Stay the blinds.
The closeness of the flat and gray
Press ever forward,
Yes,
Forward and down,
the tidal wave of day
A promise delivered,
the threat of suggestion
An unbarring of the way.

Stay the blinds.
Speak to the shadows
Unhurried in their fleeting,
lingering upon the fragile lace
sighs and forget-me-nots
Caught in the corner just there,
Unmolested in the graze of a wallpaper seam,
Beneath the scattered fluff
Of yesterday’s brushed away minutes.

Stay the blinds,
If only for another moment,
Before the roaring morning
with its advancing demands
Breaks the surface of this dark, pooled reverie.

My 60 lb lap dog,
Wet nose pushed under my calf in the just-morning.

Ruiner of couch cushions
and muddy backyards,
Seeker of the softest blankets,
Speaker of many grumbling, awooing, harrumphing languages,
Your gigantic brown eyes home to the secrets of the universe.
My sassy girl, head tucked beneath my chin,
Here you sit, leaned casually
Against my side, your arm
Lap-barring me into place:

“Stay.”

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.