Countdown

Kiss me,
airport style.

Pretend our hearts
are breaking.

Make like
you and I
are a dance
of stars,
the fated breach
of gravity
and time.

Then say
goodbye.

The things you write in the dark, after drinking two margaritas

I get tangled in what
I want to say


Her poems were too
much like
the hair
left in a brush


The switch from first to third:
a writer's oldest trick

---

I want to write boldly, 
like the earthquake
and not
the seismograph 

I want to rattle
the cage,
Explode from 
the branch

I want to be the hair
coursing down the long
switch of her back

The fever,
agitating,
before a sweeter 
delirium

God, let me write
and not be constricted
by the what 
and even less
by any whom

Let me smash that dam
into atoms,
recycle it into
kindling 

Let me break myself, 
in perpetuity,
and free the awful flow

and carry it forward 
until I can't

and kiss the end
of the road

Waiting Game

December,
out at the lake,
and everything's the same
dispirited shade of

picnic-table brown 

except for the water,
whose Crayola hue is 
the slightly more colorful
dirty sock soup

But the pines
will maintain,
as stiff as saints

and the sky
still startles
to the provocation
of crows

and it's fine,
in its way

this waiting game

I'll take the crumbs
that fall my way

like a want
of horse flies
to chew up my legs

the promissory sun  
after a week of rain

and a few crusty leaves
that just refuse, 
by golly,
to budge 

Which is the kind of old lady
I hope to become

though that, too,
can wait 

Childish things

What if 
instead of his color

we saw first

the two arms,

the two legs,

the two eyes 

of a man

Or a kid
just like us

trying hard 

to be big,

trying not 
to show doubt

What if

the hardness of trying

became a defense
of what our families
had filled us with

What if

instead of his color

we saw our own fear
and alienness
reflected back
like a photo's negative 
held up to the light

What if the shock

made us throw up 
our hands:

caught,

chastened,

shot through
with pain, shame,
mercy

What if #blacklivesmatter 

were #whitepeoplesproblem

What if poems were cover

What if games of pretend

were the law

and empathy became 
policeman to all

Wassailing

(Photo by Paul Rockett)

Beneath the crust
of first December

I went yawning for
some inspiration

when I saw the ghost  
of Glenn Gould's hands

and felt the echo of
a reflection of Bach

run across the roof
of my mouth

to make of me
a church 

Out of Time

While cleaning recently, I came across an old cd case from my college years. Half the sleeves were filled with R.E.M. albums. It made me stop and realize something.

I rarely listen to R.E.M. anymore.

But I used to, obsessively. Michael Stipe was the one person in the world who seemed to understand the yearning that squirmed inside of me. And if that thought makes me smile in self-condescension now, it really shouldn't. His voice was my lifeline. 

Art is sometimes a lifeline. 

After college, I moved to Athens, Georgia for a year. Ostensibly for other reasons, but I wasn't fooling myself: I was there for the band, and the mystique conjured around their hometown. I was there because of the kudzu-choked cover on R.E.M.'s first LP, Murmur. I was there because I was searching blindly to know who I was, and what I wanted, and I followed the only thing that felt true to me. 

I wasn't any less lost in Athens, Georgia than I was in Athens, Ohio. In fact, I moved back home after 9 months. It was my first real-world experiment in trying to make a fantasy a reality, and I failed, miserably. 

But I don't regret the trying. 

I still love that music. It still blows me wide open. But I can't hear it now without also feeling trapped by who I was then. I remember an unhappiness so complete I didn't even know to call it unhappiness. I didn't know. All I knew was fear.

I'm not that girl anymore. 

Eventually, the band broke up.

But this blog owes its name to them. And that time in my life when the kudzu began to clear. 

Four corners

His hand
on her arm

the blood reacts

She is now other
than what she
appears to be 

A tree that's moved
from day to night

the moon 
quickening
through darkling 
veins

Foxfire,
she almost thinks,
breathing through
two paper legs

sipping her sips
of tonic water
with her radioactive 
lips

She hits the
target

his mask
slips

She sees ice
beneath

and likes it

While deeper
yet

darkness

Suffuse me
before you're gone

I am small and
winter is long

Words
running circles
around a rectangular
room

fall down in a flock
at the end of the day

Exhausted by what
they couldn't say

Used To

I used to wear pink. 
Now I wear red.

Like a leaf 
no longer hiding,

Like a silent 
solid yes.

I used to hang 
on others' ideas;

now I make 
my own. 

Why You Write

You write because you’re alive. 
Because your brain is a singular specimen, 
but your heart’s on loan from humanity at large. 

You write to pick a lock. 
You write to go somewhere green. 
You write because the battle between the heart and the head 
can be a silent, choking civil war. 
You write because it’s the one worth fighting, 
on all the days. 

You write because for too long, you’ve been ashamed 
of the gap between the person you are 
and the person you were supposed to become, 
and the words are, if not a bridge, 
then a photograph 
in which the other you grows blurrier 
by the sentence, the paragraph, 
the story, The End. 

You write because you’re a narcissist. 
You write because you’re self aware.   

You write because sometimes you surprise yourself with the things you say. 
And other people seem surprised by them, too. 
And in the exchange of that shared surprise comes another flash of sparks: 
you are part of a chain reaction dating back to the Phoenicians, 
a small, if vital component in a rolling caravan of readers and writers, 
all hijacking the highways of literature’s nervous system, 
with no horizon line in sight. 
And if Shakespeare excites the highest hymns,
an individual’s response can still evoke the infinite. 
And hey—remember—you’re alive and Will’s not. 

You write because you are humbled in the sharing, 
made more by the transfusion. 
You write because your ego is often skidded, but never fully squashed. 
And eventually, when your skin has thickened
into a callous-like armor threaded through with rejection, 
you write for something more than validation. 
You write—God help you—for truth.  

You write because clarity is the golden ring. 

You write because clarity is always somewhere else. 

You write because you don’t know what you believe 
until you set it down. 
And even then, it takes endless trying 
to set it just so.   

Right before it topples in on itself. 

So yes. You write as prelude to revision. 
You erase and rewrite because you can no longer pretend to be like Hemingway, bleeding through his perfect typewriter in that perfect Paris 
of a perfect past which no one was ever, actually, part of. 
So you write until the hemorrhage has a form. 
A body. 
Intention. 
Until it pumps with atomic precision.  
As something apart from yourself. 
Character. Story. 
With great mounds of flesh on its bones. 
And later, less. 

You write to be reborn. 
You write, you write, you write. 

You write because even a poem 
composed on a napkin
isn’t worth the cost of a drink
unless it’s got some iron and oxygen 
blacking its ink.  

You write because the words are there, waiting on you.
You fail to write when the fear blocks your way. 
You write blind—and deaf—to meet the words halfway.  

You write because you want to live forever, and you’ve concluded 
there’s no other way, shoddy consolation that this is.   

You write to beat back the sameness of everyday life, 
no matter how nearly perfect, or almost empty, life is. 
You write to keep a child’s vision. 
You write to play.  

You write because words are your oldest and dearest friends. 
And sometimes, when you put them together 
in the most friendly fashion,
they burst into song. 
Or even keep you up at night. 

You write because you wouldn’t have it any other way. 

I should know. 

October

You are an old soul masked
in an adolescent's body

ripping off the pages
of a recycled diary

and setting them 
to flame

Before tossing the ashes
in the eye of a lake

and whispering your psalms
through the pine-bitten dawn

That Time is a phoenix 
with unfathomable wings

and we are the chlorophyll
draining its veins

And The Record Skipped

(Close-up of unidentified Rothko)

Intimacy lives
in that band 
of skin

above a man's
collar

beneath the
draw of his
barber's blade
   
Where Summer's
burn slides

into a white
Winter bed

And in the passage,
a woman's Fall

100 Words

In her mind, they meet in a clearing, conscious of the cliché, but captured all the same by the beauty of their bodies beating in the sun, the electricity swimming on their swollen tongues, awareness dipping into some peasant fold, so that he moves—and she moves—and they move—as leaves move.   

Like a bird she will dive into his mouth. 

And oh, the sky, and aye, the clouds, and yes to the weight of his body being on her own, yes for the felt and fleeting clutch of an immortal light, in all this blood between the legs.  

Taxiing

All week long,

I've left words 
alone,

and they seem fine

out there 

on their own

Exchanging my pen

for a Nikon lens

and the sawing at clarity

for the sensory swing 

of encountering a thing,

before shooting it

still

I like the beautiful things

more than I like the true things,

but I like the beautiful, true things

most of all  

And that is a photograph's
exquisite appeal,

being all right 
there,

magnified and married
at the speed
of light     

While words have to

struggle--

always this struggle--

and always upwind, 

us and them jawing 
to get our gears
to bite

Starting, 
then stopping
before finding--

blue

2 Red Chairs

Let's sit here all day,
not speaking 
of things

for things 
have a way
of pulling 

loose strings,
when what I want 
is to extend

my two legs,
and maybe reach 
for your knee

and lean 
just like the 
shadows do

Elevation

The church bells rang
and the cardinals flew

An altar of blood 
keeping the two

Safe across the 
city's walls

Until their final 
dying fall.

And later, the violin 
player starts 

and fails
to make a woman

from gut and hair,
of air and longing

but I'll give him points
for trying.

For Love,
what is deeper

than Death
but You? 

And how weak the word
that wants Your flesh

but bends before
such broken bread.

Boy

They pulled you out between White’s Mill and Currier Street,
about a mile from the bridge where you parked. 

The river is warmer
than it was in March
when everyone was looking
and putting up signs 
and later on, looking
less, flooding to Facebook
to report what your mom
said, connecting the fallout
to fashion a lede. 

You were “Missing Athens Man.” 
Knives in the wood
after a knife-throwing act.
A stain of old pain
in the rearview reflection.
How come we hadn’t
learned our lesson? 

You left your keys in the ignition.

There was goodness there. In the swell.
Everyone shouldering hope and doubt 
on competing scales. 
It seemed the proof you were looking for:
if life has worth, people will fight for it;
if people fight, living is worth it.
It made sense, on its face.

You had a great smile. 
I could see your mother’s hope in it. 
You wore your hair long
and it made you look vulnerable.
You probably would have hated this, 
but “sweet” is the word that springs to mind.

This world is hard on gentle boys. 

And I keep trying to recall if the 
pizza delivery guy had long hair
or short, the week before Christmas
we got pizza at work. 

Why should I want to put you there? 
What could it possibly matter? 

Your mother said she’d come for you.
Just hang tighter.

Once the weather turned,
I ran the section of the bike path
that bends to the river
over and over and over again, 
pacing myself to its muted rhythm. 
Its crooked spine, infrequent people.
The birds were sharp—soft—both together,
all at once. The wind in the grass 
was a woman’s dress, a mouthful of milk
on a taut clothesline.

My son plays baseball on the fields nearby.

And you were a rustle
in the thirsty brush,
drawing my thoughts as my 
feet held the line 
because I saw the men huddled
along the bank—
sonar trawling, sirens off. 

The water flashing 
its teeth 
in the sun.

There and back,
I took the bridge,
culling the edges with my eyes,
reading the gaps between the lines,
seeing the eddies bubble and
froth, disturbed by the dead limbs,
big rocks, uprooted trunks. 

Trespassing on something 
that wasn’t mine.

Even now, not sure 
what I’m doing here.

But you see how absence becomes abyss
and you think God, how do they carry this?
I absorbed you. Not impulsively, not all at once,
but incrementally, with the herd. 
We swallowed you in desperate sips. 
You sank in, like tea, leaving leaves at the end.
An archetype with a face 
pulled from the caves.  
The lost son. Come back. 
Your brother has killed the fattened calf.
For you. Come back.
Won’t you hear?

And now 
I want to take your pictures 
down, so that she won’t have to. 

I want to hug my children tighter, 
preserving their shape in a better forever. 

We never learn.
It never makes sense. 
You needed more time. 
Pain is a bridge. 

The paper said 
you left a poem behind.  

It’s April now. Winter was hard. 

The lilac is late this year.

Summer's Prayer

come on, some one

some thing

some where

Deleted

Green

How many shades of green are you?
How many shades am I?   

Every birthday is a balancing 
and a reckoning
and a chance to 
proclaim:

I will stay as
earnest as the child
pushing her stick
into brackish waters
in order to make 
all the waves 
that I can 

Longing to hear
the leaves of my trees
whistle and tremble
in a rapt applause

as light breaks free 
of its chain of clouds

and I teeter
on the wings 

of a beautiful 
fall


Where does the water stop
and the cloud begin?

Where am I in here?  

More & Less

I learned to love
contradiction
from you.

Oh, not directly. 
We never ventured
into such abstract country.
(There were landscapes 
and portraits to see.)

But nonetheless, 
it came down to me 
in drips and drabs:

the unbearable strain
of loving 
while letting expectations 
be.

And now I'm trying 
to walk that line.
Whether you believe this or not, Mom,
I'm a goddamn contortionist here.
Inching my way
along the seams:

That love can be true,
if also a lie.

That love is blind,
recording all.

That love deforms
in its wish to 
preserve and to
protect.

I let it get to me.
Too much, I bet. 

I am still such 
a child, see. 

Yours.
And not. 

And you are my mother.
But you were someone else, first.

We are still trying here.

And maybe that's enough.  

Maybe that's as much
as we can hope to ask. 

Because I have this horrible feeling,
that if I tried any harder--

I could break us both. 

Lakeside

The world 
today
is much too tender 
a thing 

With every song  
in the car
pulling too wide
or too near

And so I stop to watch
the dragonflies 

darting about
their sanctuary  
of light 

Not so frantic
that they don't
pause, mid-
spin

And I
with them

Feeling less
and less  
like the baby bird

for whom the sun
is too flush

and the moon
too thin

Pushing up
its tiny mouth
for the plump
of a worm

or a gulp
of hot air 

Λ

I know what
dark energy is


It doesn't sleep,
beneath my pillow


It doesn't sleep,
all night

3 a.m., Everytown

Would he-- 

        

                 --If I 

Was I so wrong--

                         --my son, my son

How did it happen that--

                                     --don't care what the label says

Where did I put that goddamn--

                                               --fun while it lasted, I suppose 

I'm going to die some-- 

                                  --Look at that moon, though 

I could just tell her--

                                --Mom, Mom

Snoring like a-- 

                       --please, God?

Shh-- 

           Shhhh. Mama's here.