the lazy dark curls on her
young shoulders were probably
unkempt and
her young laugh overloud
and her bluefire eyes
a thin veil for her
bursting and unkempt
young heart.

that's probably why he
never wrote back, she realized years later.

I remember my teenaged phantasm and I lace soft boots to draw
tall grass and sand dunes and hothotsummer,
a pair of teenaged lips on my teenaged lips in sundown,
the little wreckage of the family behind walls invisible from distance,
and the perfect quiet of strong teenaged hands, the I-never-want-to-leave only
in that we know so certainly we will
come fall—
the beauty in the shooting of the star
and not the star.

I tilt the rearview, sweater on, and leave to you.
I picture the soft reeds and pebble beach with-you-near-you and I think
how I could take you there and live a baby flame fantasy with a flair
for the dramatics and more fallapart than meets the eye or the mind’s eye, even.

I could kiss you behind clapboards
like goodbye is on the weekend
and cry to Cassiopeia that why-does-good-always-*******-go-away.

But it doesn’t always, not just yet, and so I leave my young Hollywood vision
to my young Hollywood visionary and I take your hand to pass
the quiet sad beach at miles on miles an hour, because I want
you for longer than the starry summer
and Dad’s averted eyes.

he wasn't much on saying so
but it made its way onto birthday cards
and deathbeds

the long thin fingers of a girl of twenty-four
wrapped tight around the handrail of the L-train
bright-blue-eyed but for the temple bruise

                   he loves me
                   and the mess I made

everything tattooed (everything everything)
invisible on her cheeks and in the hollow of her shoulderblade
her lower lip and wristbone
but for the temple bruise
darker by two shades

          a four-in-the-morning-night cottoning her tongue
          not-the-first of many and her long thin fingers
          white-knuckled

          little joys to light on the handrail
          not his warm-hot-ice-hard chest
          or his loud voice (woulda been real handsome
          if his eyes weren't so cold)

but for the temple bruise

                                                         ­   i
                                                           ­ fell
                                                            in
 ­                                                           love so many times that day
                                                            t­he first sunday of its kind--not drenched
                                                        ­    in imperceptible airdrops

                                                       ­     the red-brown beard of the business suit
                                                            ­and the freckles undermining the punk-rock
                                                       ­     vibe of the dark-eyed fox-girl

                                                       ­     but the thin white knuckles
                                                        ­    and the temple bruise

                                                         ­   --none more than her

we laugh twice--

first loudly; of course
they can't hurt us

quiet, freeze-dried smiles
nervously after
what if they hurt us

it’s just one

letter in the box (that you checked
and checked
and checked
till the fountain dried up
on your pen-tip).

I waited--
bated breath and newsprint
on my knuckles
--to tell you what I knew now,

but you shouted over the
first syllable
and never heard the rest.

patiently I watch the red flag
rise and fall with daylight--
bated breath and newsprint on my knuckles
--for your word.

some days I feel it coming
comeoncomeon

it’s just one

high voiced Irishmen and spun sugar turned to
teenaged dreams and a teenaged circus

cold beaches in October like candlewax and promises
to call
bacon on the stove and cemetery gates and no one
to answer

if-this-was-the-cold-war to
this-is-the-*******-cold-war to
how'd-you-ever-get-so-blind

to the summer of warm warm warm and
the nights you'd have wanted at
sixteen and twenty
if you'd thought about it

and the big empty road in front of you that
under Orion's patent-leather belt looks so
not empty

how you're tall
and freewheeling

but not without