The painting in front of me, walled
eyed. Can’t figure you.  My cousin who
painted chose to demure.  Lidded obscure
behind your spec-
tacles.

She said - a lifetime ago - that the splotch of orange
peachy dreamed on the tips of your ears, the side of
your nose, the lip top, was sun in the studio
blasting through your flesh.  Simulacrum
blood and shine com-
bined.

flat knife
strokes elongate into rounds of skin
caress, provoke this con-
versation.

The day we roared with infinite jest the
larder packed tight with provisions burst.
So much canned meats, tinned, pemmican
hardtack we had stored knowing our
journey north would be sufficiently trying
that sustenance would prove difficult.

The slog.  The slacking day when you rolled
off the sled, creviced.  Your voice booming blue
crystalline as we see, no escape.  Trapped and
the cans I hurl into the hole.

Hours I read to you lipped, curled into a
snail, a shell, a crocus of yellow
a dread of
finishing the story and saying to you there is
no
more.  So you cannot tell, when the pages have ended
I make up confabulate truth and fiction
embellish.  
Pretend the story line marches
forward decades and we are in the Amazon;
You’ve discovered
that the water
that seemed
guileless is crocodile filled.
They bite hard and
you can imagine.

All primary colors on the
floes, all glacial movement, slow to melt, fast to burn through
the colors of our arctic rainbow.
I had primed the lamp the last night, before that dawn, before
the ride in which you fell.  
The wick trimmed and each
consequential action of the day I placed
hanks of hair
neatly side by side into banks of snow.  
Under my cracked tongue is
a bump that rolls
mole like cyst.  

Partner of my travels to this cold realm, your self shelved.
Below:  Did you hear me whisper?  Asking why today
have I become.  
The whispered promise of holding
upright against the dark.  I thought.
It would be magnificent.  

Not even fanfare.  Or aurora borealis.  Or flight.
Yes dreams of flying.  
Yes dreams of ahah so it is after all.
I thought I would recognize the moment of unleashing.  
What makes the special now?
If I whisper Abandon I might hear you echo in the ice.  I might see your
boot, attached to.  A glove alone, unpaired.

The story they lived, the story they tell is one of each husky,
one by one, no longer.  Starvation and then there are none.
But we are in the Amazon, and it is a scorching hot day and there is
much to be explored until you fall into the river and get bit.

I take it all back.  
You laugh because I add flying monkeys which is
us pretending that we’ve explored
this terrain which looks like a bed
in a room and a chart.  
They cannot
stop your bleed, and so we begin again.

Nervous that way I take peanut butter from the jar
where blinking and licking overlap
messily and focus is the last thing on
my mind.

There, just there scooped
is where the thought
returns.

No high flying; no explanation
just back, and the jar gets
put on the shelf of the
cupboard
of wood, the oldest part of the house,
and I cannot recall to write it the smell of
peanuts jarred and ant poison and southern
yellow
pine.

In my dream it crept then lapped across
the stream in which my boyfriend the photo-
grapher was expounding on new ideas for grinding
lenses.  Large black dragging teats and sloping
back, with brown knobs
tumors protruding from
its chest and shoulder.

Then it stopped and fell there across the rivulet.
The size of a carry-on bag, fur matted fake and
flakey as it peeled in places.  Who ran to it? I did and
touched grit and hair and bumps. Thinking:
Get it to the vet
We can take it home
I can nurse it back to health.
Jim said: I’m not sure it’s a cat…..

This confusion.  Is it a cat? Or
something we do not know yet, an oddity
exhausted, too far gone, ready to birth
new ideas and breeds the like of which we’ve
never seen.  I would like to make it my pet or if
too far gone wear its little pelt.

Let me open the door for you he insists, a kindness born
from misunderstandings of power and luxuries, like this,
Grab the handle and pull hard toward me.  Standing dumb like a
stone easter-islanded headed fool, voice will out me, crackle of
Fury, but instead Why Thank You, honeys, sashays. Inside there’s
push off, rub off, get off, quick little deaths.  Pebbles in my shoe.

No, that’s not how it goes.  It goes like this:
Step out of time, skin suit fold carefully on the bed or the shore of
a river and now test the waters with toe stubbed broken.
Gentle there soft, marsh daubed clays, inanimate reeds brown, hollowed,
Place one gently between tongue and cheek.  Sink into the river, tilt head
Breath through reed.

Can you imagine every day iterate? Repetition? Repeat the old rage?
Practice a minuet or tackle the sonnet form, line by line?
How does one get to Carnegie Hall?  This too has become play, become fodder, become the one I am becoming.
Undone and I wish to step away, from the curb and push, push me under. A car, or truck or bus.  Taxi me ferried to the farther shore. wait there.

Under my arm a fiddle case.  Fumble the latch open and beautiful!
The gasp the wish the harm in lusting for want.  Want and rage merry friends take hold and shove.  I asked to be shoved and I am shoven.  Small tiny violin plays angsty melody for me, pour moi, pourbois.
I will play for tips.  I will play for your half of half uneaten sandwiches.  Want and rage and rhyme.  Meter has it in for me.  
Half beats and internal lusts, magnetic poles attracting and repellent. I watch.  My goal was to extract myself.  
My goal was to be serene and write.

In the best case scenario:
Tonight’s sky lusted with Comae Berenices entwines two perspectives
that converge then diverge, with one asking how may I help you seemingly sincere and yet there is the price tag of submission, and the other accepts that rejecting this kind offer will precipitate another cascade of stars wishing them frantic, de-glowing each, as they fall from the clouds.  May Day May Day May Day.

1. Maternal worry of not having a corpse to bury:
Don’t go to the quarry. You’ll cramp and sink and wedge into
a ledge and divers will not find you until next spring.  
Oh yes fueled concern fed by the loss of another child we did not know.
If I told you Ma that we were all going
there most summer days and there we perfected our sailor dives:
Would you smile or smack us silly?

#2. Maternal worry of not having a
corpse to bury.  You’ll explode and sink and drop into the ocean
and divers will not find you until debris-bombed waves bob.  Oh yes
fueled concern fed by the loss of other children we did not know.
I tell you Ma we were all there:
that’s how we perfected our sailor dives
in flight, flightless plunged.

Chant with me. The words. Mea
Culpa. I am sorry it’s almost always
English.  Je suis desolee.
But, the Power
of our club is your language and mine are blood kin.
I may not understand your meaning, but if you’re writing:
I will get your Drift.