I have written you one
hundred and eighty
one poems about stars
and blackberries fat
as thumbs, and your
hands and sweet
plums, because that's
what I do:
word play, cabaret –
but if these are just myths
I perpetuate because I'm
a perpetual liar, believe me
                                            anyway.

My mother washed potatoes
one by one while my father
went carousing with his
favorite gun; I dragged sticks
through dusty gravel while
I watched it all unravel,
wondering what to make of
such an ugly thing as love.

At night we were a fresco
painted by an astronaut, our
unkempt bed the pulpit of
a voyeuristic God where glory
worked with hurried hands in
frenzied fellowship and hallelujah
was a sigh that quivered on
my lips, and we nodded off like
angels of our own apocalypse;
it was only love, the dreamed
up stuff of kids and lunatics.

Your absence has drawn
fractions on my belly. It's
bisected the axis of my
heart; it has split me apart.
I am charts and statistics.
I'm percents. You were sharp.
So was I; when I left, I cut
those halves into fourths.
I left one in your bed, now
I'm three quarters saved
and one quarter spent.

woke every morning and
dressed in the sun, then
dreamt in the breezeway
where the day's laundry
hung. She listened for
him in the summery hum;
sometimes she was honey,
sometimes she was stung.

Unassuming, at best– no
tempting minx, I confess,
but this I would bet (speaking
humbly): give me paper and
ink, half an hour to think– I might
just convince you to love me.

I remember you like accidental
photographs: sun flare, skin,
the tops of trees. Knees. Your shirt-
sleeves in a dove grey breeze. (I arrange
the photos like a slow striptease.)

This is what he promised me:
August, and berries that fell
right into my hands; he
promised me handstands. He
promised me bees, he said
the nights would smell sweet
and wet flower petals would
stick to my toes. He said I'd
just know. He promised me
sparrows, and switchgrass that
crept past the hem of my skirt.
He promised me clean dirt, and
hard work. He promised an
August that I'd always remember,
then stayed 'til November.

A last incinerating kiss, then
the exponential loss of  bliss–
take my heart and divide by
you; leave me with poems and
warm anecdotes that I'll store
away like Marie Curie's notes:
still hot, still toxic, still true.

I didn't know your name back then.
I practiced love with other men.
I burned my lips on words like yes.
I didn't know your name back then.

I practiced love with other men—
a reckless, shipwrecked malcontent;
a willing, waiting queen undressed,

I burned my lips on words like yes.
I warmly, weakly acquiesced
and woke to wonder if I'd dreamt.

I didn't know your name back then.
I studied sin with other men
and broke my heart on words like when.

I can't write about miles of sown fields
or the absence of rain
or silver minnows in a cold creek

without also imagining
how the sky would look from underneath you.

I can't write about sugaring season
or my grandmother's barn on a foggy morning
or the thrum of an August day

without also imagining
kissing each one of your berry-stained fingers.

For the same reasons that I stay hungry
for dinner and tired for bed, I keep my
heart a little lonely for poetry; that way,
I can imagine your weathered hands against
my pale thighs as clinging starfish – my
fingernails bleached cockleshells, washed up
on the barely evening beach of your back.

No Garden, but this stand of
pines, and no serpents just this
side of night, but a sleepy,
startled porcupine; I'll offer you
some apple wine. You'll kiss
me in the fading light; I'll love
you without shame this time.

If time is a convincing illusion, then as I am writing this,
you are reading it; you are remembering me years after
we have spoken last, and I am noticing you for the first time.

I'm a young woman waking up in an apartment in Albany,
New York, realizing that I am finally broken enough to fix,
and an East Boston moppet in dirty pink overalls, riding
Big Wheels through the sprinklers with a boy named John Henry.

You're delivering newspapers on a cold New Hampshire morning.
I am falling asleep wondering if you could possibly love me.
You are saying that you do. You are stardust, and I am long gone.

Please, when you come, bring me news of the world –
not foreign wars or epic storms or the Queen's upcoming
Jubilee, but things that only you can tell – like this morning
smelled like mulch and mud; the slate was wet, and you thought of me.

Be reckless with your words to me;
incite, provoke, use words as lips
and teeth and hands and silk restraints.
Press them deep into my skin –
leave marks, leave late, and come again.

A gentle tempest stormed my lawn; it stood
me still and then was gone. Anchored,
awestruck in my place by beauty and euphoric
grace, I thought of Spinoza's God, infinity's
precise design, the perfect math of Everything –
our love, a quotient of Divine.

Between us, tangled wilds, and through that, a deep ravine – each standing on a
mossy bank with river in between; I say “It's early morning and
the world is wet and green – I'd like nothing any better than
for you to bathe with me. I'll meet you in the middle, like I've met
you in my dreams, and either you'll get dirty or I'll finally come clean.”

I only wanted to learn love; the unknown was unbearable.
Like a child plucking flimsy wings
from pretty little dying things,
I'm innocent, and terrible.