In the early spring,
we hung brightly colored yarn
from the low branches.
It would slowly disappear;
above, brilliant nests were built.

It's been a week; I know you said
sometimes it may be hard to write.
I understand, I really do –
I've been very busy, too,
learning how to sleep at night
and falling out of love with you.

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.

now I'm a shipwreck in a sundress,
an aimless, shameless coquette –
a first kiss, a second guess,
a weak and wobbly pirouette.

You're a solar system,
and I'm a rogue cosmonaut who
(having fallen in love with you  through a telescope)
has built a ship from the salvage
of lesser explorations;
now I spend my days
(or nights— hard to tell)
looking at you, chin in hand,
waiting for a place to land.

I wrote a poem you'll never see –
a masterpiece; it took me weeks.
I love you and I wanted you to know.
I achingly described your lips
with tender, breathless craftsmanship;
it was a soulful, sinful epic wracked with lust.
Poetry herself, intrigued,
shook her head in disbelief;
no mortal girl could ever love so much –
and so, enamored by my words,
she decided to ****** you first.
I'm sorry, lover, but she had to go.

that's always the first thing I think
                    love
when lofty           begins to
                                              sink.

How sick I was (and lost)
when brought to suffering
by the smell of coconut
on someone else's
freckled skin.

You are my former palace,
my walled city,
the cradle of my  disinhibition.

You are my intricate
system of roadways.
(I know you by heart)

You incite rebellions
in my sleepy villages
and send me postcards
from dangerous places.

You are my lost transcripts;
we know each other the way river
knows sky—  a cosmic nod,
a reflection of always.

We drifted like snow.
There will be more cold mornings,
the sharp tap of sleet—
but my legs will not find yours
beneath the warm mess of sheets.

The storms of late summer did not snap
and surge. The pepper plants did not 
kneel , weary, beneath the rains 
that came
and came.

(or was it a drenched swoon of devotion?)

You didn't hurt my feelings
in an otherwise unremarkable moment
and I didn't react with silence.

I didn't cradle that silence like
a delicate, damaged thing.
(the bird that each of us
tries to save—
shoebox, eyedropper;
our mothers knew it would die,
but let us figure it out)

I didn't have myself convinced
that no one had ever hurt like this.

My silence didn't get deeper.

You didn't wade through it to get to the door.

Love made, pillow fight;
you draw moons on my eyelids
and kiss them goodnight.

One summer evening in the grass
while all the bees were sleeping,
I tucked a flower in your hair
and asked you if you'd keep me.

It hauls you, gasping,
from the cool, murmuring depths 
and casts you, ardent and aching, 
for someone else's shore.

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.

You asked about it later,
in the best way you knew how
as I was tracing dreamy cursive
on your neck; I sighed across
your skin just like a cool front
blowing in and said –  It
doesn't even matter. I forget.

I used to be your
grinning goddess,
tangled, finished,

and you, my proud tiger.

Now it's cool kisses
and a tidy bed.
We're nothing like we were
back then.

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.

Silken assassin, pharaoh of swift,
serrated deaths— you look so cute
with milk in your whiskers.

Out of work muse
seeks out of words poet.

Must love grammar,
discord, whole days lost
to plotting coups through bitten lips

and safe words drawn with fingertips;

should know to not break my heart
at night, when there are still
hours of emptiness to fill up with sorrow.

Available evenings, starting tomorrow.

I won't leave much
more than a happy
ghost when I am gone –

some poems, a peace-
ful soul at rest, some
tired, tranquil bones,

quite content to dis-
appear, no tomb
or mossy stone.

My days were sweet,
and bright; I hope
I honored every one.

It's what you wanted,
right? A prime cut, cool
in the middle and hot
to the touch— toothsome
and tender, fresh from the
embers, a just-how-you-like-it bite.

When I was younger,
a moment of existential
panic would have my
buttons coming undone
for boys who didn't care why
but sure loved how.

I'm more beautiful now,
less given to panic, and I
undress for you like this:
one story at a time –  a
metaphoric bump and grind.
I shimmy out of all my lies.

Born of the same star,
you and I,
cradled in the arms
of a spiral galaxy;
our dreams for  death were

bird, volcano, reef

and we did not go easy—
no soft snap of filament,
or  cosmic campfire left to smolder.

We were spectacular;

but that was a billion years ago.
Now we have no word
for the infinite nostalgia
of those aeons spent sleeping,

no reason we can think of
that every night before we met
felt like a thousand light years, collapsed.

An erogenous haunting,
I thrill at his wanting

but more,
I thrill at his pause

to let me unravel
his tangle of wishes

and instill my own meter and rhyme.

He bends to my needing,
my sweetness deceiving.

(but then, I think his may be, too)

Hunter or hunted,
his heartbeat has quickened;

for this moment, at least,
he is mine.

We drift along through moss and moon,
the currents swift from love's typhoons,

skim fingertips through stirred up sins;
we never speak of daybreak things.

So you are not fooled
by pretty perfumed bombs
that explode in clouds of kisses
and whispers of yes,

not outfoxed
by foxiness,
sleight of hand
and hips

not suckered
by my puckered
lips

and yet
you gladly fall
for all my tricks.

i.
In Toronto, we could lean out the kitchen window
and steal pears from the neighbor's tree.

ii.
It was the first time I had seen my sister in years.
We climbed a hill to pick wild plums.

iii.
He said I'll eat one if you do.
We laughed around our crabapple kisses.

Love defies all laws of perspective;
the farther away               it is
the larger it appears.

Nothing else is like that.

I have this hot pink heart with lace taped to the edges,
and these deep, deep truths that I suspect might be lies;
I have this system for secrets and, though softly imperfect,
I do have a pair of magnificent thighs.
I have this floodplain soul that's a place for the thirsty
and *****, but sometimes it's still not enough.
I cradle my faults like things that need saving, and
sometimes I burn with shame just like with love.
I have this leaf in my hair that I picked up while walking;
it was pretty, that early, still covered in frost.
It's not much, what I have, but it's more than I came with.
I'm counting my blessings since you counted your loss.

Liz had hers on a Wednesday afternoon
in her car. She tells me about it over lunch;
a backseat full of groceries and halfway home,
she felt something breaking inside her,
so she drove to the lake and sat very still, waiting.

Then it happened, she says, I broke right open.
I wept, then sobbed, then wailed. There was no bottom.

She says she may have even fallen asleep, she doesn't know;
she does know that she eventually stopped crying,
that inside she felt like the fields must feel after a hard rain.

Here, she says, moving her hand to her chest, I just felt brand new again.
I'm a better wife now, she says, a better person.

Good, Liz, good, I say.

I don't tell her about that morning in the shower,
when the water warmed me but could not console me,
or how I'm no better for it.

What a burning, broken universe—
incalculable, devastating,
things we can't imagine.
We attach names familiar to us
                    Titan, Europa, Calypso
but they are still mighty and immeasurable, terrifying—

but don't think of all that.
It's too big.
It's too sad.

Think of this:

It's sublime and impossible that we even exist
with our
soft flesh and our wet eyes,
our music, our sins, 
our jealous lovers,
our moments of bliss, 
and love— god, love…
more immeasurable
more incalculable
than the universe, 
than whatever it is
that the universe wonders about.

Our smallness shouldn't humble us.
We are tiny demigods
watching the universe expand
from our lawn chairs
while we eat ripe peaches
with sticky hands and smiling mouths.

I like when you
invent fire, when
you discover the sun,
when you say hush woman
hush, believe this – we are one.

My father taught me to swim
by holding my small body
tightly  
and stepping off
the highest ledge
at Horses' Heaven,

indifferent to my pleas 
for release, to play safely
with my sisters
on the ******* below.

I had time to notice gravity
before the cold river 
swallowed us 

and as I fought
to keep him from slipping
through my stinging hands

he let go.

It was a long, dark panic.
I'm still afraid of the deep.

I wonder what learning to love 
might have been like
had I learned to swim 
in a shallow pool,

with a patient teacher.

letting her warm the sheets
of yesterday's beds,
time and time
and time
again.

these things are best written about later,
when you could be anyone, and I can lie
(as heartsick yet composed narrator)
about small things, like *'I really tried.'

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 ***** or I'll finally come clean.”

I learned early
that to speak too soon
or too often
of love

gave words
and weight to
my little prophecy
of loss—

so I stopped speaking.
I carved and polished
my heart into
a Japanese puzzle box

that both discouraged
and excited
with a precise
sequence of 

sliding parts
half twists
secret drawers
and dead ends

so that

by the time 
hands trembled
with the imminence
of conquest

and before the 
contents
could disappoint,

I could be a safe
distance away

saying

*you must have broken it.

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.

Next time I wake from sleep
for keeps – from deepest, darkest
slumber – I may come back a little
bird to visit in the summer; my
quetzal pomp, green feathered
grace, singing through my hunger –
when I am gone, I may come back
your pretty bird, a wonder.

Riley wants to build a robot.
With all the eagerness of
a five year old
who has been told
that she is brilliant, and beautiful, and kind,
she presents me with her shopping list:

METAL
CLEAN WHEELS
ROBOT FOOD

She tells me that the wheels need to be clean
so they don't mess up Mama's floor.
Of course, I say,
and kiss the top of
her brilliant, and beautiful, and kind head,
reflecting for a moment, with my eyes closed
and Riley chattering happily,
on why a child's hopefulness
always makes me
just a little sad.