Perhaps you’ll remember,
though most of us don’t
recall our earliest days.
What relative scale could you use
to describe the things you saw
and the things you felt?
It seems too unreal for a mind
you would one day call mature
and an intelligence
deemed sufficient.
If you could, would you choose,
and what would you find,
if you could retrieve these moments?

when a warm, familiar heartbeat
kept reassuring time,
in a comforting bed at blood temperature,

when hands twice your size
would cradle you completely; move you
from bath to crib,

when loving giants would come
when you called,
to sing or to soothe your pains,

when sleep held dreams of this and more,
in a language we all have spoken,
Beautiful to hear, forgotten on waking

Raise, for your experiences, a city.
Build a warehouse, down the block,
Where you’ll keep the cosmos.
Build a bookshelf, within a brownstone,
Where some other things can go.
Like the time you grasped a flower,
Felt beneath, felt the spines that
Pricked your skin,
Made you cry.
But that shelf will be revisited many times,
In this fragile, crumbling zip code,
Forsaking more majestic memory palaces,
Because the vision reached your soul,
Through pain,
Of all that beauty, soft, red, enfolded into itself,
On such a slender stem.

Always, I have been here before.
I tried living backwards with her,
Asking the questions after her answers,
Falling in love once she was long gone.
But that was another, not the same, in a chain of serial Dulcineas.
But then you came along and climbed down from that pedestal,
you slapped me,
Hard,
But laughed,
And I realized,
how you had been right,
All along.

His love for her made her
More like him.
Her love for him made him
Like her more.
His love for her made him
More like her.
Moreover, for them,
She made love more like him.
He made love, at her whim,
More like her than like him.

I floated in the corner, and I waited for a sign,
From the place where visions come at cost,
Where three sharp eyes, two heads, inclined,
To see me where I stood and spoke,
Aloud, to no avail,
Some truth, some lies, some love, some hate,
Was then I felt the nail.
Two eyes spoke, but only then,
To ask that I had felt,
The flesh that held the nail I bore,
From up there where they knelt.
The single eye was silent, still!
She would not even cast,
Her monoscopic field of view on all this violence past.
If only she would turn her face,
And three eyes become four,
Then she might open for the one,
Come knocking on her door...

"Nothing waits below for you", mermaids smiled, and spoke to me.
Memory fled, then all I knew was written on the sea.
Great paragraphs, on ocean swells,
In running, sodden ink,
The bow broke foam from recollections,
My wedding day,
I think.
Words rose up the sides of waves,
and flung me down the other side.
Then licked the shore for crumbs they found,
That rose up in the tide.
Heartbeat slowed, my body sank,
Turned empty eyes beneath.
Rays of light revealed your face,
Colossal, in the reef.

Miss sits in silence and understands,
Nothing breaks the spell.
Missing nothing, understanding,
As far as I can tell.
Miss spoke and said, the word was "sure",
An understanding guess,
Missing understanding pure,
The answer could be "yes".
Miss came and understood for sure,
But wouldn't stay for long.
Thought was insufficient lure,
When I think my guess was wrong.