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. 

Deleted

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.

Deleted

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. 

  

Blue Fog

My blue friend,

we meet again

You, a scarf
of fog
and mist

Me, the shadow
of a broken
cloud 

And where 
we catch, 
raindrops run  

down a
river's neck,

like the breath 
before

the softest
kiss   

I Will Follow You Into the Dark

I went for a drive yesterday. A car was tailing me more closely than I liked, so on an impulse, I swerved into a cemetery drive. (As an aside, my music was on shuffle and the song that was playing was "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," which seemed oddly appropriate.)

Earlier in the day, I had the not wholly original thought that writing only poetry might reinforce one's isolation and self-absorption. Poetry is a summoning of beauty or truth. It requires quiet contemplation and space to grow. Fiction, on the other hand, forces the writer into the heads of other people. Fiction is, by necessity, a reaching out.

Cemeteries are that way, too. The people there are real. Or they were real. Now they're something in between. "Beyond the sunset," as so many of the inscriptions put it.

I like visiting cemeteries. Particularly when I'm feeling tired of myself. Considering other people's lives--wondering who they were and whom they loved--isn't so much sad as it is engaging and oddly uplifting. (Except when I run across a child's grave. Damn.)

I like reading the names. I like the specificity of the dates of birth and death, bookends to a lifetime filled with stories. I like seeing the remembrances left, graveside, from those committed to loving in death as well as they did in life. Usually, these consist of flowers. Maybe a flag or figurine. Even wind chimes, on occasion.

But this small, rural cemetery was something else.

The graves here were positively bustling with remembrances.

Take a look:

Solar lights, for the darkest nights. 

This child lived for two months. 

17 years later, she's still missed.

I bet this lady liked dolphins.

She must have been a gardener. 

Cardinals and butterflies and feasts of flowers.

This one made me smile.

A farmer, you think? 

Fresh, but not too fresh. 

Dead flowers. Well-worn hat. Sad.

The first gravestone inscription to ever make me laugh.

The front reads:

"Here lies atheist Bob Donohoe. 

All dressed up and no place to go.

And his ever loving wife

Alice."

The back says:

"Rest in peace Mom and Dad.

We know you are together in Heaven.

Well, this should be interesting."

How can any poet beat that?

I don't want to be buried. I want to be cremated and grow back as a tree, because dammit, I am a poet and an atheist (like Bob here) and I want something of myself to endure after I'm gone. But there is something deeply touching in how committed these mourners are to honoring (and maybe comforting?) their dead. Ultimately, it's for themselves, I suppose. A tangible releasing of the love that no longer has a place to call home.

I could feel it pulsing here. 

The Persistence of Memory

I love old barns,

so unapologetically themselves

How I long to romanticize them;

how they resist

I'd like to spend the night in one,

be the drum to its hollow ribs

  

And ere the sunlight broke its fast,
warp and melt like Dali's clock

The Rushes

On a windy day, 

I want to drive aimlessly

In bursts of speed

Down furtive roads
that curve the creek
and skim the leaves,

a frictional physics

compounding the whispers

of secrets leaping

through the air 

I want to hear 

the tar traps blistered 
by the sun 

snapping and cracking
beneath my tread
like a teenage girl 
and her pink wad of gum 
as I'm flung, whisked, 
borne along

Until I reach an outer realm
where the crow is king
of his mailbox throne,

the address blocked 
in a five digit code,

a blankness there
as if to say:

You'll get where you need to be
or you're going to stay lost,
my friend

I want to feel the road
run rough,

forget its manners,

fall into ruts
and gravel, dirt and dust,
the car's shocks bewitched 
into a state of 
astonishment,

with all the flux
of my reactionary atoms
flipping their polarity

I want to revel
in this silken husk:  
sweat beneath my arms
and breasts, 
glazing two thighs
like an axel grease,
as my fingers keep slipping
off the wheel
to taste the air outside

But the wind, alone
for four billion years,
is a lover indifferent
to the lure of my skin,
while the treetops 
toss and flounce 
like jealous rivals
with feathers in their mouths

So my vision bends--
scales, skirts, ascends--
until every hay bale  
is Rapunzel's hair,
neatly bound with
fraying ends

While mine's a coarseness
running free,
a comet's tail torn away,
my heart the pedal 
my foot must squeeze 
as consciousness pulls
at the speed of storms,
still far far ahead