Because my love cannot be the orchestra,
I have hidden it in the glissandos;
do not listen for it when the music swells,
but in the resonance of in betweens.


Because my love cannot be the whole summer,
I have strapped it to the legs of bees;
do not look for it in flowered fields,
but in the pollen stuck to window screens.

i

Love wears red boots.
They click faster on the sidewalk
as I  hurry to catch up.
I just want to ask her something.
She gives me that look that says
I'm sorry, but I can't help you:
smile tight to the teeth, sad eyes.
She looks uncomfortable
and a little bit afraid of me,
so I thank her for her time
and pretend I just remembered
there's somewhere else I need to be.

ii

Love is a crone
sitting at a sticky table,
cigarette in one hand
stained mug in the other, saying
And the whole time, she thought it was me!
to a round of ugly laughter.

Monsieur Polti wrote of
thirty-six dramatic situations
that you and I
as pro- and ant- agonist
may find ourselves in.

I think we could survive
all but two or three.

Standing in the kitchen window late afternoon heavy in the Southwest United States and he is looking at her and he is thinking and he says it out loud
You are looking so much better
And more so much more
Alive your cheeks are less like the caves and more like
The peaches in the orchard that we walked before the innocence was taken

Through the window old trees converse about the passing breeze and there is a chill in what they say for it is never for us to know.

She turns from the pane and she looks at him and she nods her head and she says
For a time, before it happened, I believed that all things passed and that was so wrong for. Nothing passes, nothing heals, and nothing fades. It is all right here in me like it were the minute before. *She quiets for a breath.
It was not until after, long after that I learned this
That this meant also that nothing dies                                  she looks straight at him now
Nothing dies she says again
Nothing dies and I see the most beauty ever to weigh on my heart
in the face of an illegitimate child disappeared in a swinging screen door or in
the time I am alone awake before anyone wakes up
Or in the neighbors along the way putting a candle in the window for Christmas.             do you understand?
I don’t know why but I live to see these things
I guess because someone must see them. When they come I am the only one that is there to see. And when they pass, they justify my place here and right now, for I am the only one that saw.
The last syllable of her sentence is uttered in a calm note and everything follows and is right,
ugly as it is,
it must be seen and every part of the story is and will be what it is.

They in this moment in this place
among a million
always passing but never passed
always they share the same air, the same words upon this page.

*He has nothing to say so she turns back to the window and its okay and he thinks that he loves her but he does not say it out loud this time.

I swore I would not write a poem for my father,
who hated poetry
and poets
and most things,

as though it would dishonor him—
his bookish daughter
who cried too easily;
who sat silently through dinner;
who slipped quietly from rooms
as he entered,

still thinking she was better than him.

Fifteen years later, 
I find myself in Boston,
rattling through cool tunnels
below the city of my birth.
I think I see him—
younger than he could have ever been;
but still, the white t-shirt,
the thin mouth,
the blue eyes that I did not inherit—

and what disturbs me the most
is not that I have just seen my dead father 
step out of a train into
the cool white, 
the great big;
it's that my first thought is

I hope he doesn't see me.

So I am trying to love him.
I am writing a poem for my father
who smelled like
cigarettes
and soap
and sawdust
and raised five girls on a quarryman's pay,

and I am crying,
but it feels different this time.

Before the rain falls,
the leaves turn their pale bellies 
skyward, playfully.
She is staring at the sky.
He thinks *I should kiss her now.

Love made, pillow fight;
you draw moons on my eyelids
and kiss them goodnight.

My sister painted a picture
of the dead fetus she lost,
at the bottom of our toilet.
Every time I flush, I think
about how hard it must have been
for her to.  

I met him in that painting
and he already knew me.
He’d heard my voice singing show tunes in the car,
tasted the sugar in my key lime pie,
and now his porcelain tombstone is in the blue bathroom.
He grew in the darkness of her womb
like a sunflower seed buried deep in the ground.
He was cradled in nourishing fluid, wet soil-
until breaking ground into the light
into a world of people, already grown.
But when babies stop growing,
people already grown-
have to grow a little more.