The spinning hand
of fickle fate
Will rarely land
Square at the gate

So if it do,
Set fear aside.
With faith anew,
Push the gate wide.

Oh no.
This is it, isn’t it?
When I wake up tomorrow
It will be time to go home
To start my new life.
Early 60s guitars, Connie Francis
Singing “who’s sorry now?”
in that eternal swoony teenage croon.
Dissolving the gathering dread
Into sand for the hourglass
Rather than lock it away down down in my gut
to harden into glass.

We hid today
In the close cocoon
Of your living room.
You, taking meetings,
And me doing **** all,

Consuming your food.

32 hours is just 4 8 hour drives,
I tell you.
It’s really not that far.

Trying to soak up all of these moments
Murphy curled up in my lap
Under a blanket per usual.

As I fight,
And lose,
To hold my eyes open.
We almost made it to our goal,
2am.

When we lived together,
We drank so much Cook’s -
I was still smoking then,
Blue sunrise snapshots on the back porch
Burned into my memory like hot ash.

I want to stay awake
And pour my heart right out,
To write about the time we took home that comedian
and abandoned him at poor Mark’s house
Or when your cousin died
And we got so blasted on champagne
That we fell asleep spooning in your bed.
Or when you brought me a silk rose
In the hospital
No flowers allowed (I still have it).

How can any words
Surround and capture
All of that?
And all of the moments between the moments?
The safety?

Oh Caitlin,
San Diego.

Just 4 8 hour drives
Gas stations and fields.
I’ve gone to look for America.

My lips are chapped;
The winds were high on the mountain.

The evidence of the climb smacks in the dryness and hunches in the body:
Curled in the arches of the feet, in the biceps;
roped across the shoulder blades;
crisscrossing the palms of the hands and the flanks, stippling the spine.

I sit for a long time afterward
Shivering in the car with the heat streaking the windshield.
I just sit
Staring at the windex smears where I recently tried to clean the windows-down grime of the summer.
I don’t remember how to get to your house -
The climb stripped your address from me
Like it stripped everything.

I experiment with the emergency release on my ankle
As the song Birds by Dominique Fils-Aime rises like smoke from the bottom of the car.

They find me in the morning in my front seat,
Completely flat from a slow leak in the pressure valve,
And gently cradle my head as they lift,
Out of the car and under a mountain
(Under, now)
Of softness and fragrant sweetness so I can sleep for as long as my deflated body will let me
Before it’s time again for the air compressor,
Time again, as always, to climb.

She wrote poems about sunflowers
and about the colors of each of the different flavors in her afternoon tea.

She wrote about the foot-worn path in the concrete floor of the history museum;
About a stranger’s dog who licked her hand at the park.

And to her future child,
And to the boundlessness of love she knew but could not fathom that existed in a forever-expanding space inside her,
And about that brave and resilient seed shared by all of science and art,
the interconnectedness of all things.

In radical joyful tones,
she documented the goodnesses of her Ordinary on scraps of paper and deposited them into a small chest,
her Memory Bank.

The people pointed at the lonely beergazer
The outraged wunderkind
The housebound widower
Each lost in the past or in the future.
Ah, misery.
The father of poetry.
They would shake their heads,
A shame, they would say.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town or maybe the world,
the mother of poetry, undeterred,
sat in her garden
singing to the souls of the vegetables.

It’s the anniversary today
I haven’t spent much time with it lately
Nine years of weather
Have dulled the flush of urgency.
Discolored and worn smooth from the hours spent rolling it between my palms.

Now it just is.
Vague.
An unspecified ache and not even that most of the time.

Today though.
Carefully, carefully,
I unsealed it from its resting places -
nestled in my right shoulder, cupped behind my right knee, bound to the place where my neck joins my body -
And I popped it all in my mouth at once
and chewed.
And chewed.
And c h e w e d.

God the taste
So sour, bitter, unbearable on this cleansed palette.
Salt on my face and in my mouth too
And I chewed.

The thing is, you could easily make a meal of it
And oh did I once feast on the freshness of its sharp edges, bleeding and asking,
Why does it hurt?

These days I choose to fill myself in other ways.
A person could starve on broken promises.
I can think of nothing sadder
Than ending up the only casualty of a one-man war.

From the beginning:

It’s a new year and I quit my job
**** it, I’ll never be good at serving
Directionless in 2013
January.
It’s unusually warm.

Your presence in the room is a rock in my shoe
You’re so cool
And I’m a mess.
Remember, you called me Heather in bed?
And I made you go home?
Well.
I forget.

Now we’re crossing the street
For your birthday, it’s your birthday,
Makers Mark, count ‘em, 2 ounces at a time.
Stacked up like unread texts and why don’t you like me’s
I don’t remember
But I’m probably crying

Flash in to outside
God it’s like 60
Deciding to go with you
Asking you to kiss me

(I had a long term boyfriend in my 20s
And his mother would buy me toilet paper for Christmas
The gift of hindsight is kind of like that:
Practical and helpful and a ****** of a gift)

Today is 9 years to the day
My parents know and they’re on their way
The nurse thinks I might be paralyzed
11 broken bones and two black eyes

This is the end of the beginning
Which is the easy part
I’ve never been able to write it all down
Spin it into art

Be warned, I can’t guarantee poetry
From a patched-but-still-leaking heart.