the long-suffering fire
sputtered against my cracked knuckles,
still warm and blue when i
packed up and went.

the air, now, is still wet with memory,
spiders tangled in silk of their own making,
collected in corners,
hardly touching,
hardly touched.

one syllable once stretched across my artery,
small and forgettable,
until blood and letters
stopped in their tracks, and
i became myself in the silence after the sparks.

from far away you can’t hear the matte echo
in pupils small but deep
and skittish.
if you let in too much light,
it all looks gold.

if you let in too much light,
you’ll miss it.

she was more than just the stuff of storybooks, she was one. hair long and light and breast-grazing, star-gazing wisteria-eyed girl. a mystery on spindly legs. a fawn I looked at once and never looked away from. her lemon-meringue demeanor, breathy bubble-bath speaking voice and short white dresses, sandy bare feet and a crinkled, secret smile were all I saw and I saw them as many times as she would let me, new eyes for her driftwood shell every day. she wasn’t from where I was, nor was she going where I went, but when I said hello, she flashed her sunstorm smile at me and buckled my knees. I loved her before we even met, and I knew she would never do the same because she didn’t need to; she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything, she was freewheeling, she was everybody’s sunrise, she had that smile.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and she told me her name one day, as the horizon painted her gold and stood her still in front of me. she told me where she came from, and where she was going, the gift of gifts: unwrapping her storybook from linen scarves on the sand that evening. this big and beautiful myth shrank to size: she was real. she was flawed. she had grown from sadness, she was scarred, and for that she was more beautiful still. she didn’t need me and she didn’t need anything and, what’s more, she wouldn’t have it. her doors were closed because she wouldn’t need anything, she couldn’t need anything, she was scared of needing anything like she wasn’t scared of anything else, and for that she was more beautiful still.

but I wrote the book on living impossible dreams. as I came around more often, she fell for me right back—my far-off wisteria sunstorm was quiet against my shoulder, breathing in sync with me and drifting off wrapped up in me, driftwood-intricate and real as no storybook before her next to me. she needed me, now, so new to her and laying her bare, stripping away the mystery on her gazelle legs and casting a fearful desperation on her long light hair. instead of needing nothing, she needed me more than I was there, just like she was afraid of. she couldn’t get enough. wrapped up in me so tangled she couldn’t see the horizon anymore. she fortified her quirks so they could stand alone, they grew overbright, she became them, they became all she was. a pretty driftwood shell, a mystery covering nothing but the hole her heart hides in, scared into paralysis by its own fevered motion.

what do I do with this new shell? this new shell that looks exactly like the first one but isn’t—her eyes are still wisteria and her laugh still air-light to the untrained ear, but my hands are too strong to touch her without cracking it. what do I do with this storybook I wrote myself into without permission, this fawn that refused captivity but now can’t remember she was ever free? what do I do with my hands? do I make them weak so I can hold her or do I leave her to herself? what’s the end of the story?

I wrote the book on living impossible dreams and sunstorms aren’t real. she smiles but now it’s only hollow. I can’t look at this beauty I destroyed. I walk away because I have nowhere else to go and I can’t watch her shrink. she was never mine. now she’s nearly nothing.

her eyes are bluest in the bathroom
in early afternoon on the west side of the building
(but you probably knew that)

those are the lights, there
and there are lions in the lights and their gold circles
are halved and the gold circles
beneath her eyes are halved
and there are lions in her eyes, too
except in the bathroom, on the west side, in the early afternoon

it has always been something but not this
always there but not so big
her eyes are bluest in the bathroom
where you wouldn’t think to follow her

you tell the story and it is
happily-ever-after, goodnight
(day is so much better still)
she’s unready still

always unready to run with lions and so she tames them
in her eyes, and in the lights (it is ethically challenging)
and the gold half-circles
are bigger

and so is that other thing
always there
always unready

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.

I can play an E-minor chord, I tell him.
I can play the cello, he tells me. He smiles with half his mouth
and I kiss him again.

It’s getting late and I’m measuring
the time by the five minute steel guitar and the five minute steel guitar
and we both know where I’d rather be but here—
here is okay too.
His hands are different, but they will do.

Growing up in Poughkeepsie, the
barbells of unfaith always shook her
wrists when she lifted "I
will be gone from here soon enough"
over her shoulders. "I will love
like crazy."

Grown-up in the city, she
swallows hard in the marble mirror
and thinks "Maybe today
will be the day," but
it never is, and she ignores
the petulant inside voice saying
"Unfaith is unfaith but
so is dead-eyed
companionship, so unclench
your fists"--she hasn't yet.

coffee appendicitis and baby tragedies
a toxic fixation and his nineteen fifties apathy
his clothes hung loosely over you.

you are sleeping on his bedsheets but your own bed
they smell like him but feel like you (**** them)


and you can listen to him smile through the door


but you cannot open it.

The bed was warm with the
body of—



Christ!!!


how can you ******* look like that
do what you do
drink all that **** whiskey
kiss your mother with that mouth?


that Jesus abdomen, I’m always forgetting to
sweep the floor, haven’t even been downstairs
in days



the body of a—



Jesus Christ!!!!



can you just
put a shirt on
so I can think straight

tears on the steering wheel blur taillights
into september-christmas. raindrops in the rearview
become transitory constellations. an overdue
stop home slides away.

home ceases to be fluid sentences: becomes periods,
exclamation points, question marks, parentheses. staccato whispers,
sweet reprieves, lunch breaks, sick days.

you fit where they’ve left space for you. you know the shortcuts
and the long ways and where to get a coffee. you know where your
head rests on his collarbone. you know when to come
and when to go.

and then you go. and it’s midnight where you’re going and the
winged streetlamps beat like a butterfly migraine, eyes threatening to
close before you’re home.

wait—
which one was home, again

a t-shirt loose framing my hips
i am typecast the antithesis
of your tight *** and your
grenadine lips
tight too for your own back but open
so open
for everyone else's business.

four years you've been together (he's so sweet)
you ignore his hard red hand and his tattoo--
he's all you've got
and you **** it up and smile and you drink till you're interesting
because they wouldn't like you if they knew you weren't
interesting and you'll never be more
than what you are, Small Town.

your eyes are surface-only and the brown that no one notices
except on you because you're better (you tell yourself)
you give hell to yourself
baby you could tell yourself the truth (but don't tell him)

                and you look at me like i am nothing.

but i'm buoyant, you know, the antithesis of
your solid sinking rock heart

                i look back like i am everything.

grenadine smiles only sick-sweet and those
surface eyes make sad effort to hide infernos
i'm on fire, though
and to put it bluntly
it is brighter than yours.

the t-shirt's loose around my hips,
but they are there, underneath (where are yours?)
and my lips are tight only when you're here.
you look at me like i am nothing. i am everything, and
no words will break you (more than you are already broken).

                my eyes are blue and my smile is real, and
                no words will break me either.

some nights it was yes-
terday

others

I lose what tree
it was

in retrospect-
ive light
circles

Nineteen forty four: A broad shoulder silhouette in the milkwhite skyscape.
Winged coy mortality whispers lovewords to his temple
touches fire to his inner thigh and he
pushes her aside and says Maybe tomorrow,
I'm working late tonight.

And he is cold and american but he tells himself
He is Cold! and American! And even in the
sandbag eyelid opal gray morning when his skylegs shake
he is cold and American and his copper girl's
thrilling reproach cannot warm him red
until he unzips his vest and invites her in.



but in forty nine he is twenty seven and American. in forty nine, to be American is to have no skylegs.
but baby death writes him letters while jean marie in her cap-sleeves looks pretty at his side.
and he likes jean marie, he tells himself he likes her better. she is pretty and she is sturdy.
she can make love without leaving burn marks.

but he wears slippers and housecoats and he has no skylegs.
and jean's cap-sleeves show no skin. fire hurt to touch but at least she let him.

and so twenty seven and scared, he reads baby death's neat tiny scrawl
and feels her breath on his earlobe
and winged
coy

he falls to forty four
and flying

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.

my natural eye, and your new hip moon
and your hips, sharp hip bones and forgetting that
I could use somebody—
you never forget

the floor with imperceptible scratches
our bootsoles tracking cold sand and—

where we buried the key
you never forget

I like when you sneak glances
at my paper, at my tongue

I miss the shudder in my knees when
we passed the City skyline
it was better than the first time

you never forget

you are shattered, so it goes
and the imperceptible adhesive from the
fallen framed photograph you
somethinged her—she was not in it—
she is on your hands
not in them

so it goes, the candle on the sill unlit
unstill
until
wax burns
fire goes
you are
never start
something
will end
never light a fire
never have a friend—

time makes a stopwatch of you
a spasm
a podium of her, all your something
stuck to your fingers

as a child, you learn step lightly
step gentle but with power
don’t take what isn’t yours but
never leave what is
and especially don’t
hurt anyone
not ever

you, from the start, learned the first
strength was harder than a soft touch
but some things were fragile
sunday happiness
butterflies
and you tried to keep your word

9:43 on a frigid clear morning, the morning I made the conscious decision to stand as far as possible from the dropoff to the train tracks, and an older gentleman next to me, newspaper folded, saying "It's a cold one today, isn't it". And I smiled in agreement and I drank my overpriced coffee, fogging up the sky.

10:13 on the train, unwashed windows turning the sun *****-bright, and I didn't drift off for it as all the men in suits and flatlined mouths slowly did.

And 11:36 in the City, a man I had decided not to love and his sarcastic appreciation of modern art, and me laughing endlessly. And this man showing me his secret hideouts and telling me secret stories, stories that you earn. I had decided not to love him, though, and so I didn't. It was easy because he had made no such call.

And 5:52 in his marble high-rise and his bed that was bigger than my bed, on it, he told me he had decided not to love me too. And then we kissed, and kissed, with nothing-to-lose moving our hands and mouths all over each other. Nothing-to-lose tangling his sheets and relaxing our heartbeats, and making them audible.

8:04 on the night of the morning I began to fear the third rail and the whoosh of the New Haven line, a bruise on my neck and my kiss-swollen mouth flashed red and *****-bright to the post-commuters, and the man I forgot not to love still in the city, and the feeling of peaceful but irreversible damage heavy on my lap.

I. The Flitting



just like me to
be the one to lose my nerve
I don’t even think of you
sipping your coffee and yawning


           his honey-throat spreading imagined hospitality like butter
           on toast—the bard of Royal Street ringing bells of that
           known once and only, that forgotten bard of Montmartre


                                 e, e, e, e,
                                            e, e, e, e, e, d, c, d



I walked up and down and up and down
and up and down, wrought-iron
     balconies and
          hanging plants and
                circus clowns and
              cocktails named
          things like Aviator
and Little Josephine
     in my ribs.



           hurricane season came and went
           the apartment Jacob rented painted
           salmon by the new tenant
           I kept walking
           all I heard was jazz




II. The Splatter



I met a man all the way from Delhi
at the mismatched
butterfly-printed breakfast table.
He said

           “Where are you from?”

and I said a little town near Philly
and he said

           “Where are you going?”

and I said I haven’t got a clue.


He told me they let you
paint the walls with pen strokes
and they never paint it over.


He said to love thy neighbor ‘cause she looks okay
and when they ask what brings you here
to smile and tell them

“Well isn’t that just none of your **** business.”




III. The End



it was
          just
                 like
                      me
                 to be
            the one
         to     lose
      my nerve—





I step off the plane
humming in my best
imitation honey voice
a little drunk on airplane wine



it’s raining here
and I only remember
that one line

sumatra drips like crocodile tears in
the four-cup *** just half-emptied by nine
big and bought on faith in un-lone-li-ness
drainpipes eroding from her miscalculation

swallowed black and quickly
her white teeth uncompromised so far
her step-by-step morning still clockwork

but when she was eighteen she watched the
cream like squid ink clouds turn it
the color of his summer skin
drinking up the baby hangovers to the
last drop

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

watch watch watched
me, watch you, watched your skin turn young again
the night change to early stories lost in
fall grass, august-headed unseasonable warm
and orange, and rose, and daisy-chain

watch your skin turn young again
in summer, not summer anymore but still
something that looks
a little like summer
windows ajar and knuckles *****, cracked
and red with god and icy providence
your skin, so young so genius so young
again

I knew your laugh one april I’d
forgotten it by may and I
remembered
forgot
remembered in june
your pulse in my eardrums when I
found your chest here and when it was in the city
me, under a blanket
in a time warp
in the metropolitan area but not
close
enough

san francisco wouldn’t have me like boston
lusted after lusted after lustedafteryou
bridges held by strings lusted after you
tonight, and that night, and the halves of all of our nights
that I didn’t see, all those mouths
hands
blue-green beds lusted after you
a different end oh oh
oh, I saw it coming

that warm thing that salty distance thing, sometimes
that’s why you leave that’s why
anybody leaves
winemouths, unrecollections
mouths sour
oh that’s why honey
anybody leaves

autumn heaven gave way to the winter couch
chests by necessity warm with the
warm beats of memory
multiples of seven on the parting finish parting palms
on leather
leather and a refuge fantasy
nineteen
or twenty

the shoulders of a soldier of the soldier of the soldier
that you should have could have been—

dreams and cheeks ready came, after
pulling blood and fingers and sons through slowthinking hips
sharp with the thought of your laugh and lips
broken record touched
sorry
sorry
sorrysorrysorry I’m
so
sorry—

can you remember?
the rains are a little alive the
living rains are a little memory of the
little sweet high
the little clocks
barely
waiting underneath the ghost of the second afternoon train

my bones were fragile in january are fragile in january please
keep touches brief keep touches soft keep touches to the city
only in the camera lens keep touches to the curtains to the kitchen to the
hy-
po-
the-
tic—
don’t make me give it a name
just be my brother don’t
let me give it a name
(four
ever
forever
sunset
stop me)

goodbye was to be navy and floor-grazing and in my own
words. that evening you were to buy me flowers for the first time
despite how adamantly I didn’t ever want flowers for those months
you were to know I was wrong that last time
I was to smile at you and cry in the bathroom for the knowing that was
it

but evening walked too quickly and spoke hell
the language not the word, my language not your word
I only understood the skyline
you only understood numbers
let’s make a deal, you said, as the sunshine made its last orange address

let’s make a deal, I agreed.

stumbling like sugar like horses like homeless like
muscles literature-fixed and all brown-bricks
grandiose and unready. grandiose and unready.
grand. ready. no—

so—

stumbling through the seasons through the ceilings we became a mid-march anachronism
nothing to lose
nothing to lose
nothing-to-lose
nothing
nothing to
lose

nothing

can we just stay till the dawn
it’ll be fun we’ll be fun we’ll have fun you’re fun
taste the minutes melt like rock sugar
watch the dust pillow from the middle
only human
fingertips feel the shakeshake and the desperate tears
in fabric

honey pearls
tiger hearts
scratch-blind highway floods
mad july
that july

where were you
where are you

and where am I

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?

here and again, where ruins used to be
and you'd step with abandon in your white dress in front of me
only a mad hatter and an alcoholic fool for you, my Alice romanesque
with wonderland on every inch of you

apocalypse acropolis and columns lit from behind but you
lightfooted, Alice, were always so much prettier than tourist traps
and the drinks were stronger across the pond

so here and again, two years dry and two years older
(both of us but mostly you)
and the sand in your hair, long and light and gravity wet and romanesque
like you (and only you)
alice, they call this an impasse.
but you've been drinking too, tonight
and (finally) the stars are blurry for us both


and your mouth is so red
and romanesque
and so close

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.

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 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

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

a man without a country is what he called himself, but this was his country, make no mistake. a man without a home, is what he meant. he overheard two girls joking a few years ago, they were saying what if we just lived in the tunnel, then we wouldn’t have to worry their voices bounced off the bricks, louder in that tunnel, where he was, where they wouldn’t have to worry but he did. he sighed into tobacco-yellow fingers. a few years ago, this was. a few years of rain and relentless seasons’ change and the kindness of strangers fewer and farther between and kids that will never be that way, that pretend they don’t hear him and they don’t see him and maybe they don’t. a few years of that’ll really take it out of you. his voice is deeper now from underuse and cold air and tobacco and being just so ******* tired. the kindness of strangers stops short of his hard palms most of the time. winter’s end just doesn’t feel like much anymore. a few years of that’ll really take it out of you.

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.

there's this 1945 jacket that i have, this military-grade thing, and it has these white paint splatters on it from probably 1968, or at least i hope that's when they're from. i like to think this jacket that i have has seen the revolutions i missed, on the shoulders of a soldier that i knew in his white-haired days, whose nose is feminized on my face--it's too big, but it's his, and so i like it there--and who learned to walk a second time without flinching, whose goodness never needed flowered language, and whose goodness i take with me where i go. and then on the shoulders of a soldier's son whose legs hyperextend like mine, who falters unforgivably and breaks what he loves like i do, and who also loves wine and music, and who loves the best he can. there are all these pockets in this jacket that i have, and these rows of buttons that take forever to line up, and a little tiny hole in the elbow, and strings all at the wrist. i pull the strings like i pull up grass and i pick at what's healing and when i was a little girl i wiggled my baby teeth before they were ready to fall. i forget that 1945 was a long time ago and every string i pull is one string less for the next soldier, or soldier's son, or soldier's son's daughter who tries. one string less for the next revolution, one string less for the picturebook wedding, one string less for the girl-on-the-side. but this jacket that i have, it's still stoic, and it's still good. the soldier that i knew in his white hair is good still from where he is, and i can still see his blue eyes in mine, and i can still see that the soldier's son loves even though he falters, and so do i. i try to pull out fewer strings, and i try to be a soldier--a good soldier--i always try.

midnight taffeta calves, your mom’s rose-gold
diamond pendant resting between *******
too-long hair tamed, fastened at your nape

this peculiar impasse between pretending you’re
prom-young and you’re midtown-gala-elegant-old
you’re a little both, at twenty-one, and a little
drunk—fourteen-dollar champagne, picklebacks
and the desperate paradoxical preservation of this memory

you can hold your cloud-head up beautiful still
so you hitch your dress
runrunrun behind the Rhodes
crouch down in the thorns with every-elegant-one you love
twenty-one, desperate, ebullient, ****

and ****.

stand up straight again, glowing, sage
check your coat and dance
nobody’s the wiser

The metal makeshift flowerpot sat in the middle of the sundrenched floor, and she breathed deeply.
She was hot to the touch, but nobody did, and her metal shoulders were loose, and she smiled (as a flowerpot could).
Linda came in one morning, stepped to block the window, arms full of magnetic reeds.
The metal makeshift flowerpot sighed. Oh.

For afternoons that piled, she sat in heavy dark,
Immobile from the magnet arms and blind from her favorite time of day.
Linda thought she looked so pretty, and the room was as she had imagined.

The metal makeshift flowerpot was glad to help the house’s market value, but she couldn’t hold the magnets any longer
So she held her breath instead
And Linda never knew the difference.

he grew a light beard over the summer
and he looked like a sculpture, like a ******* adonis
in the most beautiful handsome unplanned way
and he was talking about laundry detergent, or apple pie, or something
and you zoned out looking at him
and then your friend whispered in your ear
“What is that ugly-*** beard”
and you said “Yeah”
but you smiled a secret smile and kept on looking

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

i never had the pleasure
but if i did--
the chance to know him or
just to shake his hand
maybe tell him how he fixed it
how he fixed me
from however many miles away
--i bet he'd have smiled
and been glad to meet me too

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

the gold lion cub flanked by his father,
soft chest for shelter and memory, like I thought
you might remember me

what is there, though
what ever was
I clench my heartstrings without trying when you pass
raise my voice so you can hear all the fun
I’m having without you because I miss you
I miss you I miss you but that’s just it

why

this cerebral museum I’ve kept of you, you
so brilliantly and always tear it up
remind me why I shrugged away your
irish spring forearm every time

why do fools fall in love and why does
non-love stick so stubbornly to the teeth
why are you still here
why were you ever
a forearm pushed away is all you were even
on the best days but

like you know my clenched heart aches to remember
you as you should have been
always the bull in the china shop,
always the beggar for a sad farewell,
you shred me

and then I mend, and forget
again, and again
just like I did when you were here
why are you still here

if I could just stay torn and the
rose-gold camera lens could take itself for what it is
allow a bit of real into my memory of you
your freckles
your venom and too-tight grip

I could grow a mane and lose the shadow of the lion's chest
rest my head on something better
feel the sweet African sun before extinction comes

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

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

everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues,
and this is mine:

love is not blindness and his especially
his love was not blindness
he saw everything:
what was there
what wasn’t

nonetheless he rested at reading-glass distance
everything in hyperfocus and bigger, like he wanted
like a futuristic camera: oversaturated, overbright

love is not blindness—

love is literature, or wine, or a lens flare
his filled my gaps with what he wanted there
he saw more than the camera did

I cannot condemn, nor could I ever, his amber propensity
to imagine me. to beg literature is a dodge
of responsibility of which we are all
most equally
guilty

and the devil is in the details
that stitched up such an
achingly different forever
than the one he saw

love is not blindness—
his wasn’t, and mine wasn’t
—but it is literature: permission to fill the page
permission to distrust, like I did then
like I do still

forgive me my own amber propensity
to feel the paradox
there

two bridges only went down in the fire
my architectural catalogue was largely unscathed--the
ones with the most foot traffic these days
standing tall still
but two went down.

first my most recent design.
in the city I just left it stood alone and imposing and
gray
weather beaten in so few months
and weak--not my best work, though
I gave it everything when it was commissioned.
I thought it might crumble some day.

one other was lost--the first tall one that I'd built
and the first unexpectedly beautiful
ornate thing I was ever proud of.
I hadn't been back in years when I got the call. no one-last-photo of
its sunset or one-last-drive across its bumpy surface.
just a clearer view to the skyline
--takes longer to reach now, the traffic on 95 is a real *****.

years since I'd been back
but I wasn't quite finished, not
forever

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 will make it happen,” you said.
“Please trust me,” you said,
and you didn’t deserve it and so I didn’t.

And I’m better off now, but a little bit it
nudges me lightly that I was right, and you
were never coming back.

And mostly I hate everything you did
and said, and mostly I never want to
hear your voice again.

But a little bit it nudges me lightly
that a little bit, somewhere,
I’d give my right arm to have been wrong.

I’d give my right arm to tell you I
don’t forgive you
can never forgive you

and use my left to grab your hand and
forgive you

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

you were hard most of the time
to read, to touch
I wouldn’t bring you home

now, though, when I ball my hands
I feel your silk-soft hair against them
remember all the colors of your chest

and you twinkle at the corners of my eyes

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.

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.

he is six feet tall, curly and blond, and john-lennon-glasses
he purses his lips, trumpeter-sans-trumpet, wherever he goes
he is the only one on the sidewalk
even when everyone is on the sidewalk
he smiles at you
“how are you today!”
and reminds you he is from west virginia

he cooks corn on the cob in a too-small kitchen
and stops after one beer most of the time
he’s the neighbor of neighbors and he’s
the trumpeter of trumpeters
if you’re listening

and he might be alone but you’d never know it
he'd offer his couch, an ear
a cup of sugar
if you should ever need

a trumpeter

dizzy from the onslaught of the springtime I thank
my lucky stars for strings and steamboats I thank
my quiet mind for resting sometimes I think
my lungs are stretching in your absence I worry
that I ask too much of you