A poem falls short; I'd like, instead
to draw a single line from me to you
and watch it curl into a word
so beautiful it's still unsaid –
or press paper to the window pane
so that the day might saturate
a note that brightly warms your hands,
spills birdsong from imagined trees
and buzzes like fat bumblebees,
but I am bound by language, love; I can't.

I lie in bed, a lazy girl
dreamy smiled and and sleepy eyed,
your latest sonnet on my pillow –
my latest heartbeat, amplified.

Next time I wake from sleep
for keeps – from deepest, darkest
slumber – I may come back a little
bird to visit in the summer; my
quetzal pomp, green feathered
grace, singing through my hunger –
when I am gone, I may come back
your pretty bird, a wonder.

If an easy rain
would make the rocks slippery,
he would hold my hand.

I pretend that your poems and 
my poems go
slumming in disguise;
carrying on in dark doorways
of riverfront bars—
tipsy, telling secrets,
spilling out into the sweet-smelling
night,
libertines 
more in love 
than they were before.

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

dainty stems crisscrossed.

When you are over me,
I'll pluck my poems from your hair
and shake them from your sheets;
I'll take longer than I should.

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.

This is how we love:
First with fire, then without.
Who was tending the embers?

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.

This is a lonely poem,
a half an hour before dawn poem,
a poem like an empty kitchen –
a godforsaken (god, I'm shaking)
feeling like I just want to go home
poem. (and I am home)

is not a kiss of measured bliss,
perfect in its timeliness;
it's the one that leaves your heart undone,
a far from perfect hit-and-run
that isn't great until redone.

If time is a convincing illusion, then as I am writing this,
you are reading it; you are remembering me years after
we have spoken last, and I am noticing you for the first time.

I'm a young woman waking up in an apartment in Albany,
New York, realizing that I am finally broken enough to fix,
and an East Boston moppet in ***** pink overalls, riding
Big Wheels through the sprinklers with a boy named John Henry.

You're delivering newspapers on a cold New Hampshire morning.
I am falling asleep wondering if you could possibly love me.
You are saying that you do. You are stardust, and I am long gone.

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 wrote a poem you'll never see –
a masterpiece; it took me weeks.
I love you and I wanted you to know.
I achingly described your lips
with tender, breathless craftsmanship;
it was a soulful, sinful epic wracked with lust.
Poetry herself, intrigued,
shook her head in disbelief;
no mortal girl could ever love so much –
and so, enamored by my words,
she decided to ****** you first.
I'm sorry, lover, but she had to go.

For the same reasons that I stay hungry
for dinner and tired for bed, I keep my
heart a little lonely for poetry; that way,
I can imagine your weathered hands against
my pale thighs as clinging starfish – my
fingernails, bleached cockleshells washed up
on the barely evening beach of your back.

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.

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.

I blamed it all on Scorpius—
my secret self, the sting, the lust,
my conditional approach to trust.

I shrugged at Mars when jealousy
and suspicion got the best of me;
I was just his astral devotee.

And my vengeful hate for all unjust?
It all went back to Scorpius,
but, alas, I hovered on the cusp;

I'm Libra now. I'll readjust.

stupid poetry.
stupid hope.

Amid the fig and quince,
the bright pomegranate orchards,
the black mulberry and wild olives,
we were still hungry.
He called it the Tree of Knowledge.
How were we to resist?

It's been a week; I know you said
sometimes it may be hard to write.
I understand, I really do –
I've been very busy, too,
learning how to sleep at night
and falling out of love with you.

The lotus calls another time;
right now, just bring your lips to mine—
a congress of the simplest kind,
yet steeped in fever, still divine,
this tangled frame of skin and breath 
urged onward to its little death
on rolling seas of hands and hips;
the synthesis of fingertips—
my shaking legs, a testament
to a winter's afternoon well spent.

If I wrote you the shortest poem,
a word, or less
that said as much as any
poem, or more;

worked through this night, and the next;
by sunlight,  lamp light
head bent over every word I've ever written
and all the words I haven't learned;

if sometimes I cried, and thought I'd never stop,
and sometimes I found a word
that was not the right word
but it was a good word,
a perfectly sweet word
so I held it to my chest for a while;
curled up in bed with it,
stood there, waving
long after it was gone;

if I wrote you the shortest poem
and rode my bike to your house
because I wanted to give it to you
while it was still warm,

would your door be open?
Would you smile for days?

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.

An old barn shrill with crickets' trill
(we snuck away to meet like spies)
tomatoes on the windowsill
(the car was hot against my thighs)
clover growing through the floor
(there was little time to spare)
summer here had grown indoors
(your hands were strong, and everywhere).

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

woke every morning and
dressed in the sun, then
dreamt in the breezeway
where the day's laundry
hung. She listened for
him in the summery hum;
sometimes she was honey,
sometimes she was stung.

At night we were a fresco 
painted by an astronaut, our 
messy bed the chapel of a
voyeuristic God, where glory 
worked with hurried hands
in frenzied fellowship and
hallelujah was a sigh that
quivered on my lips, then we
nodded off like angels of our
own apocalypse; it was made-up
love, when we woke up,
the dreamed up stuff of kids.

I'm still like a child
with love—

wanting more than my share,
impatient, reckless.

An unruly student,
I have learned nothing

except this:

Love is indefinite and
ill-defined,

but we should study
together
sometime.

now I'm a shipwreck in a sundress,
an aimless, shameless coquette –
a first kiss, a second guess,
a weak and wobbly pirouette.

My precious sweet potato pie, my darling little damselfly,
your life is still a lullaby, and I love you more than life so I
kiss chubby fingers pinched in play, make root beer floats,
chase bees away, but even I might break your heart someday.

The crickets abandoned the yard
not long after you.
The evenings are too quiet now—

no big, dumb you exploring every 
bush and branch,
snapping and snuffling
through the thicket,
coming home 
with dirt on your nose
and covered in burrs,

goofy faced.

Just grass
and a sleeping garden.

The squirrels fear nothing.

without you, i am sans serif –
unfinished still, a half-etched glyph.
you are my pitch; i write for this –

each arc and shoulder loops and dips
towards the softest landing of your lips.

I was a shy girl.
Some boys found my quiet ways
as inviting as
dappled groves in shady woods
(where each one ached to take me).

By accepting the terms of this agreement, you represent and warrant that you have the capacity to love.

Any similarity to a previous love is circumstantial; this love is not affiliated with other loves.
We assume no responsibility for for the shortcomings of prior loves;
we do, however, assume all responsibility for any loss, error, or communication failure incurred while in possession of this love.
It is, after all, love.

Love is available as is; no specific results are promised.
If you are at all unhappy, you are encouraged to return love.
If you find love to be damaged or defective, well, it's love.
Slight imperfections are to be expected, and add to the character of love.

Love may occasionally send you poems, letters, or declarations of its continuance. If you wish to opt out of this correspondence, you may cancel your account at any time.

The service may be temporarily unavailable from time to time; this may be due to maintenance, or periods of reflection. It in no way implies or forecasts termination of love, unless specifically stated so.

By accepting this agreement, you agree not to abuse love by acting in a manner inconsistent with the provisions listed above.

(please say yes)

We draw hearts to say 
     I am in love with you

when love disappoints, we say
     I am heartsick

when we fall deeply, we say
     My heart did a slow somersault

when we know that the heart 
is a drum, a pendulum, a clock.
On good days, it is a sundial

but it is always
just a timekeeper, the 
tick 
tick 
tick
of minutes and seasons,
but never
forevers.

I'm not beautiful—

no scandalous, empyrean beauty;
not the beauty
of long legs and sleepless nights,
not transcendental, not diaphanous; 
no ambrosia, no absinthe;
no earthly Aphrodite
to crush your heart 
with slender hands.
No,

not the kind of beauty
that makes disciple 
out of man;

but

our secrets, they rhyme darkly
and your heart is beating sharply,
and tonight I'll make you love me
while I can.

You were hard
like sun-warmed
stone, your
eyelashes were
feathers – these
are things I can't
forget; I'll write
you poems forever.

I have written you one
hundred and eighty
one poems about stars
and blackberries fat
as thumbs, and your
hands and sweet
plums, because that's
what I do:
word play, cabaret –
but if these are just myths
I perpetuate because I'm
a perpetual liar, believe me
                                            anyway.

You're a solar system,
and I'm a rogue cosmonaut who
(having fallen in love with you  through a telescope)
has built a ship from the salvage
of lesser explorations;
now I spend my days
(or nights— hard to tell)
looking at you, chin in hand,
waiting for a place to land.

Your advice is appreciated,
but I think that instead of
the 'three shining coins
and a lonely crossroads' thing,
I'll just write him a poem.

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.

No Garden, but this stand of
pines, and no serpents just this
side of night, but a sleepy,
startled porcupine; I'll offer you
some apple wine. You'll kiss
me in the fading light; I'll love
you without shame this time.

If this poem is like our love
(and the sky as
clear)

then it will rise like a rocket
and stop short,
here.

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.

Be reckless with your words to me;
incite, provoke, use words as lips
and teeth and hands and silk restraints.
Press them deep into my skin –
leave marks, leave late, and come again.

I called to you 
softly when I 
was young; my
voice bounced off 
the bricks of a 
suburban slum,
sauntered down 
side streets and 
stirred piles of 
leaves, then snagged 
in the branches till 
the wind tore it free 

to collapse at your 
window like a 
weary songbird
that had been 
singing for decades 
and finally, you heard.