strawberries at home send out runners,
and my children, miles away,
walk into homeroom,
just about half trusting.
Because they only have the one choice.
They only have the one world to love.

20 June 2016

Summer Solstice

It bears some explaining now,
how to survive the longest day of the year.
But first, the acceptance:
You will have to be diurnal.
You didn't ask for it, I know,
this merciless day-dwelling,
the milked and measured time of men.
And then the moon
your mother
demanding all night
that you listen to her stories,
write them down even
with insomniac hands.
She pulls at the strings she wove
at the base of your heart
until tissue meets bone,
threatening to break out altogether.
There is no rest.
This tilt of the earth is not for you.

But since you are here,
more woman than wolf for now,
you should know something
about how to meet the hours.

The morning is easy.
You can rise as early as you wish.
The earlier it is, the more dream-secrets
she whispers in your ear
to sustain you.
And if you hurry, without rushing,
you can feel the urgent, tender arms
of perfect love reaching for you
before they travel west
to hover as mist
over the slow-waking mountains.

You give yourself to the tending,
to the plans of yesterday
not quite finished.
There is movement in the late morning hours,
flow and fulfillment.

The noon hour is meant to blaze
with a single fierce intention.
You claim the peak,
craggy apex though it may be.

You must sleep away the afternoon.
Your ancestors are so brutally far now,
and you are truly, utterly alone.
We are together in that.
Let restless dreams
carry you to the twilight.
The ache of estrangement
will loose itself.

At five o'clock, the river begins
to rage again,
and it is your rebirth
into adulthood.
You are reacquainted with yourself
as caretaker of your own boundlessness.
Now is the time to write.
It is the time to sit with a beloved
and imagine, in delicious detail,
how it will all be made new.
It is the time to co-conspire.
It is the time to linger
with lips and fingers and breath on his skin,
not for the heat
but for the cool assurance.
If he is gone,
you remember,
and it is almost the same.

The next three hours
are the truth of your life.
They will show what work
you are willing to do,
how earnestly you will
seek the horizon,
whether you will fall in love again
with desire itself
for another year.
Use the weight of your body
to lean in,
drag the fear along behind you
if you cannot set it down.
Your mother is rising now to call you
into the heavy haven of night.