For every
cigarette smoked
on your front steps.
For every
scorn and sigh
put out
by your reckless
and willful desire
to construct
temples
and virtues
on the inside
of my mind.

I put my hands
on a beauty
and she woke
up a deity.
Her ancient
hands
a simple touch was
all I needed
to free
the story
of millions.
A tale of
bravery
and of love
where only
endless flowers
could grow.

Follow
the light
to her door
run your hands
down her rocky spine
know how
the earth
feels as a stranger,
as a careful
confidante.

Oh,
the warmth
it feels right
at this angle.
Filling the
sediment
with a peculiar
kind of glow
an aftermath
of constellation
grounded firmly
in her form.

If I had known
that beauty
had existed like
her eyes
clearing cobwebs
and caverns
of my grief
I would have
found her
and danced with
her just beneath
the echoed waters
where she waited
just for me.

If I had known
of the path
leading right to
her door
I wouldn't have
waited
so long
to write this poem
just for her.

When I finally find
myself in the dirt
say
some 52 years from now
give my lampshades
and frail autographs
to my lady
with her married scorn
and scarred hands
that have held my own.

Only in death
will I see her clearly
as the day I met her
and
in our plantation house
you can find a tin cup
a stray look and
her sentiments
I never overlooked
quite carefully put.

Her ancient beauty
quite unnerving
and her eyes
ever fearful of my demise.

In my crystal clear
version of the way things were
you'll see her letters
that I have kept
still breathing hard
and holding fast
against my chest.

For
I have never loved another
quite like her
sharp teeth and red lipstick
on my dress
and
when we were married
the whole town came to see
what true love could
really mean
to us:
as thieves
as unbelievers
in all things.

Constant sorrow will follow
America
but not her
immortal and etched
into every doorway
of the south
and inside of my body
breathing out.

So much for I have lived
to succumb
to become the dirt
she dances on
to watch for her
in every crowd
spell her name on my tongue
breathing loud
and fast inside of her love
and her blouse
that stands forever
inside of our plantation house.

This morning I awoke
the rain was screaming
across her windowpane
and I grieved.
She warned me once
with all of her November
in the summer
she would never love me
the way I need.
Where will you go
with all of your spare change
funny names
for the way you felt?
Will you find someone
to stand still with?
Will you keep bits of me
tucked into your sleeve?
A girl unlike me
unknowing of maps
and crosses in the ground.
I want to be the girl
always gone
the girl turning tables
one foot in Carolina
and the other standing next to you.
But instead
I am the quiet girl with a dream
a pen in pocket
and a penchant for danger
rearranging the way I know the earth.
You're lost on the way
to my house
but you know the way
you know the way.

It was the likeness of her
replaced
with maps
forests
shine
cold sheets in summer
vanilla ice cream
sunlight on wooden floors
flight of fairies
childhood unearthed
a generous heart and lungs
a magic of my own.
When I finally dreamt
without her
it was
renewing.

I was born
backwards.

I was raised in a place
with no name
but I can still find it on a map.
The first words I wrote
as a child
were of Dorothea's
funeral procession
and the brown linoleum
on her kitchen floor.

Now I can't seem to remember
her hands.

She grew up slow,
sifting the dirt with her hands.
Time moved against her
so gently.
Dorothea wasn't scared
of the wind.

Dorothea died
two months before her 90th birthday.
I shut my eyes and smell
the rain from her front porch.

I close my eyes
to feel the open windows
of my childhood.
I remember buying ice cream
on the first day of Spring
at the cafe close by.

Why do we run from
what we know?
I want to find
all of the years
I misplaced under my fingernails.
I want to see
Dorothea standing in the kitchen.
I want to see
my mother happy.

Childhoods
lay dormant as death
but I have faith
that they find us,
eventually -
face down in the debt we owe,
dark, dim,
hungry for summer.

I believe in the reincarnation
of Dorothea
because I have found myself again
in her ghost.
I found the South
embedded in the spine
and scripture of poetry,
back porches,
pink houses,
love on an acre of bones.

I stay up late
to write myself into the arms
of an existence like the one
of Dorothea.

In the glow
of some kind of metamorphosis;
brightly lit, gluttonous ego,
Lily came to me in a dream.
Her love
she fashioned into a blade;
I was an enigma
she cut through.
I'm such a bad girl
when I miss her,
spilling ephemera in pavements and lipstick.
I could love her
but I'm always gone.
She knows how I love to be gone -
She knows that I am a slave to freedoms
I've written for myself.

I have known many ways
of birds
and unseen ghosts.
When I walk
it is always against the wind.
7 hours talking
to you in the dark
only to realize
you had left long ago,
tucked your longing
into the shadows.
Inventions of you
carved into walls,
quietly,
because that's the only way
I know how to love.
Girls I lay with
are only figments
of an imagination I write out of my pens.
Every moment spent
with you girl
was a light on the darkest night,
but now I must return to myself -
the way I was when my body was made.
Only Christ can know
the pain I'm in,
my girl she will raise her chin,
forget.
Meanwhile,
I,
conscious shadow seeker,
will be looking up
for reincarnation.