even in sleep you are aggressively alive,
recklessly optimistic.
you twitch and twist against me
and I don't know how your arm
hasn't fallen asleep beneath the back
of my neck like that.
your short-winded lungs slow down,
your breathing gets rough,
even in sleep you are fighting
for air

and you are getting it.

A student of mine wrote me a note
on the blank side of a 3x5
index card
and she hugged me goodbye.
Another went home and built a telescope,
and he sent me pictures
of the pieces along the way,
apart and together like an array
of Martian images coming in
from the Opportunity in a
pixelated panoramic display.
I told him about lenses
and the human eye,
about why stars will always look
pointed unless we get close enough
to really see them and he said-
I’ll try.

She doesn't wear sweaters anymore;
the thread unravels at the edges
when she needs things to stay together.
Every group of things she sees
comes unstuck in space; a sheet
of glass over everything
magnifying what's underneath, so
as she sits letting droplets hit her back
one after the other on the floor
the bathroom tiles file past her eyes
like crystalline symmetries,
footsteps in the snow fold over
on themselves, glide planes on high,
her own feet are a rotary inversion
of the version of her that mirrors her walk
upside down, her own feet
are always the ground
she walks on, always moving,
always soothing and then falling through.

To see the world on the scale
of atoms,
to break down
the random, to battle the chasm,
to search for structural integrity
in her enthusiasm
so she can know it will hold her up

and yet everywhere opposites attract.
On the scale of atoms, positive
and negative, north and south,
an attraction and repulsion,
and evolutionary revulsion
that she can't make herself feel.
Ratted out by evolution, still
she zooms in on everything
to try to see a reason she still exists.

I remember sitting up with you,
trying to show you how the glow
on the screen could be you,
how you could stop saying her name
over and over again
if you wanted to,
how I would stay on the
other end and still be there
on the other side of the night.
How there were at least words
we could say, books to read,
at least soon it would be day
and there would be things to do
and it’s easy to move on when
you really need to move.

I remember you sitting up with me,
trying to show me that I
don’t need to be guilty,
that I can just be, and I can
like who I like
and it doesn’t have to be
the likes of you.
I remember sending you a picture
of a yellow bird on a telephone wire,
you sending me a song,
me sending you a joke,
you sending me a poem,
you sending me a wedding song,
your wedding song
from your wedding with her,
your signature on the divorce papers.

The way you looked right to me then
did not make me feel not guilty.

It is not my fault that I am
this far away, it is not
my fault that I befriended a bird of prey,
that your hawk eyes saw right back
to how little I knew of me, to how
much I hated myself yesterday,
it is not my fault that I am
this way,

it is not my fault.

I remember your children being born,
your wedding song and the wordless
music at the end of it.
I remember never thinking you were wrong.

I remembering sitting on my jacket
shivering
outside the door of the observatory.
My friends were up two stories
watching other worlds move,
and I remember listening to you, pulling back,
looking at the phone and thinking,
‘I am too.’

You told me that today I sounded happy,
I sounded me, less guilty, more free.
And you spun away slowly, thinking
that kind of friend is not worth having.
So you sent me to orbit some other planet
with some other sun
and I have to tell you it won’t be hard.
I can find my way to light from dark.

I will take a girl to the observatory some day.
I’ll walk her there, pull her up the spiral
staircase by the hand,
and over her shoulder I will point
to constellations you have never dreamed of
and I will tell her,
‘these are all the worlds we could go to.’
And we will start to move.

And we will take our friends with us,
up the spiral stairs,
and I will not stay at the door with you.
I will wrap my jacket around myself
and I will take what I know about the moon,
a glow in my hands,
and I will hold it out to them.
And if I move all over the universe
I will always come back to them.

Because that’s what friends do.

You say again that you would rather
move from the tabletop over to the couch
but I think this is right:
us sitting on the edge,
your feet planted on the chair while mine
dangle in the air like a child’s,
which is the way it is.
You think of fingers interlocked like locking
us in a cell, or an embrace,
I think of children holding hands and
running through a fairytale.
So I think this is right,
us sitting on the edge here
with comfort over there
and I won’t say it’s me not you
because I am not confused,
not an amoeba or just easily bruised,
I am not broken or scared.
I just want to sit here
instead of there.

I am a dandelion in the hand of a child.
I haven’t the heart to tell her
that I’m a **** and not a wildflower.
So I don’t.

The stars are always aligned but I can’t always see
them properly. When the light is low and the moon is new
I can show you what Orion’s arm is pointing to,
a little cluster like us that hardly exists.

My mother used to tell me that my hands would be
too clammy to be held by anyone else
but she wasn’t counting on you.

Our fingers are woven tight enough that I feel safe
looking up-
we can take the constellations in turns, you first,
so that if the toe of your boot catches
a crack in the asphalt where moss is growing through
I can steady you.

And you would do the same for me.

The earth is so young. There will be
time enough for me to take you to the observatory,
to see properly how Orion stands ready
to catch the Pleiades.
We can watch it till sunrise, fingers intertwined,
blinking sleep from our eyes as the sun blinks the stars
from its skies, thinking:
that is you and I

On the back of a receipt written
in a language I don’t understand,
detailing a currency I don’t use,
I sketch hands holding each other.
I can’t get the fingers to intertwine
properly so I don’t know
what the point is.

The texture of your skin
that’s so impossible to catch
is just a mess of atoms like the rest of us
and it makes the cabin pressure hit my heart
a little too hard, besides.
Flying doesn’t feel very free.

Below me, streetlights flicker in alleys,
sketch out silhouettes of strangers
that could be a little frightening
but from here they resemble ursa major
twinkling,
and the continent is a pond
reflecting the sky.
Even the city gets prettier
the farther from it I get.

With all that air between us
I am the color of Orion,
neither white nor blue and not quite light,
the color of a dandelion that knows
it is a **** but hasn’t the heart
to turn away from the little girl collecting it
in a fistful of wildflowers.

And with all that air between us
and all that way to fall without you
I find that for someone who must try so hard
to want the rest of my life,
I am awfully scared of missing it.