He misses me still, but that's old news.
He's missed me for so long now - he can do it in his sleep.

He does it while he eats alone at his desk,
while he runs for a train,
while the rain is coming down in sheets.
While a girl takes off her dress and he reaches for her,
his hands hesitate a decimal. He turns off the light,
and misses me.

It grows inside his chest, like a bonsai tree -
something natural but stunted.
Snipped and pruned carefully, but not allowed
to grow outside it's box. Not allowed to put down roots.

He hauled it off, across the sea.
Across China and the Middle East, he misses me.

Half a world apart, in Amsterdam I walk
with my eyes to the ground, all brown and grey.
Thinking of the planes and trains that bore him
away.
This has become second nature for me.

It's midnight in Tokyo, he sits at his desk
in the light from the street
thinking of trees, canals, red bricks, me
and when we sleep, he and I both,
it's with ghosts in the sheets.

The roadside weeds that clutter my hometown,
tangled skinny stems and yellow flowers.
Sing oh reverence, glory come down
to us, they sing, in daylight’s fading hours.

I cannot stomp them out, I cannot press them
in between the pages of my books.
Flower after flower, stem by stem
grow ugly. I can barely stand to look.

The preacher, he had called the place salvation
when telling us to where the high road led.
But the stars all seem to spell damnation,
and the moon, an eyeless, bloodless head.

Tonight the roadside weeds sing mercy, mercy
come for a homeward soul in need of thee.

The root suggests multiples,
a pair of shoes, yours and mine.

The prefix is a verb in motion, a
positive direction; a triumph of gravity
in defiance of its equal and opposite reaction.

He stands by the car in the grey light
with drizzle beading up on his shoulders.
Our life upset, torn at the seam into his and mine.

Turn around,
the coward whispers from my mouth.
I see my face reflected in the glass window

staring back at myself, the coward,
half of a set now rendered unusable, sold as scrap.
Turn around.

Multiples reduced to singular nouns.
My shoes are kicked and left by the door.
Everywhere his shapes are cut out of the dust.

The coward in me grins wide as a sickle
In the bathroom mirror. Our set of ghosts are
making too much noise, all night they keep me

up.

The wind chimes on the porch keep time like a metronome.
I’m sitting beside the imitation Tiffany lamp that my mother pretends is real
And wondering if the summer is a canyon I’ve fallen into.
The sky is a queer yellow, the color of a fading bruise,
And steam drifts up from the street. 
It looks like the world has been scorched and is slowly cooling.
The wind chimes are tuned to Amazing Grace,
Keeping time like a metronome to my summer heartbeat - a slow march.
The imitation Tiffany lamp lights up like a jewel,
my mother’s way of telling the world that we are home.

His thin shoulders,
Dutch nose

the hair at his temples is grayer than when we met
five years ago.

Something I can’t quite put my finger on.

My love for him
is a ships in the night love.
We circle, cutting separate pathways through
a vast ocean, on course for something

something

that keeps us signaling
onward, onward.

We look to the past privately but do not
speak of it.

The times our bodies touched.

I count them (I think he also does.)

One: the way I used to graze his arm with my hand
Two: an accident, swaying with music, too close
Three: drunk with the courage to kiss one another
Four: sweat, bed, the sun rose and I held his hand at the door
Five: years later, a hug that lingered,

the times we are allowed to touch one another,
hellos and goodbyes, in cars and trains.
We continue to pass one another.

And when we talk, we talk
and laugh and I feel a churning of waters,
a warm ocean swell that says: this is it!
Hold this.

The tide runs out,
Ships press forward on prescribed routes
through blind oceans.

Pale summer bodies
Hairless, like fish
***** for one another, lost in the blind sea.
They shed their virginities like dead skin,
They call out to me,
Winter is over!
Take off your wool coat.
But my mother told me not to and I’m afraid.
So I watch them come to shore
With childhood running down their legs,
And into the ground like melt-water

Honey beads up in its combs
Honey combs his short summer hair
Honey runs thick in heat like this
Honey runs for miles on County Route Eight
Honey-bees cling to our window screens
Honey shut the screen-door when he smelled rain
Honeysuckles grew on the side of our road
Honey had a roadmap open on his knee
Honey-bees know when the summer is ending
Honey will wait out by the car for me

Her prairie hair is grass gone to seed,
her voice vibrates on a fiddle string.
She taught you the meaning of homeward,
Americana Pollyanna, you tangle her name
in the cold northeastern stars.

She spills tall tales across the porch,
the air smells of thunder and cherry pie.
As a child she caught fireflies in jars
and has a scar in the shape of Alabama,
Pollyanna.

Tonight,
snow clouds roll through Chicago, the air is thin.
You stand in the window on a two hour layover
and look Homeward.

Pollyanna Mystica, a sky full of constellations
that you have already begun to forget:
watermelon seeds spit from the porch,
a spattering of insects on the windshield,
beautifully and infinitely random.


Freckles that trail down her knees and bare feet,
meandering paths you have followed before.
Pollyanna Diana, an fat moon smiles down on
the Kentucky dirt, rutted and red
where she will lay down her tired bones.

The loneliness and the shudder rise in my throat sometimes still.
Although I push them down into the ground like melt water,
some people are born under vicious stars.

November baby, your eyes the color of water holding light,
smelling of burning leaves in forests whose names neither
you nor I know. Now tell me, is this not a beautiful dream?

You are a king of the failing daylight, long shadows, the frozen ground,
turning our breath into crystals in the air that hang on your every word.
Two children of the winter, you its fearless rush and me, its limping end,

in like a lamb, March child: pale skinned and sparrow-hearted.
If there is a lion in me he is dead or hibernating under the ivory
vaults of my ribcage. But listen, inside a faint fluttering begins, a panic

or a voice rising timidly in song with the smoke from your fire.
The fabrics of our seasons weave together in this beautiful dream
where my moon is waxing always, rising in your frozen winter sky.

You are walking down the street in an unknown city,
it has no name, so you name is Grey because it was and so it is.
A bus pulls up beside you and stops a few paces ahead,
you didn’t realize you were standing at a bus stop until now.

Out steps a man, a should-have-been lover from your youth,
grown up and smiling and walking towards you. He holds
in one hand a suitcase, and in the other hand, a different suitcase.
He stops in front of you and a cold wind finds your neck.

We should have been lovers, he says to you. What happened,
you ask. Life happened he says, as it is apt to do.
He hands you the first suitcase, inside is a folded love note
written in your hand. You feel a little sick to your stomach.

I don’t want this, you say, it is over, it is already dead.
He hands you the second suitcase, inside is a neatly folded
three-piece suit, several pairs of socks, and an apple,
in case you get hungry on the way, he says.

You don’t want to stay here, do you? He gestures to the city
without color that you both have found yourselves in.
You don’t want to stay here, but you are afraid of what
is over the distant hills. Where should we go? You ask him.

He looks east: a hundred birds rise together from the fat green trees.
He looks west: the sun dips into the ocean, spilling itself everywhere.
He looks north: heaven domes overhead, constellations whirling.
He looks south: black soil blossoming blades of grass, pushing up.

You can go anywhere you like, he says, one might go so far as to
call the world your oyster. Me, you say, are you not coming?
I am not, he closes the first suitcase, your note held inside like
a crumpled moth, but I have something to remember you by.

Just then, a bus pulls up alongside you, and the doors open.
Don’t forget to write, he says, and the apple, in case you get hungry.
You set the suitcase in the empty seat beside you as the bus pulls away,
and the motion of the earth spins you onward, as it was and so it is.

Last year, Indian summer
when the leaves were yellow, last year
when I was younger, more beautiful.
The river was still warm and
the earth was less ancient.

I thought I saw God in the water
but it was a trick of the light.

He stood on the railroad bridge
above the lonely Wallkill last year,
in the slow honey sunlight,
and the colors of his negative
are still hanging in the air.

For many reasons, December is a dead season.
The fields are painted in purple and grey, with
blackbirds rising into the sky from distant tree-lines.
The give of summer earth is a hazy memory now,
stored somewhere deep, frozen down in the pores of the soil
where seeds have drawn themselves tightly into themselves.
Trees bend to the ground under their own naked weight.

And this is the season of the christchild?
With a wind that seeks the softest curve of your neck,
slapping your face and drawing water from your eyes,
with nights that go on with only brief intermissions of day.
Is there comfort to be found in the darkest season,
hidden away in some corner of some wood or in a
box to be torn in the rush of Christmas morning?

Open a citrus fruit and let its oils blossom into the air.
Crush a pine needle and spread its syrup on your fingers.
Watch the yolk of the sun break over the horizon through
the smoke of your breath and the breath of the frozen earth.
Get up early, stay up late when the lights come on and walk
out under them. Feel the heat from the open doors of the
department stores but don’t enter; keep this for yourself.

Once, I drove through the predawn blues on the bank of the
Mohowk River the day before Christmas. In the timid dawn
the frost was lacework, birches bowed, the blackbirds jubilated.
And somewhere ahead, a pine wreath hung on a porch for me,
a door was unlocked, a bowl of citrus fruit was being laid out.
December is a dead season, a sleeping season, but from
the darkest night of the year hangs a simple string of lights.

he read Brautigan
and thus would say all this is juvenile
and not real
he was real in a ***** brown sweater he wore
every day I knew him that smelled like menthols
and sweat and dope (he called it dope
sometimes because Bukowski did and he
read Bukowski too)

of course
he was real in his Catholic school
sports coat and fresh face once
without the 5-day beard he took to
wearing as a ******* to the system and other
real things like that which he sang
about on his guitar with a hole
in the bottom

the one he found in a
second hand store just like he always dreamed
he would and they would make sweet sad
music (that high and lonesome sound)
together forever he wrote his
poems to the tune of its steel strings
when he would sit at home at night and get
high and lonesome too

and so would I
because he thought I was ugly but didn't know
how to say it so he let me tag along for a few years
and let me sing in my off key death rattle
and lent me Brautigan and Bukowski
so I could know what was real and not real
but I didn’t learn my lesson so well

now did I?

Open up the sky, come fall electricity
lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven.
The churning leaves, pounding cataracts come fall,
beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth.

Lift each blade of grass to yearn for heaven
all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Beat us back into our ancestors, into the earth
where words are rendered indigestible as stones

all reflected, caught in the water of our eyes.
Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water
where words are rendered indigestible as stones
In the grey and green wash, the last storm of summer.

Come, thirsty, choke on rhyme and water as
The sky breaks, sun behind its gauze of clouds, breaks
In the rose and gold wash, the last storm of summer
and this is that fairy land, the kingdom of heaven.

Listen:

it’s 3AM and your heart feels like a gear
that slipped the track.
Or the sunshine smells like honeysuckle
and its the most perfect day of the year
but the knuckles of winter close on your throat.

This is not a new story. Some women can’t
find a good man.
The intellectuals, the homely homebound
finding nothing but silences, theirs and that of
God (or someone that goes by His name)

Anyway, He’s not on the other line,
your prayers spread like ripples,
skimming, only reaching the surface.
Some women are cursed by Eve and her
****** want to know, you know?

No. Eve was a ***** or a saint,
nothing more, not a woman with a real ribcage housing
a real blood heart. Some women can’t find a good man,
but she had two and chose neither and
that is her curse.

She found herself naked and embarrassed
and Adam was a fool with nothing to say
and she was embarrassed by him too.
When lo, the angel of God cursed her *****
from which she birthed ****** and cowardice.

Some women can’t find a good man
and nights seem like the barrens of Eden
with fruits that birth flies and rot on the vines.
Remember, sister, our mother who from out
of Adam was born then cursed to his side.

Crocus-hearted bloom, in careful ways
he cultivating quiet love inside
that snow-filled part of him. Across I stray
the border of his acres, vast and wide.

Through his field I dragged my hungry bones,
but the landscape holds no place for me.
The gentle gardener has tilled his rows
and through the soil he has spent his seeds.

Somewhere a lady wears her mother's dress
shining  ivory, pale as orchid bulbs.
Her heart it bangs and thunders on his chest
like storms, and in their rain I am dissolved.

Woman, hold him through the night when dreams
of me rise like demons from the angry sea.

I hate the miracle of my anatomy!
Cried the woman-poet from the
bed

the man slipping silently off her
while in the next room
the dogs howled at a
television nature-show.

That night he had
called her brood-mare,
took her to pasture,
tied her to a post and shot her

and now he reclines
all broad shoulders, white
chest and body hair, smug in animal
satisfaction, one with the dogs
in the living room.

She covers the flood-plains
of her hips with blankets
and prays that his
hooks didn't catch,
feeling like a basin collecting
groundwater as it flows off the
mountain face.

like us,
take comfort in the soft golden September.
The season for falling asleep,
as the shadows fuzz their way towards the center
from the edges of dawn and dusk.

For those with thin skin blanketing their veins
who feel the wind shift on the retreating edge of the storm.
As the north creeps in like a sigh,
take comfort in the growing silences of

paper lantern stars; watch them rise flickering
towards the fat orange moon bloom in autumnal constellations.
Fade pinpricks in ink as the leaves melt into the crow-cries
the smell of the coming night like smoke with no fire.

You know of it, it makes you lonely
for blankets and the flushed warmth of another.

Take comfort as the wind howls through the night hours
to remind you that no one is ever all alone.
Pull on your thickest wool sweater like a winter undercoat;
like armor for the coming night.

For those with light eyes, thin skin, sore heart
which slows its beat keeping time with the shortened day,

take comfort, and let it sing you to sleep.

Never the woman,
always the other woman.
She-poets have sung of it since
they first gave words
to the wet knot of their hearts.

The consolation prize, the late-comer
who must be the one to wash his
***** hands. Not a goddess but
the amazon who presses on his
body’s weakest points. The villainess.

The other woman has no power.
He doesn’t need to know her name,
her fears, which books made her cry as
a girl. He already has his golden idol,
but he wants a clay vessel on the side.

He doles her out careful smiles under
pinkblue bar-lights or in smoky kitchens.
He tells her yes you’re beautiful
but I’ve got a better one at home still
can I see the shape you make in my bed?

And she is hopeful and lost
but finds his arm and lets herself be led.
Never the woman, but a girl who
plays games in the mud, dirties her dress,
blacks out her face, her soiled lips.

And women speak of the other woman
like she is a crow above their doors.
Watching them make their love
through greedy eyes while
nursing her barbed and tangled heart.

I dreamed that I met your mother.
Not the women that you called by their first names
as a child; not the women your father carefully
introduced to you as you stared down at your knees.
Not the women who crouched to look you in the eye
and said, my aren't you a handsome little man just like
your daddy?
and you, still shy, always shy said nothing but looked into
their brown green gray eyes and saw someone else’s
mother, but not your own.

I met your mother. She who pressed you into being,
who molded you against herself, between her muscles.
The woman who fed you lifeblood
before spilling you out screaming for her.
The woman who looked into your eyes for the first
time in a hospital and saw her eyes and was scared
and packed a suitcase and left before
you grew into a half-version of herself.
I dreamed that I met your mother, and she gently reminded
me that I touch her womb every time I touch you.


She was wearing a long housedress, red with white peonies
and vines blooming and connecting like veins.
She was washing dishes and watching November birds
rise from the fields through her well-water eyes.
My son is a good man, she said and I agreed and the birds
took to the sky in lonely circles and disappeared.
In a dream I pressed my knee into the hollow behind your knee
and your mother smiled and said it was okay,
and all the not-mothers your father introduced to you
disappeared like November birds rising from the fields.

a great return, as I predicted,
like a king. With your crown, your laurels,
your broad shoulders and back,
your hands in your pockets, your face
hard-browed and blond as an SS guard.

he is a slave to his masculinity
he has you, he has had you
and still, you’re no necessity

Some sort of resurrection,
less like spring and more like remission.
A disease that I had chased like a rat
deep into my bones, now
creeps back to its hole in my chest.

you’ve seen his big artillery
bombs dropped, missiles flew
and still, you’re no necessity

Like an old rag dinging out of
a player piano. Off-key and tinny,
on an endless loop for the better part of a year.
I know the words to this song,
they go: he wants you not, he needs you not.

he owes you no apology
boys will be boys, it’s what they do.
he is a slave to his masculinity

But I have written him stories.
I have given him children,
a flat with tall windows and sunlight,
I have given us breakfasts and coffees,
funerals and weddings, I have given us.

he gave you one perfect memory
his pale skin in the pre-dawn blue,
but still, you were no necessity

I have taken them away.
Perhaps his room is white, cell-like,
empty walls. With a mattress on the floor,
for the king with his pride and
laurel wreath, no use for memories of me.

*Let me write you the last story
he had you once, and now he’s through
he is a slave to his masculinity
and girl, you’re no necessity

Something simple
to begin:

Your winter coat hanging in my doorway
blue wool buttons and frayed edges
with one dun hair
clinging to the collar.

                       you left me with these things.


three kisses goodbye
under a streetlight   

                     
The first tasted like every flower blooming in every summer,
every blackberry, every honeybee at the screendoor,
the skirts of every rainstorm, distilled and drank.

The second felt like committing something to memory.
The locking of a jewelry box, the pressing of a leaf,
twisting of a ring; the way in which a muscle remembers.

The third was a hesitation. You had already reassigned me
as a bedtime story, counting these things like sheep.
We stepped over the threshold between now and once.

Your coat hanging in some other doorway
hanging from your thin frame,
packed away in a box until

until,

what we are now is arbitrary
lengths of time and distance.

Milk thistle, Queen Anne’s Lace, and other
nameless weeds have won the battle for the roadsides.
The flowering trees have had their shining afternoons,
and now they retire to green on green.

August stands at the deep end of the swimming pool,
where the water is still somewhat cool, gem blue.
Her shoulders are freckled and hunched and she glances
over the yard at the houses bleaching under the sun.

The young girl sits with her pale feet in the shallow end
like magnolia petals set adrift by the light breeze.
She is singing a hymn for the first day of June,
her small voice hums like bees through the air.

The chlorinated water is an ocean laid out between them.
A promise was made but not meant to be kept.
Something wordless, felt but not understood, smelling
like the sea but tasting like sweat, and she will sing of it

until her throat can sing no more.

You remember that empty winter
Tasted like gin on my breath where it hung,
drops of moisture in the air.
J’ai coupé mes mains sur la glace

Mais mignon, tu es froid,
Et mes bras ne peut pas vous réchauffer.
Nous parlons les mots glacées,
Et ils éclatent dans la nuit brumeuse.

De whisky de vin de gin tonic
Comme les bouteilles, tu seras épuiser.
Alors, qu'est-ce que tu feras?

And those things we say, love
They froth and drip from our mouths
Down our chins and onto the wet snow.

We speak carefully
without naming body parts.  
As if the utterance of a word
could evoke touch – which would mean
hearts racing off in jolty cadences, sweat and
altogether too much skin.

We move with hyperawareness of our limbs.
The air ripples and reaches with each gesture
in phantoms of feeling.
I sense the edges of your fingers,
I cannot ignore the millimeters of
space between our knees.

Your mouth curves down at the edges,
when your gummy smile splits
at the things I say. I remember your lips.
I cannot put them away
in a part of me that locks.
Your mouth opening against mine –

your tongue slipping in.
Put it away.
Your mouth on the pulse below my chin.
Turning back in your doorway,
the dawn light white on your skin.
Put it away.

This wanting is something I can keep
like a mantra - a bed with you
won’t again be a bed for me.
Now we drink as strangers or friends
who once pressed their bodies against each other’s –
but heavy snow covers only blur the edges,

nothing disappears entirely.
We speak carefully

to hide the pump of blood and memory.

We called him Kansas because he reminded us of open spaces,
but we should have called him nothing at all.
He had a last name but we didn’t bother to learn it,
something all-American, midwestern and bland.
He had no hometown but a drifter’s restlessness in his limbs.


Kansas had a girl called Daisy-May, which wasn’t her given name.
It was said that she could charm the rattle out of the snake,
and we never knew if that was a a good or a bad thing.
Daisy-May reminded us of the Forth of July, all sparklers and rocket pops,
Cut-off shorts and bottles of whiskey.  She crackled like a firework display.


Our town overflowed with them, we were too small, too pure,
and they were too combustable. Daisy-May was as mean as they come,
and Kansas was ugly in the same way that Saturday nights are.
Knowing him was like being drunk past midnight, alone and walking
home past ***** neon and watching the stars pass you by.  


Every teenager in the county awoke at the moment of impact,
the night Kansas drove his car through that barn on route 20.  
We flocked like pilgrims to touch the twisted metal of the guardrail.
We followed the dead grass tire marks like the yellow brick road.
Daisy-May was lovely as ever laid out in white like the ****** herself.

On nights when it’s so dry that our skin turns to dust and blows
away, we think of Kansas and Daisy-May and how they caught fire.
Patron saints of our frustration, desperation, too ugly to be real.
Bottle rockets on the Forth of July. Shot from some lonely road
to explode lights in the sky, to blot out the stars for a moment, then die.

You were my life's great distraction,
from the tedious ins-and-outs of seasons,
the still summers and the silent snows.

From childhood's great terrors,
slipping under in the swimming pool,
from the restless rubbings of the twenties:

When my soul seemed too large
for my ribcage.

When I bottomed out in my thirties,
penniless, a slipped clutch in my car
and nothing but mustard in the refrigerator,
I remained for you.

I quit drinking when you threatened to
leave me on the kitchen floor.

That is the first bullet-point
on the endless ledger of debts
I owe to you.

And though we were fruitless
(genetically speaking)
your perfect DNA will remain in the soil's pores

and your calcium will marry the grass roots,

so that this great, dull planet
might become less ugly.

***** has got thinner hips.

Her thighs are clean lines
where mine are a ven diagram.

Collar bones, stomach, all negative spaces.
My figure is convex in all the wrong places.

Here's a bedtime story:
Once,
I got him drunk and he ****** me,
it was fruitless.
But he makes love to her.
He finishes with her,
while I had to push him off me.
But I digress,

he cups her face with the same
hands that he used
to push mine into his mattress.

But her and me,
we are still sisters
of the same anatomy.

So sister,
I hope you rip up his lungs
and drag him out to sea.

I know of the creases in his shoes
but not the color of his eyes,
how utterly meaningless, romanticized
faults of man.

to be taken by the random
coming together of chromosome,
chance and missed chance,

In a dream he came to me;
he spoke to me in rhymed couplets

And my heart of sinew and muscle,
romanticized into something of feeling,
tuned for one moment to the sound of his
end rhyme

then sinks
to the bottom of my belly where it
pulls like a diver’s weight.
exerting itself against my body’s
own timid buoyancy

I know the names of all the birds
in your language and my own.
If I tell them to you –
is that enough?

That would not be enough.
My life’s careful machine would have to
be halted – parts would have to
be removed and replaced.
The cost would be enormous.

I know where to find ancient things
buried in the earth.
Coins, broken pieces, bits of pottery.
Is that enough?

That would not be enough.
I cannot take your jewelry
for my fingers – I must not study
your artifacts, those broken pieces.  
Some things must stay below the dirt.

I know where the jackdaws roost
in the quiet bell-tower of a village church.
If I take you there –
is that enough?

That would not be enough.
We could never stand by that
gentle river, in that village
with the old stone church. If I went there
with you I would never leave.

What if you never left?
We would undo all of our choices,
We could run the river backwards,
is that enough?

That would not be enough.
We will stay buried like bits of pottery,
silent as bells in an empty church.  
Jackdaws returning to roost,
remaining in patterns they don’t understand.

There's a jungle silence tonight.
The angry orange sun is low in the sky
Quivering in the gelatin air, sluggishly setting.
Cars rattle on the pavement like half-mad animals
And I hang limply to the steering wheel, drawing slow breaths,
Listening for a sound of thunder in the reverberating quiet.
There is nothing but the distant whine of sirens,
And the backwards static of the radio.

Only a red crescent of the sun remains,
Pierced on a church steeple and sinking slowly.

When he hears orchestra he wraps his body around it entirely,
As if the crescendos and decrescendos spread out in a vast horizon

around which he can loose and find himself in cycles like the moon.
As if the vibrato could resonate at a frequency that would dislodge

him from this life, from this crippled city, from this traffic on I-81.
As if, like an oyster nursing a sand grain, he could snap shut on a swelling

of violins, or on the ghost of sound that follows the cellos out, the last breath,
as if he could compress it inside himself,  down into something he can keep.

He hands it to me like a ring that doesn’t fit on my finger, and I pretend
as if I understand but the meaning's unclear, and he says it’s okay, listen again,
                                                                ­                                                      listen again,
                                                          ­                                                            liste­n again,

I met you when we both were in recovery, sitting in a waiting room,
while Dr. Limbo shuffled our papers and told us it'd be awhile.

You were in with a heart defect. It has a hole, you said,
that nothing so far can close up, and you're not getting any younger.

I suffered from chronic chills, the kind that make people cold to the touch,
hugs are like a trip to the morgue, I said, and you nodded thoughtfully.

We discussed the articles in every dogeared magazine they had laying out,
folding back the pages and pointing at the pictures.

You explained to me the inner-workings of the common espresso machine,
and I named all my favorite cathedrals in Europe, chronologically.

When we finished with that, we checked for the doctor, but he was busy.
You nursed the weak part of your chest as I ran my hands over my arms

You know, I think the hole is getting wider as I get older, and someday it'll eat
me away like cancer. As you speak, I see the slight depression near your sternum.

Well I fear that I'll never touch a living person, I'll only touch rocks.
And my capillaries will forget how to fill, and I'll freeze from the inside out.

We looked at each other, and I thought you might try to kiss me, but instead
you wonder if the doctor is a good one; and if they'll call our names soon;

and you turned to face the door.

Summer is stale and lonely.
A fine dust caught in the air
And the corners of my mouth.
My eyelids are paper lanterns;
All I see is yellow.
And those chapped fields
That lay out under the high-noon sun,
They are stale and lonely too.
I want to peel off my skin;
It fits too tightly.
I want to raise my voice with the locusts,
Crying to our mother for rain
To dilute the earth.
But the sky is distant
An inverted ocean,
Refusing to fall.

My mother and father, they brought me up clean
Spare change and a bible by the bedside
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

I watched the world through a hole in the screen
Smelled the rainstorm and the thunder outside
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

I hear my mother on my answering machine
She was a child when her own mother died
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

They told me that people are ugly and mean
And Jesus would love me if I swallowed my pride
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

My mother and father, they have a routine
And soft-spoken fears that they always denied
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen

Childhood is a sickness without a vaccine
A fever dream, arms and eyes opened wide
I stayed in the house until I was eighteen
My mother and father, they brought me up clean

My dreams have become waterlogged: floods
and unstable bridges, broken levies and
water leaking into our house
from the crack beneath the screen door.
I see you from the streetcar window,

as the flood climbs the sides of our
city's monuments; its storm-darkened cathedral.
At the far side of the bridge, in your rain jacket
and arrows of wet hair, against the swollen sky,
you stand holding a sign to your chest.

Your eyes like lost pebbles in a stream bed.
I walk to you over the rails, the deluge raging
under my feet, purple storm clouds tinged
with sick yellows raging overhead.
The sign says the end.

and perhaps it is, perhaps it was.

Loneliness can be pressed into a jewel
and hung in the window.
Spinning prisms across the walls of my
empty room.

It's brightest when the sun is shining;
the facets deep and ever-changing.
Light and shadow;
time and distance.

This is when it stings:
Every perfect evening (gull cries and clear skies)
hangs on the walls of my room in light-tricks.
Vignettes of sunsets; only refractions.

The daylight oranges over his long back,
it goldenrods in his hair, shadows lengthen
his crooked fingers, strong wrists.
He looks west.

The sun says: follow! The light is chasing me.
His loneliness is a jewel that he saves for me.

Derailed, and the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury the
moonlight, all sound cuts out. A hundred tons of dust
from beasts of metal tear the summer river dusk to
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

When the flickering dome of heaven collapsed to marry
itself to the earth, to the river bed, to the parking lot,
the bridge, a frail arabesque, snapped like a gunshot in the
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary.

What strange coincidence, come to pass, come to carry
away long childhood afternoons; her and her final hours.
Whose plans were these, man-made towers that break in
silence, the moment after the coals met the tributary?

Derailed, the bridge folds inwards, it came to bury itself in the
silence of its own weight, as the coals meet the tributary.

Honey is the blood of the sweet and the rotten
With sugar-scabs on the back of their hands.

Their hands, stained to the wrists with pulp,
Waving to us from a roadside stand.
The people that live on this small mountain
Eat fallen fruit and peel off the flies.

His hands stick to the wheel as he drives,
Upriver, where the air is wet and heavy.
We swallow our words, thin like skim milk
And I smell the thunderstorm fresh on his clothes.

It covers the stench of his sweet rotting bones

I. My mother once had a dream about the blue hour and I spent many evening car trips with my cheek against the cool glass of the window and asking her “is this the color of the sky in your dream?” To which she would reply in gradients: a few shades darker, a few shades lighter. It became my own personal mythology. The blue hour in winter lasts ten minutes, but when I’m walking home I think about my mother’s dream and it feels like a dream that I had. Then my breath freezes and the streetlights come on and the sky gets dark.


II. You know the way the atmosphere can seem thick and the sunlight comes like its being reflected in honey? And everything you look at turns orange and gold? Distances fading to sun-ghosts and loosing their edges? More than once I stood in a field and watched the waves of light break over the summer grass and roll off into the trees. When the light is that way it looks like there’s no such thing as winter or cold beds or questions or death or war. Do you know what it is like to stop your car on the side of the road and watch the sun break itself on your bare shoulders? I think you do.


III. The worst night was the time I cut both my hands on the ice and snow near the porch of someone’s house in New Paltz, NY. I will tell you about it with surgical precision: it was the kind of ice that forms after the temperature gets over thirty during the day then freezes at night into a sharp crust; two week before Christmas 2009. I had been drinking hard; I had already cried but swallowed it down. I fell through the ice and cut up both my hands. I didn’t go home. I drank gin straight from a cup that had already been used and left by someone else. I told someone that I loved him. I didn’t, but neither did he. Words dripped out of my mouth, I still didn’t go home.


IV. That’s not the only time I did those things. Sometimes it was worse. I lost my shirt once. I lost some friends too. I pretended like I was high when I wasn’t. I got scared of the police in the back seat of a car while my friends told me to stay cool. I thought about dying in a VW bus that was swerving down a small mountain loaded with stupid kids loaded with drugs and I was sober and thought about how the paramedics would pull our bloated bodies out from the wreckage. Rough patches. I imagine growing up was hard for you too sometimes. Let’s not talk about it.


V. Just give me the benefit of the doubt.


VI. I could have been a cello player but I was too restless and I quit. I imagine you could have been something too. Perhaps the trumpet or the drum. Maybe you sing. I can imagine you with a little boy’s bowl-cut squirming on a piano bench as a Ms. So-and-So played scales over and over with her pale cigarette fingers. And you let your eyes wander off to the bay window where the strong and true July sunlight was shining and you thought about a stick you found that morning that was the perfect shape and weight of a rifle and how the neighborhood boys were running through the streets making POP POP noises at one another. “Pay attention!” You tear yourself away from the glorious blue outdoors and place your fingers on the ivory keys.


VII. Sometimes I think love is a rare and flawed thing; perhaps a kink in our genetic makeup. I think about the past twenty-three years of people telling me that I am pretty and they don’t understand why I can’t find someone because I’m nice and smart and interesting and not strung-out on drugs. Sometimes it hurts when people touch me, even if it’s the cashier handing me a receipt, and a voice in my head asks me how will you ever be enough for a man when you hate brushing up against strangers on the train? I’m truly sorry for telling you this, you can leave if you want. It won’t hurt my feelings.


VIII. Did you have a dog as a small child that you loved as fiercely as a small child can?  Was it named Bruno or Max or Buddy and did it flop down next to you in the grass on hot summer days panting with pure and simple and absolute joy? Did it swim in the lake near your house and run with you along the long white fence in your yard? Did it get out one evening through the back door and not come home all night, even though you stayed out past one in your pajamas with a flashlight calling Bruno! Max! Buddy! Did your father find it’s body on the side of the road in the morning, dry brown eyes, broken legs, tongue hanging out on the asphalt? No? That’s good, none of that happened to me either.


IX. In every nightmare I have ever had I am running away from something. I am going to the bank and taking out my savings account in cash, I am stealing a car and driving to Walmart in a strange city to buy platinum hair dye, new clothes, and sunglasses. I am going to the airport and buying a ticket to Canada, where I will go to a different airport and buy a ticket to an undisclosed location where no one can trace me. On a related note, do you ever have a dream in which you are deeply in love with someone and when you wake up you reach out for them but find you are alone, and everything seems hollowed out and your life seems like it has become the dream?

X. Wake up, it’s your turn.

It is getting colder: deeply, deeply.
November carries a fog as thick as guilt
to set heavily on my brow like a crown.

I piece recollections in a daylight mosaic,
bits of broken glass with ragged edges,
but the colors are dark, the faces unfinished.

A row of bruises on my leg has cropped up
overnight like small brown mushrooms,
I feel the tissue deaden beneath my skin.

The fog comes at dawn like a merciful nurse
to remove me from my own history. It presses
cottonballs against my eyes. The bruises remain.

The bar-lights remain, smudgy windows grinning
out from under their shrouds, dark streets, they
too remain, waiting like a trap under deadleaves.

But did I break myself on him like a bottle last last?
The fog says YOU DID YES YOU DID
and reflects to me the shame of my own face.

Does blood smell like burnt rubber to you?
Now nothing but a stain on the highway.
The windshield cracked like a finely cut crystal,
it was glass that opened the animal’s sorry neck.

Is that why you flinch at the sight of tomatoes
in our September garden, rotting while
beetles make lacework of the leaves,
do they remind you of flesh bursting at the seams?

Do you remember being scared drunk and praying
that the deer was an angel or hallucination?
While steam rose from the broken bodies
of your vehicle and the animal like incense to God.

If I die before I am a bride,
bury me with these words in my mouth,
as an I-told-you-so for the creator.

If I go clutching my maiden name
in arthritic hands like beads of a rosary,
tell about it at my funeral.

There must be a hymn to sing,
something like:
I kept every vow I ever made.

Put me in the ground in ****** white.
As if that'll erase the one-nights, love's malformations,
the way that matrimony might have,
in simpler times.

If I die with vacant bedsides, I instruct you:
take me to autopsy
remove my heart and check for scars,
then instruct the mortician to place it in my hands.

Like a bouquet.

To have and to hold.

A list was compiled during the
short walk from your neighborhood to mine.

Organized first by duration (in seconds and milliseconds)
beginning with the brush of our fingers
on a beer bottle which passed from me to you.

Then by the thickness (in centimeters)
of the clothing, skin and sinew that
stood between your beating heart and my own.

I fear it will never be rendered to zero.

When we touch my sternum swells
like the muscles of a bird
pushing it into flight.

Every time is a miracle.

The red crescent sun
is pierced on a church steeple
and sinking slowly.

I feel alive in bus stations.
While waiting on a wooden bench,
Chipping at the paint
In the quite anticipation of flight.
The exhaust smell mixes with bacon grease
From the deli next door,
As the buses heave on the pavement.

I choose my seat carefully
Watch the mountains turn blue with distance.
The bus expects nothing from me,
It won’t ask for an explanation.
I can lean my head against the window,
And watch the sun set orange through my eyelids.

Sitting among strangers in a tandem-flight.
We all have stations we’re trying to leave behind.
The  engine knows and will whisper to me,
In steady vibrations,
Rumbling through the vinyl seat.
I will not easily slip away,
On this bus or on any other.

Mohonk Tower is the spindle
Around which I am strung.

Trees like fox-fur brushes
red red red
and impossibly soft.
This mountain is sleeping,
Even the bears are swallowed up
Tucked into their rock wombs
Harmless as boulders

But winter is coming and
There is sand in my oyster-heart
Far from the salt spray, shut up tight
Like an old window stuck in its sill.

Man fell in love with the winter
The empty season, he understands.
Pale like blood drained from his face.

But my lungs taste the dust of leaves
Breathe the dim gold light.
I am folding beneath the earth
Red inside and beating with life,
Sleeping but not forever.

He and I are the same:
umbrellas on sunny days, nothing in the rain and
shivering, slightly, in the warmth of sunny rooms.

His gentle face watches me walk through the door
and he paces the floor looking for a rhyme
that will hold me, neat like the sonnet he’s folding

                    my quiet dear, who walked in shadowed rooms
                    forever, noticed slightly dimming lights
                    and slighter changes in the weather, afternoons
                    with showers, clear and starry nights.

                    she smelled like air and puddles on the street
                    The rosy blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the pinkish blush of clouds after a storm--
                    the white and empty sky after a storm--

He admits defeat, and again we are the same,
afraid to speak each other’s names, waiting
for rhymes that would’t come, or never came.

But we could slink back into the mountainsides,
coastlines, deep tree recessions and rain-filled
nights, you and I.  Be brave and build a home,

a bed and a desk, fill up our books with poems
about the weather, the curves of our necks, lay
our words in the soil of the cold, careful northwest.

Isaac stomps out his cigarette ****,
He’s been living down in the suburban desert.
I heard he stopped going to church years ago
And I heard he’s scared to pray with both eyes shut.

A hot night - sixteen and itching with life,
Sixteen and running blind down the mountain
Sixteen with bound up wrists; ******* hands
And the story goes his old man dropped the knife.

And the story goes he put up a hell of a fight.
They’d make a killing on ticket sales alone.
Get that angel to sweat in the stadium lights.

And I heard that Isaac still has scars on his chest,
But we all pay some penance, we all cheat some test.

I haven't had my heart broken.
But I have thrown it against another person
and broke it myself.

He would've looked handsome in wedding photos,
but even more in a suit and tie
on the other side of the divorce court.

He would roll up his sleeves like a lawyer.
He would say things like:
You ruined my life when you got pregnant.

As if babies were something a woman conjured inside
herself out of lovesickness and desperation.
A snare in which to trap a man like him.

But instead I broke myself on him like surf on the ramparts.
I foamed and spat and washed myself right back
out to sea again.

And all I have is a notch on my map, marking
a shallow harbor,
a few torn sails
and an empty womb.