from the platform, someone asks
where is this going?
from the tracks, two q-trains answer
with horns that sound like
i'm yours, i’m yours, i’m yours, but
when one pulls in
the other pulls away.

i like to remember that
waves still form in part
due to ocean basins

that my intuition
skims along the floors
and only reverberates
all that it finds to the top,

so maybe if I better
understood the reasoning
the seat of my heart, the crux
of why I am, this turbulence
would come a little easier,

the combers,  though heavy
and unyielding--predictable,
navigable, waters I can
sail on.

lately when it rains

and it pulls at all
the earth, humid and
oaky,

i wonder if it brings
the same out in me,

summer sweat, the
whos and wheres
buried down deep.

i went back through
my old pieces

and it all became so
bleached,

white sugar, white rice,
skim milk, I used to be
so rich, cream, honey
oak sap,

I wrote and it felt
natural, saw in
words and coffee
hues, tastes and
teaspoons clinking
bowls rolling, counters
covered in  flour
batter running into the
sink and onto my
feet, i could bake
bread on my palms
leavened and without
yeast

i wrote like everything
was alive because it was
because it is


because I am.

I miss you
you don't know how much*
the rest is incohorent, he keeps
saying sorry, over and over.

I guess I understand why, now.
the apologies, the childlike way
he'd turn and burrow into my
shoulder--something he'd
hardly done before

maybe I didn't understand
the reasoning behind the things
he would have liked, but the pain
was always so palpable
a heavy ache, a lonesome ache--

I hope all the blackest things
are the farthest from you,
and that you recede from
the places that only bring
temporary comfort,
i hope that you heal,
that all the ways you
have frozen over will
thaw, not a bitter thing
to be found,

i hope that the bees
find you sweet, Matt
because you are and I did,
you are not a body of
the things people have said

breathe, in and out


in and out.
with me,
in and out.

if you must love her
(and you must) because
all of her is worth the non-trouble
but the most-work--

then openly confront the
child that throws fits, when
she sits in front of the house
stewing, kneel and ask--
that is all anyone ever need
do; ask.

or say nothing when she
cries in church, touch shoulders
and keep singing, a low voice
undulating with her father's

if you must love her,
and you know you must,
you have been called out
from all your temporaries
and sort-ofs, nothing ever
remotely permanent
because you must


you must.

and if out here
I look like regret
then drive away

i can understand--
I took off the rear-view
mirror 'cause black trucks
still drive the highways
and not one of them
belongs to you,

if you need a body count
you have plenty of those,
slide back in to those old
lives, if you must.

water and oil.

i will stop holding my
heart out like grocery
samples, take this,
take this, I've heard

we take we
think we deserve--that
of lonely people, then--

i would love to give
to the lonely but not
myself,

if not a hand-out then
bushels of peonies
wrapped in brown
paper, in bloom
and beautiful.

people only know quarters of the story

a retelling, the abridged
condensed, shortened,
can you truncate the
things that have not
ended or strip it of
it's beginning--can you
choose between one or the
other?

the novels exist in our
backgrounds, in the attics
we wrote and wrote to say
we did but only to store them
away when we found we could
not erase people the way we hoped--

I have learned that there is no getting rid
or escaping a place, not unless you have
fully healed, and it's not enough just to say
you have, to be able to go and be, do and feel
without the tangled strings of your past
curling behind you--

but luckily i believe
in such a
life.