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.

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.

He’s gone again, a plane to India.
The North Sea foams cold, its current
pushes him always away, he goes
I stay and think of him, the woman
he could know - is he alone?
He only feels in love when riding trains.

We last parted frantic, running for trains,
promising let’s meet again, after India.
The doors slide closed, and then I was alone
in the wake of his train’s current,
cursing myself for being the woman
who hang her hopes on a man who goes.

But sometimes I’m the one who goes.
To foreign countries I too have ridden trains.
I’ve played the role of Independent Woman
(although the North Sea was closer than India)
I still fear I lost him in its current.
We kissed goodbye then walked home alone.

Has he counted the nights that he’s spent alone?
Turning over and over – when sleep comes and goes
does memory flow in a deluge, churning current
of possibility lost or missed like trains?
Is he dreaming now, sweating on a bus in India
in all the noise, is he missing a woman?

He told me he cannot find a woman
he can talk to, so he is alone.
It’s adventure he lusts for, it’s India.
It’s only the act of going he loves, so he goes.
But I'd fill the seat beside him on trains
if I could give myself away to his current.

Time rolled over us in its driving current,
now I, always a sentimental woman,
imagine him when I’m riding trains;
remember him when I’m sleeping alone.
I cannot shed my life to go where he goes.
But I count the miles - the North Sea to India.

***** 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.

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.

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.

One drink wakes it in me –
the reckless storm that ignites in my belly
and spread to my head,
my chest.

Run.

I issue an evacuation order for myself –
a hurricane of stillness gathers on the horizon,
pack a bag and go.

Leave everything you don’t need behind.

Your job –
you’ve always gotten another.

Your home –
you’ve always gotten another.

Your love –
you know you love another.

Everything is undoable,
transit is safety, movement is comfort
stasis is death.
Plastic bags dragged into your throat.
***** water rising in the basement.

Go.

Before you’re too old,
before the cement dries,
wipe it off.

Two drinks crumble it in me –
the recklessness becomes hopelessness.
I’m so tired.
I am sandbags;
heavy, full, put up to weather the storm.
I couldn’t go if I tried.

Heaped on a beach and the water is rising.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The woman feels the man's presence beside her
like a vacuum.
A darker shape in the darkness of the room;
beads of sweat dry on his chest.
There is an ache in the deepest part of her
but she bears down on it, lets it throb against the sheets.
He turns over and over.

The woman watches the man's long back get dressed.
Convexes and concaves.
He looks at her with alien shyness,
a stranger in her routine, too big for the house.
She swallows the ache and coffee; two cups
with painted birds. He drinks and rises from the table.
She goes to strip the bed.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus,
with all this wine wine wine
the water bill's overdue.

Violet-stained hands don't
wash away no sins.

Baptism don't come from a
faucet that don't run.

And we ran out, baby

there's not a drop to drink.

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.

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.

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.

Like the muscles of a gull push on its breastbone
to complete a miracle of gravity,
so does my chest swell.

I felt it first

The night he showed me how to find the North star,
as if he knew that I have been lost at sea
for some time now.

As if he was taught as a small boy
the way he could lead someone home.

Ursa Major smiled from her seat in heaven
and gesturing north to remind us that
we are no longer lost.

But she is blind and she is cruel.

I knew it first

the night he showed me how to find the North star,
as love began to seep through my veins.

Ursa Major smiled and extended her claws
towards the North.

My boat had already lost its steering
but the sweep of his tide kept me
drifting in loose circles

Ursa Major closed her clouded eyes
and I lost my direction.

He called to me, gull voices through the storm

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.

I harbored you
quietly.

Like a shell plucked from the surf
and placed in the pocket of a winter jacket.
For months I'd run my thumb over your ridges,
and then I knew.

Love is no marching band.

It blooms in a slow creep;
a rose tint inside a scallop's
creamy heart.

The slight chill of a morning in summer.
Before the sun brags its potential.
It beams humbly with
the anticipation of a beginning.

But as does the heat of day,
loss stubbornly rushed in.
A shell slipping unseen through
some hole in a pocket's lining.

A shell lost in the sand at the North Sea.
You may fit to someone else's fingers,
but not in the same way you once fit me.

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