Last night I wanted you to stay,
so I gave a bit of me away.

This morning, only one regret;
would I always be a brandished breast?
a glimpse of stockinged thigh, outstretched?

Or could I cool it down a few degrees?
Long enough for you to see

that of all the ways I know to please,
my body is but one of these.

I couldn't sing the hymns,
but I could recreate you
in the corners of my eyes
so that you could walk through the door
in a storm of miracles
and we could all gather on the lawn
in our summer sweaters and our sweet perfume
to laugh about how scared we were.

Still night;
eyes keen,
sheets unfurled—
sails.

The night, sometimes,
swims with sad fish.

The night, sometimes,
is a ritual drowning.

Lonely, I consider waking you
to say

*Look—
the stars are bioluminescent, baby.

Wait, please—
don't go.
There's something I
need you to know;

when I fall,
it's headlong
and this poem,
these poems,
are all wrong.

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.

My father taught me to swim
by holding my small body
tightly  
and stepping off
the highest ledge
at Horses' Heaven,

indifferent to my pleas 
for release, to play safely
with my sisters
on the ******* below.

I had time to notice gravity
before the cold river 
swallowed us 

and as I fought
to keep him from slipping
through my stinging hands

he let go.

It was a long, dark panic.
I'm still afraid of the deep.

I wonder what learning to love 
might have been like
had I learned to swim 
in a shallow pool,

with a patient teacher.

You have a flying machine.
I have the afternoon off.
Let's meet where we used to,

huddled under mossy eaves,
fumbling with rented keys;

you can call me Gypsy Rose 
and I can call you Captain.

We drift along through moss and moon,
the currents swift from love's typhoons,

skim fingertips through stirred up sins;
we never speak of daybreak things.

What I wouldn't give
to know the comet tails of thought
obscured by your  ellipses …

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.

Should it matter what we call it?
What sound our mouths make?
That's just typology, interpretation;
my love for words doesn't mean
I find them adequate.
Do we have to call it anything?

Can't I just say
*I will love you tonight, 
like that girl you write poems for,
only better ?

I cannot deescalate you,
or pin you to a warm bed and
kiss the anger from your lips.

The trap is set, or sprung—
always in the teeth of something;
always wondering if it's best
to struggle or lie perfectly still.

Your words ****; they remind me 
that I've made all love borrowed,
having spent mine as I pleased.

Not so long ago
you thought that I made the weather;
you braved me

and when you thought the sun would be nice
I gave you auspicious skies
and a sweet, cool breeze
so that you might feel me,

so that I could whisper in passing
I love you, remember?

Well, I don't make the weather,
but I still love you.
Remember?

You did.
I was parchment;
you wrote with both hands.

I curled at my edges;
the ink is still wet.

You are my former palace,
my walled city,
the cradle of my  disinhibition.

You are my intricate
system of roadways.
(I know you by heart)

You incite rebellions
in my sleepy villages
and send me postcards
from dangerous places.

You are my lost transcripts;
we know each other the way river
knows sky—  a cosmic nod,
a reflection of always.

So you are not fooled
by pretty perfumed bombs
that explode in clouds of kisses
and whispers of yes,

not outfoxed
by foxiness,
sleight of hand
and hips

not suckered
by my puckered
lips

and yet
you gladly fall
for all my tricks.

From wind and stone, sand.
From faith and prophets, temple.
From beast and hunter, blood.
From my heart and your heart, monsoon.

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.

Towel clutched loosely
warm, blushing skin, damp with steam
cool condensation
distillation of lust, his
fingers wrapped in her wet hair.

Because inventing heaven
from pebble and mist
was backbreaking,
heartquaking
work

and
because I
shivered with 
fever, my body lit
by rapture unfathomed,

I sought stillness in the mouth
of the ocean, gave myself
to her shallows and,
with sleepy eyes, 
said

Leave 
me here.
You laid hands to my 
dreaming curves. They became 
dunes, shifting; you filled my sky with birds.

When the word over finally made sense,
I shook you from me
like water,

like sleep.

it makes the break soft, uneven. 
even if I could, i wouldn't—
what?
Sink firmly in until I could speak for you?
Say lovely things 
about what it was like?

Even then I would **** it.
Or at least watch it die; 
dispatch a small flock of birds
to make it seem
cherished.

Think, small heart.

Don't say
sad eyes know things.

Don't say
hurt things make poems.

I raised you wrong,
told you lies to console you.
Now you speak in five cent fortunes.

Now you don't know anything.

You say
finish it

like  I have fallen upon you
a moonlit mercenary
eyes bright in the dangerous night

to find you sleeping,
unguarded;

like you opened your eyes
to an almost kiss

as I lowered myself for the ****;

like I would sink,
blade deep—
close enough, 
finally;

like I wouldn't love you still.

My words, defiant, deny me;
they speak in low voices
on dark porches, lose me
in strange cities;

they forget the warmth
of my mouth.

Eyeing me suspiciously,
smug with voweled virtue,
they dismiss my attempts
at reconciliation, saying only

We don't even know who you are *anymore.

Love defies all laws of perspective;
the farther away               it is
the larger it appears.

Nothing else is like that.

What a burning, broken universe—
incalculable, devastating,
things we can't imagine.
We attach names familiar to us
                    Titan, Europa, Calypso
but they are still mighty and immeasurable, terrifying—

but don't think of all that.
It's too big.
It's too sad.

Think of this:

It's sublime and impossible that we even exist
with our
soft flesh and our wet eyes,
our music, our sins, 
our jealous lovers,
our moments of bliss, 
and love— god, love…
more immeasurable
more incalculable
than the universe, 
than whatever it is
that the universe wonders about.

Our smallness shouldn't humble us.
We are tiny demigods
watching the universe expand
from our lawn chairs
while we eat ripe peaches
with sticky hands and smiling mouths.

I learned early
that to speak too soon
or too often
of love

gave words
and weight to
my little prophecy
of loss—

so I stopped speaking.
I carved and polished
my heart into
a Japanese puzzle box

that both discouraged
and excited
with a precise
sequence of 

sliding parts
half twists
secret drawers
and dead ends

so that

by the time 
hands trembled
with the imminence
of conquest

and before the 
contents
could disappoint,

I could be a safe
distance away

saying

*you must have broken it.

An erogenous haunting,
I thrill at his wanting

but more,
I thrill at his pause

to let me unravel
his tangle of wishes

and instill my own meter and rhyme.

He bends to my needing,
my sweetness deceiving.

(but then, I think his may be, too)

Hunter or hunted,
his heartbeat has quickened;

for this moment, at least,
he is mine.

We drifted like snow.
There will be more cold mornings,
the sharp tap of sleet—
but my legs will not find yours
beneath the warm mess of sheets.

Before I was ghost,
I was real.

Your hands
brought pink to my skin,
coaxed sighs
billowed softly,

heart surge,
pulse and shiver,
rise, fall

and, later, laughter;
chimed rhyme on my ribs.

Now I am resigned to sad places—
dark balconies,
orchards brimming with moon
and lightless bedrooms,

clinging fast to strangers
begging
*make me real
make me real.

I entered through your garden gate;

a summer hush
no sign of us

just the grove of 
words
you grew
for her.

I returned home
a silhouette,
to tend my hothouse
of regret.

You kneel to see my
upward angles,
catch handfuls of my

white
hot
words.

You smolder, plead;

I sigh
and seethe,
but

I don't know
this savage heart
within me, so I

breathe,
breathe,
breathe.

Fresh cherries, just washed— 
beads of ruby strewn across
white bowl's shiny gloss—

dainty stems crisscrossed.

Stay away from the voodoo, love.

Resist

the swamp music
the bells on her ankles
her feathered fan

and when she sways
at the hip—

goddess of sudden changes
patroness of prostitutes
and abandoned lovers—

chanting Mambo, terrible beauty.

Say nothing

when she leans close
(cinnamon, tree bark and, faintly, smoke)
and breathes

If you have no altar,
I am your altar.

Stay away from the voodoo, love—

her drumbeats and cypress trees,
her hocus pocus
honeylocust.

Don't trust charming thieves, love;
don't trust girls like me.
Girls like me, we leave, love;

we steal your heart and leave.

Girls like me, we know, love,
when it's time to go.
We're prettier as ghosts, love;

we flicker out, then go.

Tangent: touching
along a curve,
a surface,
without intersecting.

We are acquainted.
Contours quietly agree.
What I cannot guess
with my hands
I will consider
with my lips—

count the places 
I kiss you,
forget where I am,
start over.

It hauls you, gasping,
from the cool, murmuring depths 
and casts you, ardent and aching, 
for someone else's shore.

I want you to miss me so much

that when we kiss
I find our last kiss
still melting slowly
on your tongue.

The moon only wants everything,
her net always cast;
greed versus gravity.

The only things Earth cannot
hold fast to
are oceans and imagination.

.                                 
                              ­            oh no
                                wait wait
                                     drift stay
                             want pray
                                 dry soul wet wings
                                        clever clever costly 
                                               things rainy morning 
                                                          long leap heart beat
                                                    beat beat stretch reach
                                                 outgrow  g­od god don't go 
                                          branch water hurry melt did 
                                       you feel like I felt quick fix 
                                          heartsick minx eyes blink blink 
                                      blink hush hush hot blush say  little 
                                   mean much but please come sit touch
                                 bright sun brighter moon pretty promise 
                                  dark room heft spark smoke sigh chest                       
                                    ­rise  rise rise lazy looping butterflies
                                       I want the  night your eyes imply
                                               think fast   breathe  slow
                                                   ­         wait wait wait
                                                            ­           go

Little more than listless guests,
we play the game I-need-you-less.


Discord, missed turn, second guess;
things are different. Bitter? Yes.


Weary, naked– I'll confess;
you drew your hooked line through my chest


so meet me in your battledress
and if your blade finds  tender flesh,


I swear that with my dying breath
I'll say * "I won. I need you less."

The cold crouches.
Perched, ankles numb,
I quake with joy—
thorny with cold, slow
but hopeful.

On white horizon,
fire licks sky.
It comes
like comets, like horsemen.
I knew it would.

Silken assassin, pharaoh of swift,
serrated deaths— you look so cute
with milk in your whiskers.

May gave us tall grass.
Clumsy hands pressed my clean hair
into the cool mud.

dame's rocket
lion's mouth
bittersweet

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

When you said
what we have is magic
I didn't think it meant
you'd disappear.