I'm preparing for the
fall-out, it's lover's
Armageddon
Where you're in
San Francisco and you're
going to a wedding

And I'm in Arizona with my
goddess-empire dream
work it work it, hustle baby
I'm Palo Verde Queen

We're preparing for the
fall-out - our supreme
divination
and you're waiting for your next train
home
- Californian Exaltation

from one dry heat to another
two lovers, hope-possessed
work it work it,back to me
and to our honeyed love nest.

I could fall onto
my back
and into
cigarette burns and
the grief-trenches

I could hold onto the feeling
of your hand
in mine
and the hunger I
feel for your
magic
  healing
    words

I don't know if you
knew it then -
but since all this time has
passed
and all the knocks on the door were not
yours (they
couldn't be yours)

and I knew you couldn't be back to
say
goodbye.

I'm so glad I stayed
with you,
held you,
and called our family to the
room
when you died.

Looking back to a summer
afternoon,
where I hid behind every table
with my back straight
and my arms held down
a forced gentle on my face,

I felt like a rattlesnake,
waiting.

I've never been tame - and
I wasn't even, then.
I've never been possessed.
     I've never been locked inside a
room in June - your hand pressing on the silver handle
with its cracks and fractures, its creaky breath rattling like tuberculosis
- your black ash streaming lungs
your history of slithering poison where neither you nor I had
legs to crawl away

The longer the days go
between then's dewy porcelain and the now, and the
shadowy sound of your breathing,
the more I simmer and smolder my snake-seethe and fume
your venom never owned me -

I molted when locked in that room.

I went back to
that weekend
when the hills were full of
roses
and you were only ten steps
    from the path

I was in my
sundress
and you were in
your knack:

a deep and dark depression where there's no
going
back.

It's easy to say
that the other's to
blame

when the sand and
the sea play the
push and pull game

and it's hard to get
dry in this grey, coastal
rain

wet wood
on the coast
won't light up into
flame

So I sit by the embers,
glowing in shame

and take a stick to
embed the sand with
your name

- the month that you died,
I wasn't the same

I've never been sure
I was meant to be tame.

Between the lonely moments
  And the "I'm so glad you're here's"
And the end of a scotch glass,
Or one too many beers

Between ugly and healthy and
   Birds who forced bees,
  I've finally learned
You were never against me.

We always say
the sun
  goes down,

but we're the one
who turns away.

There's a time when song
tells me

and there's the time I let
her be

And then there's the time
I am
begging
for her to come and
speak to me.

I'm working the trade
of
tethered souls
where it won't stop
raining and I can't
let it go.
Where thunder never seemed so soft against
a field of buzzing strings in an
orchestra it's like the
plague
and even when
my hands are
black from all the digging
this ensues...
I'm working the trade of
tethered souls
and I've
chained
myself to
make do.

I'm aware of the things that come from the woods.

The brooding water paths pushing to the west.
A quiet sprinkling of pine
  needles and
flooding near the
Ash Groves when the winters come

the winter's spent.

Cities are strangers and pavement is trapped soil
waiting for my hands to dig them up and build a
refuge out of dying-to-get-out-of-here-dirt

I'm dying to get out of here dirt.

I left myself in the absent way
a butterfly leaves the cocoon but do not know of what

I'm seek
  ing .

At civil dawn
I'm counting -
the seconds where it's
indisputable the sun
moves
where names get caught in
time that invariably
forges on
I'm getting caught up, spun around, lost in the cogs of a
stranger's swan
song.

I imagine petals sound like
a star spray of
harp song
  when they fall on
a dreamer's tilled
land
and that Azaleas grow
  in a backwards life
where time isn't counted by
clock hand
  You have painted
a Floristry of roses
in a neglected girl of a
wasteland.

Arizona made me quiet.
Arizona made me see.
For every flower wilting
there's
the ghost path of a
creek.

Arizona made me cautious.
Arizona made me choose.
Do I prefer a coy, dry heat
or the temptation called monsoon?

Arizona made me hard.
Arizona made me fast.
The sun is not my friend,
  he lives to laugh behind my back.

The red clay dirt sticks to me
in the
luxury of white
sheets
and now I know if I
move
a rock
scorpions
breed underneath

I'd like to say I've
grown from hollow, from the yellow
flowers in the dell -
from the fading wings of
promise, to the
loved from infidel

I'd like to say I've
found the plateau, from the depths
of all our wars -
from the hazy shade that
summer makes
-
from now to
evermore.

I'm not sure what happened
my first night at the
symphony -
it was a dark October
& you brought the
thunderous wonder of
        the Oregon
                   sea

I'm not sure what
touched me as your notes
lead me
to the pier -
      I'm drowning in idolatry
               for your beacon
                     & chandeliers

I'm digging through
buckets of sea glass and
agates
I found on the
beach
prying them out of the bitter, cold
sand,
          -  that ends at
white lines -
and concrete

The wind's in my face
and it's a furious hunt
to the point where I almost can't
   breathe

I'm on a continuous search
my knees caked in
dirt

seeking
     la joie  
           de
                vivre.

I haven't been saturated
in rain for
some time
or bathed in soapy shades
of color -
I haven't touched my hip-
bone
to a ballet barre
or even
talked to my
    mother

I haven't felt the tiny hand
   of a child touch my arm
or ran without the need for speed
    or been to my best friend's
farm

- it happened a few years ago
and I really am not sure why
I fell into a sleepy spell
between now and when you
died -
  I moved to the desert,
and I hardly said goodbye...

It's the hottest place I've ever been,
but that's not what made me dry.

In tall pines and
night storms
when we were
close
to over

& hiking with
my long hair
down
in frantic search
of clovers

in our dancing,
& tambourines,
your whiskey drinking
sober -

You live as a
memory
     in
perpetual
October.

Famous love stories from
Paris
& poetry you
don't understand -

pages of maps from wars of the
past and
blueprints, models,
    attack plans

paintings in places
we might have been once -
and ghost towns that
I'd like to go
  the history of places buried so
deep in bomb shelters and
  trenches of
snow

From front to back
from your to my
hand,
chapters and chapters of
copy

The way that we speak is as silent
as wings:
we communicate in books
  and
  coffee

Bookstores &
confetti have a
peculiar thing
in common,

confetti is the
final form of
  trees.

When the women held their
signs with marker smeared like
lipstick on the neck of the man who
didn't let me go -

I saw colored shapes against a
wet, grey sky
and a thousand women full of
    togetherness & gold.

And this I know:
when I am out
  and I can see the end -

I'll never approach the cliff
and give myself
              the other side

and that
   from far away
I can pretend
it's all
a free fall
into
nothing

So in moments of cello
and measures of
rendezvous,
Dvorak concertos &
adagios too...
in moments of breath
when reading the lines,

it's your hands holding
a set of strings,
and afterwards, then
mine

I dreamed I was
covered in salt
  from the sweat that
it took to
pull you to the
finish line:

where I saw strangers
& wildflowers
and anger
and laughter
and street lights
bathing
happily ever-afters

where I saw sadness
& take-backs
and widows
and crime
and remembered
it's been
just 2 years since you
died.

Don't worry,

I've been here before,

lying in canopies
of 'where'd you go' and
'what have I done?"

I'm not immune to love-fall
or love-hope
   or even the fall-out -

and there's no
modesty to my
afflictions

don't worry,
I've been here before
and I'm not willing
   to
     wait
       in
          hesitation.

When I've been on my own
in a park where the sun is finally
starting to warm my arms
and I  can see the veil of grief-chill
pulling back, about to reveal her
cities and her sidewalks
built in dirt

And I'm miles into the run
   of things
and I'm even further into my own head:

I'm sure that there are other runners
out there
who wish they
       could also
run from the dead.

I've been trying to find
1,000 ways
or reasons
or pieces of sun rays to
blast away my storms
- or even 100 things,
   or 10,

I'm not picky, but I'm fading fast

and I need to find

something,
anything
to
   live for.

Tonight, as the sun has waltzed
full circle, her dainty toes
unnoticed through the
sky

and the oven is hot from baking
and my hands are dry from
bleach and Arizona grey

I'm lighting the candles
and setting lights on the
largest window pane

It's Christmas Eve and
I'm waiting for you in
  four days straight of rain.

There's a place that I go
back to-
and it's a garden,
filled with flowers

  and it's somewhere in the Northwest
   where the forest moths and stretching firs
wait quietly for showers

it's there
where Monarchs
    gather in
       kaleidoscopes

and my densely swollen shadow
   next to piercing sun
   elopes

There's a place that I go
          back to
where the plague of
  dreams engulfs me

and it's at the end
of a nestled street
  I find a
    fever that exults
me.

I'm not going to stop loving you,
even though everything feels like it's
  glass

and I'm watching where my little
hands touch
and where I catch and lose
my breath

I'm not going to stop loving you-
even though I've never been angry
             like this

where you're transforming paths to
hope springs and pinnacles
and my bag's too weighted full of
envy to
carry to the top

I can't bear the weight.

I'm not going to stop loving you
  or staring into glass.

I haven't forgotten you,
when I am chopping meat on
the counter,
and my little hands house swelling
veins over
kitchen heat and stove top steam
and rosemary and
bay leaves

When my tiny arms are
reaching for a cup that I'd
forgotten in the
microwave, still hot to the
touch by the
handle
and I'm
pouring broth into the
pan that you cannot
eat from.

I have not forgotten.

You're beautiful and
ever-growing
into someone I could
love and
love and learn
to love
    again.

Up a little coiled
street, hardly touching
yards of palms and
cacti-
a street asleep the way
a ribbon lies,
untouched and full of
Christmas
  promise

up the corkscrew street, your hand in mine

and all the sleepy
little
foggy town
is a midnight shade of
red

The Copper Queen Mine
may be haunted
but I'm too in love
to see an ending or
   the dead.

We drove up the
  switchbacks-
one lane,
  gravel,
   up the mountain
side

and on the edge of the
cliff
where the ground meets the
sky, an infinity
pool as
bare and as dry as
  depression

it's ugly
and it's not clean
  at all

and it's a drop-off to the bottom that I'm
afraid to
hit

-but only for fear of falling,
    not for fear of
        not existing.

I'm not sure if I told
you,
but
when the orchestra becomes
quiet

like the moment
after
fallen
  sn
     o
        w

your stillness
whispers all the things
I need
  to know

I put up the
   tree and my
  little hands
ached-
I'm not old,
I'm hardly twenty-
six

I've worked so
hard
my hands still
can't handle
loneliness
  and sticks.

Where there is a
dream, living in
settled glass,
(the kind you find in an
abbey
in an alley of
sinners & saints)
    where there is always a small
bird with her
"I trust you" wings in a
nest where she rests
assured

among chorales and
readings and phrases as
  inevitable as forget-me-nots-
where red meets blue
with the welding of
gold
and prayers are a
hatchlings
   lullaby

I've heard of people
praying
   for
everything,
but not even
    birds
      answering
       their
            cry.

I've never moved ink like this,
and like ink is
surprised by the
sudden shift,
           so am I
surprised by how
I've never been swayed like this
either

You'd think a poet-dancer-painter-joiedelavie-creator
would have felt the
  move of
everything and
  never missed a
cue or crossed-T
but

there are ways I'm finding
to push the pen that I
haven't tried
before
and
I am
being
moved as
well, in ways my
spindly bones did not know
that they could bend,
before

like growing the fruit at the
end of a
branch, I'm learning to
  balance
           the
          weight

Sometimes when I'm
running
and my knees are
bobbing in their
  straight and bend,
  and I'm follow
ing the
canal
   path-
     and my
little lungs have
started their quickened
rise and
fall-

there are white tailed
rabbits and
   small black
ducks- sometimes
straw-colored grasshoppers
frozen in
    fear-for-my-running-

and then there's
me  
       me.
questioning if I'm
                                 pushing
hard enough
      fast enough
           Am I
tough enough?
good enough?
Is this enough?

I don't want to hold
       back, but I can
only
breathe so
     hard.