mid-march sun kisses your shoulderblade but then it rains
and your equilibrium is temporary it collapses somewhere out of frame
and the voice that has been everything says you’re doing something wrong before it dissipates
and different palms on your back say you’ll be okay but I know it hurts
and he almost understands
and they almost understand
almost.

mid-march sun used to drop in every once in a while but now
the ten day forecast says rain rain rain and now
there's no one to blame
and no one to tell.

the gnarled elbows of
that oak, wizened with
snow-crusts of
one thousand pretty winters
held me that day fast

august-limbed, i
stumbled
through the lavender
flashes of a crystal
sharp voice in my ears

ringing bells and harebells
purple, gold, spreading
tripping heels
where am i
where am i

shh, said the branches
on my shoulder blades

he was far behind me
seething to himself and
he could not see to follow
but years later,
my oak protector reduced to
rings,

i feel him still angry,
red—I feel him
want to find me

you’re tall now and your elegant shoulders are
rolled back and your collarbone frames your diamond
pendant like a picture
you don’t always wear the athenian owl anymore
you’re a little past your own poetry

they’ll all say my
how you’ve grown
haven't you

new york was first a big empty window-walled apartment
a trundle bed and Victoria
and finding that I can’t love anyone more than I love the
solitary solitary solitary train

next it was hungry circles with a
stranded little man
going too far to get back home

and then the  l - - -  of all our lives
maybe l - - - ing someone more
than peace at eight a.m.
irish cream ale in the evenings and
push-and-pull-and-push

and now it is
westward, higher, hypothetic
thinking where is the balance
between the train tracks and the
sweet sweaty bed

at the end

it’s something mundane but im-
possible not to miss
never the vast neverending or the
reflection in your so-pretty-eyes

not how it’s purple in the sundown
or the time you kept your feet dry
waving from his shoulders in the ebbtide

it isn’t the round he gallant-
ly orders for the two of you
or his singing voice
the salty never-gone stillness
in your eyelashes

it’s something mundane—
the no-memory but infinite patience
the time he touched your too-warm forehead
and when the water rose how he
kept you off the shore
—don’t forget that

tiger eyes searching yours hey
hey
I love you—
it’s the twelfth time and you’re barely awake
I love you too, you hardly say, like a robot to his jawline

hands on yours those hands you loved
they’re too hot now oh
oh, my god just let me make my breakfast
I don’t have time right now

hey
hey
hey (you don't have the time)
hey
I love you, he doesn’t ******* stop saying

you miss him when you slam the door

pretty face bright glowing-- colorado freckles frozen
artificial sun, perma-smile.
lake michigan eyes.

        his white teeth and rosy cheeks
        a little taller, hands on her waist


in front of a church. on his bed. on her bed. on the dock. holding half-empty green bottles.
                                                    ever balanced
                                                             never crying




except in the hallway when everyone else is sleeping.

                       i don't want to be ******* lied to, she said

and he breathed out heavy, shook his head
it wasn't a photograph night.

I said I wasn’t gonna write another poem about hometown
stars and hooded sweatshirts and how life was a little warmer
when your thin fingers were on the steering wheel of that
**** station wagon or when they brushed up against mine

I said I was bigger than that now and I didn’t miss you anymore
and my own car didn’t stall at stop signs anymore and I didn’t
have a bonfire in my ventricles anymore cause I didn’t hear your
name much anymore, not these days

and I said I could barely even remember the time I promised
to never forget you and wasn’t that just the way it always goes
but now I’m here and small under the stars and awnings of our
dusty hometown and it’s still warm without you and I don’t
know how it ever got to be like that

and I do remember
and I wrote you this

this summer, the first of its kind, has been a very difficult one. I’m not unique in my anxiety for having the comfortable, intricate, beautifulinspiringwonderful rug I’ve come to love so deeply over the course of this chapter of my life ripped out from under me, but I think I’ve felt the pull particularly strongly. I’ve also lost quite a few people that I loved and love, in varying degrees and to various uncontrollable forces—first distance, then ungenerous and unforgiving illness, then irreconcilable differences of bagel topping and dog breed preferences. my world has been even more transient and transitory than usual, weekends punctuated by drives from my old home to my old home, neither of which I feel like I particularly belong to anymore. my weeks taken up first by a job clouded with exhaustion and headstrong disinterest, then by nothing at all, now by a conflict of interest—a place I love inside a place where I never wanted to land.

on the nights when I’ve fallen asleep, dreams of crying parents and misfiring deadbolts have awakened me, and those nights have been difficult to come by. I’ve felt the ennui brought on by the inescapable digitization of the world and the awareness that I’m not smart enough to be above it. that I’m not smart enough to even properly love the poetry that I love, to speak the language that I thought I knew, or to use the temperamental dishwasher in my own house. I’ve buried my misgivings about myself in lamentations that my friends have been scattered to different cities, so they can’t prop me up anymore.

I’ve shared pieces of myself with people more nakedly than ever before and with much higher stakes, and though I regret precisely zero of those risks, I’m learning it’s true that the harder you fall, the harder you’ll fall, and the latter isn’t something I’m yet accustomed to allowing for myself.

I haven’t yet accepted the death of a presence in my life that has been so large and multifaceted throughout, constantly reminded when the GPS winds me through the churchyard where she officially is now and when I pass her picture on my kitchen counter and when I keep on loving her wonderful family. when I remember that she’s the reason I had these phenomenal four years in this phenomenal place, and the reason I’m for now sitting comfortably in a job that I love.

and I haven’t yet accepted this transition into having so little control, so little trajectory. it’s a big life. this summer, as I said, has been very difficult.

but august, in time, will fade into september, and when it does I can say “last summer was very difficult." and I can remember how to stand up straight and that there’s a reason I have those city-scattered friends in the first place. and I can figure out that the lesson I learned is that risking a fall makes for a strictly irreplaceable, exquisite six month repose—not just a bruise—and maybe a new city-scattered friend. and that the death doesn’t erase the radiance of the life. and that distance is sometimes bridgeable, and that figuring out where to be takes a little time, and that nightmares aren’t there during the day, and that everything is, little by little, sometimes, usually, always all right.

i have known the taste of violet; it has
stuck in my molars long after i’ve finished
it has been my wine-stained secret
i have known

the striated forearm and clenched fist
the mirror in the ventricles
and the hardiness of them
the measured beat
beat
beat

i have known the scrapes that even cardboard leaves
with a slip of the hand on its way out
i have known better the scars that mouths leave by association
on the shin, on the skin, on the cortex

have i known anything but
violet
i wonder

on good days, I deal in thoughts like
why do banana peppers taste like that
can I carry twenty-four water bottles a three-quarter mile, or
I think this tree’s a little taller than a year ago

on other days, I deal in
how

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.

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

i can’t help but remember all the things you taught me—
how to drink to excess and wake up smiling, how
to cook rice, and where the train is—now
as you lie sideways on the couch,
listing baby names with a cracking voice

cecelia sounds all right

you lie in the grass
just shy of sunburning
and your hands are warm
and your coffee is cold

and it’s the same world still
but it feels like a better one

a fine line is drawn daily between the by-yourself and the alone, and between every little heartbeat of together, and between not old enough and not young enough, but sometimes you land right on that line and you sing about it in a singing voice that sounds different from your talking voice and all the voices blend together across the country and it sounds like a tribute to tonight, but “tonight” has broadened in the scope of your wonderful gymnastic balance and it’s every night that you can see stretched out in front of you, it’s every time the sun goes down and sometimes you’re all the heartbeats of together and it tastes like dark coffee or light beer and instead of singing about it you shout about it, even if there’s thunder in the clouds and the sun is waiting till past tomorrow to come back, it’s there somewhere just like how the other voices are there somewhere even when you’re on the left side of the line, and right now, tonight, is the same thing as all the nights and it’s the only thing that fills your head as you fall asleep right on the line between the half-light and the morning. and it’s a fine line too, that one.

I was searching my pockets for a story to tell my daughter on the night before Thanksgiving when she was looking especially nineteen, shouldering the immeasurable weight of being nineteen, and I couldn’t find one with a good three-act structure, but I started to tell her about the kind of vaguely existential warm knot I always used to get in my stomach when I went home from school for Thanksgiving, and how I couldn’t decide at the time whether it was happy or sad, but now I knew that it was happy for certain, and how when you think about how once things change they are not changing back it can be kinda heavy, but you don’t have to think about it too often, and we had this new recipe for cranberry sauce this year and you don’t even have to get up early to watch the parade.

When I went downstairs at nine the next morning to put the turkey in the oven, she was smiling in front of the TV, sipping a cup of black coffee with her dad.

yellow-not-gold library lights far off
dizzy circles and the truth
you saw the wrong direction
and I saw the door
and everybody saw it coming
but you and I valiantly didn't for longer
than the weak-stomached
didn't we

I saw the weather there
seventy-eight every day (every day) as long as you wait
for the clouds to burn away
they always
they always do

I saw the future there but don’t know yet if it’s
mine

I saw faceplates facades and artifacts there—painted bricks you couldn’t tell from the
real red bricks on your granddad’s house
(you don’t so much
remember what they looked like, but you are confident
that the difference is negligible)

I didn’t see much else there but the weather
boy
the weather is pretty in the afternoon

a girl with too-long hair and smiling eyes
and two laughs-- one sardonic, one irrepressible
had very little
room to sit
next to him:

                                           a boy, almost a man with a
                                           guitar and callused fingers.
                                           strong-- hands two sizes
                                           bigger than hers.


she leaned on him (out of necessity, of course)
he held her up (to be nice, of course)


                                           their knuckles touched and she got restless
                                           she moved her fingers against his ever so
                                           light
                                                         ly


he played the game and nudged her thumb


                                           fingertips like dancers on broken glass
                                           collided
                                           quietly--



                                                    ­            like vines, we intertwined
                                                    ­            *carelessly growing up

this is where we sat
my elbows bony
your mouth a hard line

some walls are painted yellow, some
lined in mirrors, yours
bare
i was

ancient
crude

drawn in eternal by words that mean
things that they don’t sound like, building
materials that belie their insides
lengths i’d never go to

we are both what we say we are
but you are more

we make the best of things, she said about the rainy season
our ten-dollar words swallowed by timid tongues and our
mile-wide headaches on our shoulders

we make the best of what, quizzical I ask her
she stood to lose more but she was better
she ran five kilometers at a time
she ran pretty circles around my holiday smile

ten-dollar words instead of money I carry with me still
to remember that I got there once too and
to feed to the mechanic when the engine stalls

does the engine ever stall
it does

this is an invitation to act rashly
I close my fists, full of imagined marbles
as big as your big hands and hot to touch

I imagine sitting cross-legged on his floor
we are in front of his salmon couch
on the frayed area rug I imagine he has
I imagine he has mismatched dressers

I don’t know why I imagine us on the floor
his couch is probably softer than it looks
sometimes they sit on the floor
in the movies
maybe we didn’t want pizza grease on the furniture

our knees touch, I imagine, indian style
unmoving
we exchange embarrassing **** we wrote in college
I think how college was earlier for him than for me
how while he was losing his virginity I was
bussing back from a jv tennis match

I imagine him laughing at a word in my poem
I defend my phrase, lunging then lounging on his quadricep
he’s showing teeth and crinkly eyes, putting
his hand on my forearm draped on his leg

he thinks the phrase is cute, actually, and so human
I imaging smiling back and we’re looking at each other for a little
too long and the air is electric in the way it gets when there’s
poetry in it and teeth showing and skin touching and we are
very close to one another, I imagine

I can’t stop imagining
I unclench my fists
quietly drop the marbles
this is an invitation to
act rashly

I turn to you and tell you I’m having
a really nice time

this morning rings no bells of my first time
moving lead-legged through elm-split mist
to your doorstep

that day was tinted mustard-yellow
i had my eyes covered tight
and the trembling was mine alone

this morning is all green
like the inside ring of your iris
and the trembling is everywhere

i wait patiently
the mist moves
and not much else

you've got a photographer's
eye
and no camera
you look real close
to remember

the clink of red mugs with handles missing and
twelve-dollar bubbles chasing
silly lilting words down your smile-throat
closing your smile-eyes longer than a blink


I watch your adam’s apple while you hum, you
turn up the music, hey—
remember when we hadn’t met

it looked a little like
how it’ll look when we are gone, hey—
remember how soon we’ll be gone


but I left my shaky voice-for-leaving at the
bottom of the glass, I
promised to speak steadfast-slow, I
touch your callused hand and

the next I know it’s morning and
the curtains don’t work and
I don’t mind your breath and

I haven’t let go

I saw your daydream face like I used to see the ghost of my brother after I'd all but forgotten I had one. My lamb eyes and your lambdas crashed in mythological accidents and I all but forgot that I had you too.

I fell asleep last night dreaming of golden rings
of sunlight holding together quick inhalations
all over the floor of your room, letting them go
just fast enough, but only.

I wanted to write like you and breathe like you and
blink to the beat of your apocalyptic pulse
when you’ve spent the day stacking papers,
receipts of all the times you said okay

When it wasn’t. I fell for you behind closed doors,
imagining your aging memories of pain casting
you and me in the same bronze. But you,
instead, were buoyant gold-plated sturdy
forward-facing and I,
as ever, will find a way to keep you anyhow.

from your cohabited bed, you say you can’t see out the window
only in the living room do you feel peace, only during economic conferences
do you remember who are without a frame

springtime air doesn’t taste the same without winter giving way
and you say you’d like to be where people wear sweaters and
comb their hair. you still comb your hair when you remember to
and you think you’ve still got a way with words

but you don’t use them much. you blink often—
who’s to say why—and over crackling lines of hi-miss-you
i hear your voice ache for my bricks and long leash
and hot-cold orange future

you don’t know the half of it

one thousand four hundred and sixty or something like that
fewer days than words from whitman’s mouth
makes sense. he knows more than I’ve learned so far.

but I’ve learned, so far. let’s get a little saccharine
sometimes the mosquito bite on your brain lasts years longer than it deserves
and you can’t walk away till you’ve walked together for awhile

sometimes someone else picks you up at the corner and
you wish he would’ve been there all along and then you
realize thank god he wasn’t cause he’s
beautiful but there’s no bigger beautiful than the
beautiful you squeeze into your final days

and he’s beautiful.
you’ve lost count of the drinks thrown back that brought you
to all the doorsteps you never would’ve seen
all the mouths you’ve already sort of forgotten

and the nights with your legs resting on
the legs of people you love with more love than—

here is where you learned to say I love you
sometimes
and when you can’t, to say something else
squeeze a hand

here is where you slapped somebody’s shadowed cheek
and found the remote house that’s kind of home
and where you’ll have to go away
but not without leaving
a little bit of you
everywhere

there are two generations sipping tea
and countless strings invisible
her heart to her heart and my heart to your heart
all of the hearts, and the tables, and chairs
and leaves of grass
and minutes
and pink clouds

we see the finish in the distance
but these strings
and her heart and her heart—
the finish won’t last
these strings
we’ll stay

to feel the beginning, and end
you take note of how lucky
you are on five hundred threads
and the beer in the fridge on your
parents’ blind-eyed tab
and how just this last time
you can drink coffee before bed
or not come home tonight
or see middle-america with
only your own blessing.

you do not
take note of the broken storm window;
what’s it to you?

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

i like names that are real words,
english words like brown or smith or brook
and i like hardware stores with paint chips in the windows
and i like crooked noses and smiling eyes and plastic bottles

insignificant is what you said you were
it’s what you said it was to make applesauce
for a latke party, because what does it matter
to make a meal or a statement it’s all
so small compared to everything else so
insignificant

but it isn’t, i like streetlamps and the way they backlight
branches and i like the trees that still have leaves in december
and i like having nowhere to go
and everywhere
and it’s not insignificant
it’s not

do you remember walter?
do you remember, walter?

boats and boats and boats dotting your ivy shoreline
he stood there like a statue like a king
remember?

do you remember, walter, how we said we'd fight the world so we'd be free?

the white balance on your entire world was turned up.
the volume on your entire world was turned up.
the contrast on your entire world was turned up.

do you remember walter?
i remember, walter.

*i bet you're fat and married and you're always home in bed by half past eight

maybe it was on the dam, graffitied
by hummingbirds
where i counted red ants
and minutes
on the bridge of your nose
at close range

and where we said goodbye
shrugged our shoulders
and never came back

or maybe it was on the brown couch
opposite the copy machine
that covered my hands
blackened them while you were away
you might have been proud

maybe it was in the recesses of the library
where i drank too much coffee
and found the only thing that drives me

or maybe it was right here
where i made up a nightmare
and never could shake it after that

this friend of mine was never good at smiling in pictures. he tried really hard, but it never worked. all gums, all eyes that didn’t follow suit. he wasn’t great at smiling in real life, either, except when he stopped thinking about it. I saw him smile more than anybody else did, probably, but not enough. and then, like all friends from a home that is dispersing, I had to go. he said I love you by the dam and he meant it like a friend and so did I and that day, before I lost sight of how much he meant it, the sun went down and neither of us smiled with our eyes but we smiled with our mouths and we knew it was all all right.

then I lost sight of how much he meant it and we don’t need to talk about those years, even though we still don’t talk now that they’re gone. I think he grew into his hands and his heart, and I think he found someone who taught him, really taught him, so much better than I ever could, so much better than even he thought that I did, how to smile. I think she loves him more than he meant it when he said it to me, in quality and in quantity of ways. I think he packed my secrets in a box on a shelf in his hometown closet or maybe he dumped them in the recycling bin, and that’s all right, and I’ve found where I feel right too.

and having not seen him in a long time, having not talked in longer, having not hugged him in longer still, having not known him the best or ridden in his passenger seat or punched him in the shoulder, having put so many years between me and my best friend,

the picture that I saw today, the first ever of his smiling eyes

well, the pine-tree fireworks light up better like that. mine did the same.

who was i to be so bold and who
were you with teeth like picket-fences
and eyes like my father’s lawn

and where was i to aspire to that 1955 smile and where
were you when i remembered all the lawns looked alike back then
and picket fences kept my father lonely

some nights it was yes-
terday

others

I lose what tree
it was

in retrospect-
ive light
circles

To grow up a restless gull, itching to go in every feather, spreading fingers across continents and craving every one of them. To finally go and lose your hunger. To settle into the next place like it’s the last, tuck your head under your wing and know only parking lots. To forget the sea was yours.

To need to hear the same song every day to keep your head. To paint a mural of where you’ve been so nobody suspects. To avoid eye contact because you’ve got nothing behind yours. To forage and forget. To forage and forget. To forget.

I would tell
the six-year-old me
that that girl is my best friend still
in fifteen years
so I'd hold my tongue
when that collage is ugly
and I could say now
we never stopped loving in all that time

pointillist muscles ache
by turns sharp and muted
echoing soft water lilies
once planted, twice uprooted
caught on canvas
then let go

the radiator sputters
stoic but senile
they taught you acrylic lakes
were more gray than blue
and you paint
by the book now

hard winter holds your brittle fingers
in what it imagines is a gentle grip
you smile to hide your grimace
the quiet sun politely reminds you
what you promised
then let go

it’s difficult to articulate the precise difference between drawing pictures and writing words. neither is particularly honest, especially when you ask me. there’s always a temptation to let a small truth stand in for a larger truth, and that is inherently a little bit dishonest. universality is only for some, only sometimes.

but imagining it is there more often and more broadly helps put a leash on the chaos of coffee shops and prison cells and tenements and castles. to imagine we are all held together by a shared sensation is a thrill irreplaceable by a one to one experience, by a touching of foreheads or being in love.

that’s only if you’re a good artist, though. sometimes you just have to draw exactly what you see, and then the only stretching of the truth is acting as if the chair legs aren’t there because they aren’t visible behind the table. if you’re a really honest human being, you can draw them and then erase them. but nobody is.

your pulse has been steady for ages now
and you only cry at shakespeare— never at your frailty
you’re not frail

tonight, when the door locks behind you
and you jiggle the doorknob; you
pound the glass and nobody hears you
not one soul

panic rises, boils in your ribs
and you think well hey
at least only security guards
will see me like this

I want to go back to that dream
where you touched my palm
and I kept it quiet
where no one saw me stopping short
while you were close behind
barely there

now, your electric fingertips
keep me awake
the details blur, and
I want to crawl inside that dream
and sleep till noon

there’s only the pursuit of a good story and good stories always have tears on grass
and on chests i was the professional and you were the amateur the good story
was always at my fingertips i could teach you how to cry

you, i don’t know i want your story, i think  i want your chin against my forehead
and i want your casual quiet accolades i don’t want to teach you how stories go

you’re pushing up against your five year reunion i’m pushing up against the space
where i choose where this is going this is going to your five year reunion this is going
to hell and you would listen to everything i could teach you i could break you with
your permission, of course

you’re wrong about one thing i can’t take secrets with me very far and i’ve lost
the line between what is and isn’t part of the original script you’re pushing up against
your five year reunion i’m pushing up against the only thing i know

listen—
this is just the way it is

I see your headlights in the drive-thru
last winter
in the camera lens tonight

this is not personal, you said
you cried, thinking it was dark enough
voice steady (if you focused on the radio)
not personal, but permanent
and I was in no position to argue

lately, I haven’t had much that I’ve ached to tell you
—that feels a little personal—
and I only remember when certain angles of light
hit me like a freight train
after the sun goes down

to not know you takes me back

the year is 2004. the place is oval beach.
the wind is calm. the voices far away.

in a few days, I’ll twist my ankle
in a few drops I’ll forget when rain was warm
it wasn’t always like this

it wasn’t always like you

leave the levain out overnight
don’t overwork it in the morning, knead gently
mist the inside of the dutch oven to create steam

this crust your crowning achievement, you
capture it from every angle
shy to dig in

savor the feeling of a chest swelled with pride

and then ugly, uninvited, the memory of his
swelled for a different reason, a
distraction

even on your sweetest day

you stand up straighter now even on off days
the poetry not gone with the milk teeth after all

the electricity in his finger tips when he
says “how you doing, my friend”
and when he soothes the muscles in your calf
echoes, revives other muscles
their own memories of contracting so long ago

he knew how long it would take to heal you but
he’s only here until December

you will finish getting better, but you
won’t be like you were