somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I am twenty-one years old and
I have saved two lives—
a girl whose throat closed despite her
and a boy who thought he had no other choice.
By all accounts, I am
a heroine,
a savior,
some divine-palmed human spread thin
among peers who are the same. The same—
who fear the dark as fully as I
and need the quiet, sometimes,
when the din of all the mouths talking at once
becomes more heavy than loud.
Be gentle, love, approach me slowly—
do not touch my shoulder when
my eyes turn to glass and
know that I hate to be hugged
because your arms will trap my fear somewhere
within me.
I suppose there’s a reason no one writes
what happened to Odysseus
and how the gods felt after their story ended.

How alike--both born in Bergen County
among mansions and stone-lined yards,
but my childhood had been framed with lace,
yours a light bulb broken before tasting electricity.

My mother called me your “moral compass.”
My sister said I kept you from disappearing--
as if you were born from leftover ashes
smearing the stone hearth black

as the nights we’d lie awake and you’d
asked me what color to repaint your bedroom
and how to talk to that boy from your class.
You insisted I spend every night at your house.

Sometimes, we’d race our fourwheelers wild,
I always lost, far behind you--and further still
when you found that skin-and-bone crowd with
*****-stained clothes, their teeth and eyes

yellow as their cigarette-tarred fingertips
and when they stumbled near, I smelled
breath foul as the stench of a mouse
dead in my car’s engine--slowly burning out.

My parents gave me a pink childhood framed with lace and luxury--
but a black stain has spread there, deep as the amount of time
I’ve spent thinking about what people are capable of, and how they can stand
hanging a mirror in every bathroom, because water cannot clean people
of the lie they told their brother or the betrayal inflicted against their friend,
some wrongs of which may never be realized, but will always remain
in the form of a new freckle on my left cheek or shadow beneath my eye.
And I am sorry, because I should have sooner heeded my mother’s words
when she told me I was the moral compass grounding you stonedust streets.

Your childhood resembled a light bulb broken before it tasted electricity,
no one taught you North from South and how different the terrain may become
when you find yourself in the mountains with only sandals on your feet.
I had been that for you, and you told me as much every weekend we spent
riding in the bed of my father’s pickup truck and shouting against wind-gusts
that threatened to carry our voices away from one another--

I have sinced learned there are many ways to **** a person.
I killed you when I stole your sense of direction like floorboards from beneath
your cracked and bleeding feet, and allowed you to fall--who knows how far--
landing in a pile of skin-biting needles and leftover sediment,
the very bottom of brown-glass bottles strewn across the floor.
Staying would have saved you, I’m sure, and I’ll never forget that I turned away
out of fear, cowardice, because I hated the sight of your skin-and-bone crowd,
friends in name but not in heart, and left you lost among them,
And you who knew no better remained, your humanity
expelled with each smoke-laden breath and then evaporating, nonextant.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

When I forgive the monsters among the trees, my petals will grow dusted pink--
These days, I have become a skeleton made of thorns,
An unbloomed rosebush stark against the gentle green.
Sometimes I see sunlight beyond the thick-leaf canopy,
Splintered by branches and trunks more mighty than I may ever grow,
And I recall the sweet and far flowered days, wet with morning dew.
The monsters came in summer heat with clouds for tails and roots hard as stone--
They trod rough on my leaves and stole my roses with grinding teeth,
And left me naked among oaken giants.
Six flooded springs have passed, though every dawn breaks cold,
A suffocating haze, thick as if the sky itself fell to weigh me down,
How slowly fog burns under the rising sun.

My Ma builds fires with logs thicker than herself,
Such a skinny thing bending--
Her weight succumbed to IV drips only three weeks ago
In a white-walled room that smelled of sanitizer and alcohol--
She has felt cold ever since, wrapped up in sweaters and blankets
And sitting so close to the crackle-popping flames
That I fear she will catch fire and burn up,
Gone--I suppose--one way or the other.