Heritage

Where is my name from?

She named him Samuel, after his father, and also after Mark Twain, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to have such an inspiration. With a name like Samuel Tennessee Cartwright he was going to be incredible anyway; he could be a great writer, or explorer, or railroad baron, or president. She called him Tennessee, or Ten, but he’d always have Samuel to fall back. His father went by his middle name, too, so maybe he’d never quite figure out who he was in casual conversation, or when he came to visit. She’d tell him if he asked, of course, she wasn’t going to give him a novel for a life; he’d have to earn one. Besides, kids were more likely to ask who their fathers were than where their names were from.

Where is my dad?

He wasn’t gone; but they weren’t together, they never really had been.

They had slept together, the only thing preceding it a certain electrical smile shared between them for the past month. They hadn’t been drunk, only foolish, only giddy: college students during exams week. He was gangly and she inexperienced, and afterwards they had managed to avoid each other for a week, until their mutual group of friends pulled them back together. The instant they had been back in the same room they realized that it wasn’t strange at all. And certainly she had appreciated that none of their friends had noticed anything. These people, their trusted, core people, had never seen or mentioned seeing anything between them. Accordingly, they had concealed it almost mirthfully; quietly joyful when no one had seen that touch, that glance, or felt a quiver in the air.

There was a kindness between the two of them, a satisfied and tender understanding that was not love, but was in fact the tender beginnings of it. The rushing fall that drives everyone mad, the first and sweetest bite of a peach, a door being suddenly opened by a gust of spring wind. They had slept together again, more cautiously this time; they had held hands; and then nothing after that. Awkwardness not being one of the many things that can destroy love, they were unworried, however, poor timing is the ruin of nearly everything else. It had never occurred to them not to move on with their plans in life; unencumbered they went separate ways with whispered promises to write, to keep in touch. She went to the city to work for a magazine; he went to Texas to Teach for America and start work on his Peace Corp application.

But they were encumbered, or at least she was, so deep down it was unrecognizable. She felt the first tremble of life in June. Disbelief, panic; but never anger and never fear. She imagined flying down to Texas to tell him; and he would pick her up and swing her around laughing. She imagined marrying him. It was not unpleasant, a little house with ferns and cucumbers in the summer; a dog, an office with old bottles in the window, his guitar in the living room. Dancing in the evenings, falling in love, getting older with someone warm at her back. She imagined ceding pieces of their lives for one another, then sinking into disappointment until the kid was having two Christmases and every-other-weekends. She imagined raising a child herself, in the city, with a hectic job and no life but parent conferences on her 30^th birthday.

When she told him, over the phone, she was greeted with silence, not cold but choked, and she knew he was imagining the same things, and she told him it was all right. They’d figure something out when he got back. She almost had an abortion.

What did you want to be when you grow up?

When he was a floppy-legged infant, she touched him constantly; greedily stroking his soft skin, his feathery hair, and gazing into his round, round eyes. She loved the way he looked at everything, the way his his tiny fingers closed around her own. She loved the way his lower lip hung like a squashy comma. Every time she went to touch him it was like a courtship, she was wooing him for the honor of having contact with something so beautiful. When he crawled to her and pushed himself up onto her lap, when he grabbed at her and smiled, she could feel her heart pounding. Each time it was a first kiss. He was so exquisite.

Can we get a dog?

They lived alone with each other, in an apartment, she was doing well at the magazine, they had given her maternity leave and had Fridays off; she knew it would be nice when he started school to have that day to herself. Now those days were just the two of them, going out around the city, or sometimes just lying together in the sun on her bed while he looked at everything for hours until he fell asleep. He loved sweet potatoes.

His father came to visit, more often now that he was back in the city after Teaching for America and before whatever else he was going to do. They had never talked about getting married but neither of them were seeing other people; both had tried on and off in the past two years but they were young.

Once they had almost slept together again but it had been strange, because they had really meant it that time. She imagined someday he’d visit and they’d finally sort it all out and, for once, it would make sense.

Once he had been there with other friends; and those who knew about him were angry later, angry at how she was just letting him go, that he wasn’t there for them. She knew he would be, and besides, it was her friends who were there, they helped her all the time. Samuel laughed around them, they held him and sang to him and she was so glad that they were not alone.

Why are girls different from boys?

When they were alone she would talk to him, all the time, even though he wouldn’t understand. She would read him poems or her articles, and he would stare at her, just stare and stare as if he knew everything. Or she would gossip with him, tell him what was happening at work or with her friends, who were stumbling through young adulthood in a world that seemed so far removed from her now.

She told him, “You’ll get old, Ten, and you’ll learn to ride a bike and write sonnets and you’ll fall in love with a girl who wears too much makeup and consider desperate things to be with her. You’ll hate me for a while, and you’ll color pictures, and lose your keys. You’ll fall off a horse and I’ll drive you to the hospital, you’ll go on picnics and learn about dinosaurs and get muddy and cold and eat marshmallows and love curry and be held close, so close, and you’ll feel loved.”

She said, “There will always be someone there for you even if you don’t know it.”

She said, “This world is insane, Samuel, and we’re insane too, and that makes us sane. We can’t see even an inch into the future but we don’t stop moving, our blindness never stops us from taking a step forward. If we could stop and go back we wouldn’t. There are all these stupid terrible things that we’d love to stop, we’d love to, but we won’t because we’d have to go backwards. It’s like riding a bike at night or sliding down a hill on a sled; you can’t stop and your voice streams out behind you and you can’t see where you’re going but you love it. We’re happy to be alive. We make mistakes, we’re sorry, but we don’t stop making mistakes. Even if you never make the same mistake twice your life will be full of them. We don’t see each other and we bump into people, we make each other road-kill and we trample on each other’s dreams and thoughts, we steal and cheat and lie and kick each other even if we don’t mean to.”

Where do babies come from?

She said, “People are cars without headlights.”

Another Life

I wish I were a newsie with my cloth cap in my hand
I wish I were an immigrant sailing to a foreign land
I wish I wore a top hat and a gold watch on a chain
I wish I drove a wagon to settle on the plains

(Refrain) Cause I can’t be no one else, that’s right
No I can’t be no one else.
I can’t have another life this time,
So I’ll give it another try.

I wish I were a business man with a briefcase full of gold
I wish I were a maiden who never will grow old
I wish I were an actor who danced upon the stage
I wish I tamed the lions that live inside a cage

(Refrain)

I cannot be a doctor with healing in my bag
I cannot be a shoeshine cleaning with a rag
I’ll never be a lumberjack felling trees beneath my saw
I’ll never be the President and give my word as law.

(Refrain)

Instead I’ll be just myself singing you this song
Though the list of other lives is twice a million long
I look around at my life, at all I’ve got instead
And never wish for anything else until I wind up dead.

Cause I can’t be no one else, that’s right
No I can’t be no one else.
I can’t have another life this time,
So I’ll give this one a try.

August 29 2004

A train comes churning through the sleepy town
its headlights rushing on through the thin midnight mist.

Songs in the darkness, and the flash of a cigarette tip outside
imitates the moon,
which lies in the sky like a cow, milky white and
spotted by dark skittering clouds.

We splay ourselves on the line of open conversation
rewarded by sleepy smudges beneath our eyes
and the bright half-circles of our smiles.

Poem to a Dead Mouse

This morning you woke up in love,

scurried about the byways and corridors of your world

until you came upon the mousetrap

that closed on your head still quivering with the scent of bait.

You died in flight

as the trap sprang up and over

now your back legs lie askew

your front paw reaching for your crushed spine.

I found you there, grotesque, and wondered

where else you might have gone today

who else you might have loved

and if I would have been careful enough to avoid your fate.

That looks on Tempests

All day the ocean is rushing at the unprotected shore,
wearing away sand,
drawing the earth out to sea.
It is dangerous, in waking hours, to recognize these tides,
the quiver of light on waves,
what might be love wearing on the corners of my mind.

But there is no logic in the dark.
Safely harbored we curl our hands together
and you ask me to stay
until you slip out into a truly pacific sleep.

Sink

I knocked on the door again because I could hear her in there, I could hear her music and her feet bouncing on the floor.

“I need to pee.” I announced. The money saved by renting a one bathroom apartment had undoubtedly gone into groceries, specifically, the cranberry juice which was aggravating the current situation. Olivia would appreciate the irony.

“Pee in the sink” she warbled through the particle board of the bathroom door, and I briefly considered following her advice.

“Your dishes are in the sink. Let me in.”

“I’m shaving my legs” she replied. Woman things. I had strict rules against the mention of woman things, especially bathroom woman things, in my presence. Propriety should be foremost amongst roommates, and the tubes and bottles lining the bathtub were bad enough. Olivia, I have to admit, is better than most, and in return I keep my unsightly hair clippings and male hygiene products to myself. Olivia and I have been living in an Odd Couple’s bliss these past few months, a bliss somewhat impeded upon by the current pressure on my bladder.

“Can I please just come in?” If she really wanted her privacy, she would turn up the radio or mention one of the dreaded woman words that would have sent me scurrying to the nearest public bathrooms. I was fighting a winning battle, and we both knew it. I put my hand on the doorknob. “I’m coming in.”

She was in her underwear and a grey t-shirt, and had her foot up on the sink, her leg streaked with a few lines of lather. Her other leg, bent to support her, was jiggling up and down in time to the rock music from the tooth-paste spattered radio, and her unpolished toes fiercely curled against the damp carpet. I wondered at one point in life the human condition would become beautiful, at what age we became dignified.

“I’m not looking” she said, and I pretended she wasn’t there as I peed. Olivia and I have been friends for five years, and if we’re coexisting this disgustingly I wonder if it’s been too long. When does this sort of closeness become acceptable? If we renewed our lease in the fall, what might we become?
She hopped over to make room for me at the sink, and I looked at her smoothed leg as I rinsed my hands.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Does a girl need an occasion to shave her legs?”

“Yes.”

She snorted disapprovingly. I was using her own words against her, but Olivia has a great propensity for inconveniently misremembering past arguments.

“Well, I’m going swimming, anyway.”

“Why?” This was a new development, as Olivia generally abhors water sports. I suspected peer pressure.

“Swimming is good exercise. And it’s something I should be good at. So I can, I don’t know, learn to sail.”

“Are you planning on learning to sail?”

“I might be. Either way, you of all people should not be one to criticize attempts to better oneself.” Five years. Too long indeed.

“Fine. Thank you for your gracious accommodations in the bathroom.”

“Just one more service we offer at Chateau Olivia!” she proclaimed, holding her pink plastic razor above her head, with an accent reminiscent of her inspiration, the Statue of Liberty. Resisting the urge for further sarcasm, I instead decided to wash the dishes while Olivia pattered about, humming and gathering swimming accoutrements. If she was on an aggressive campaign of self-improvement, I might find myself out of a bathroom more often, and in need of the additional options.

When Olivia had left, come back in to grab something she had forgotten and left again, after I had watched her ride away on her bicycle, I returned to the bathroom. Standing in her empty, still damp spot, I shut off the radio and opened the medicine cabinet. I looked at the pill bottles on the top shelf and then lined them on the sink. I filled a glass of water, stared at the white flecks in the bottom, and poured it down the sink. I filled another glass and looked at the pill bottles. Celexa, ibuprofen, old prescriptions. The lethal doses all carefully tabulated in my head. Orange and white plastic that for Olivia had probably long since blended into the background of things she couldn’t reach.

I thought of Olivia coming home, exhausted and cheerful, and finding me on the bathroom floor. She’d smell the vomit I’d drowned in, drop her sopping suit and scream. She’d never go swimming again. Swimming is good exercise, and she would like to learn to sail. Maybe exercise is the answer. I thought about going swimming. About walking in and never coming out, like Odysseus’ mother. The newspaper obituary, if there was one, wouldn’t make the connection. I thought about taking a walk. About stepping in front of a car. Too messy, that might hurt someone else. I emptied the glass of water. I put all the pill bottles back onto the shelf and went into the kitchen for more cranberry juice.

“Fuck Hemingway.” I said it out loud and slammed the cup down onto the kitchen counter, but it was plastic and only hurt my hand. Suddenly it was very quiet in the kitchen. The clock tocked and the refrigerator shuddered off. Olivia’s ugly houseplant seemed sympathetic, leaning precariously in the corner. Perhaps it, too, wanted to die.

“Fuck you, Hemingway.” I threw the cup across the room, looked at it, and picked it up. I wiped four droplets of juice from the wall with my finger.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”.

Jackie told me that, right after I started writing my senior paper about Hemingway. Most days, I wish she hadn’t ever shared with me her extensive collection of quotes. I thought about calling Jackie, trying to be casual about it. She’d tell me what she told me when we broke up, that, among other things, I wasn’t happy enough. Enough. As if it was quantifiable, acceptable only at certain standard levels, or as if she managed to be any happier at any given time. She should have said I wasn’t happy enough for her, I know that’s what she meant but I wish she’d have said it that way. Her relationship with words was so beautifully potent, I envied it and trusted it, so of course it hurt me. But she can’t be blamed for this, she can’t be blamed for anything but putting that stupid fucking quote into my head. My senior paper was shit, anyway, but I still passed. Of course I did. Olivia doesn’t let me talk about Hemingway anymore. She says it makes her sad. Really she just doesn’t like anger, it’s too different, it’s frightening. She’s used to my sadness.

I need to get a job. A better one than my last appointment, which was so monotonous I quit before I could be fired for poor job performance. Olivia’s happy because I stole a label-maker from the office, which is at the bottom of her closet now, out of tape after she labeled everything in our friend Riley’s apartment. I thought about calling Riley, going over there and staring at the label on his ceiling that says “ceiling”, but he’d be at work, 2:30 in the afternoon on a Monday. Everyone is at work, except Olivia, who has Mondays off and is swimming. Why didn’t I just go swimming with her?

I got in my car and cranked up the radio, drowning my sorrows with the music of the 1990’s, which in itself is deeply depressing but always makes me feel better. It’s familiar, if nothing else, but the repetitive nonsensical lyrics, the grim drugged-up despair in the vocals, it means something; not like today’s sad music, which is self-consciously intricate and far too specific. Nineties music doesn’t make much sense, it just points to the painful core at my center, nods, and wipes its sweaty brow with a tattered flannel shirt.

There are a few bookstores in the area, some corporate and some locally owned. I’m a regular at those, but none of them are hiring, so I bitterly looked for applications at the big business bookstores. I hated the poshness of them, the hipster coffeehouses and over-decorated seasonal cheer. At least they’d pay the rent, the cell phone bill. Employee discount and old biscotti for Olivia. I went to the grocery store and got lettuce, soup, yogurt. Red grapes were on sale, the good crispy ones, as my enthusiastic roommate calls them, and I bought a bag for her. She’d be hungry from the exercise.

I was just sort of lying in my room when she called, but I didn’t pick up the phone. She called again almost exactly a minute later, so I answered it. Her voice on the other end was quiet, I could hear activity in the background.

“Can you come and get me?” she said.

“Don’t you have your bike?”

“Yes,” she said after a pause that suddenly sent a wave of adrenaline up my spine, “but could you come get me?”

“Yeah. I’ll be right there.” I couldn’t remember the last time I heard Olivia being that quiet on the phone. Not even when she called while she was off playing hide-and-seek and had gotten bored, not even for the sake of the game had she been quiet.

I pulled up by the pool, and she was waiting outside on a concrete bench, her bike and backpack beside her. She looked very small. I got her bike and she got into the front seat, but she didn’t look back as I tried to maneuver the clumsy machine into my back seat without impaling her or getting grease on the seats. We drove home in silence, the radio mostly chipper commercials.

Upstairs, Olivia dropped her stuff in her room and went into the kitchen, filled a saucepan with water and turned the burner on high. She got a chair to reach her tin of tea rather than asking me for help though I was leaning in the doorway watching her. Opening the fridge, she stared at the new bag of grapes with vague surprise, instead took out four pieces of bread and spread peanut butter over two of them, moving calmly, like she wasn’t there at all. Then she spooned strawberry jam onto one sandwich and apricot jelly on the second. She doesn’t eat apricot. Without thinking or asking, she had made a sandwich for me, too. The silence in the kitchen made me glance nervously at the wall, checking for spattered juice stains. The clock ticked and I found my courage, finally asking,

“What’s up?”

“I drowned” she said, staring at the sandwiches.

“You what?”

“I drowned. When I was swimming, I was tired and when I turned my head to the side to breathe, I breathed in some water, and started coughing, and I guess I stopped kicking, and I went under the water. It was in the deep end. I kind of came back up but I didn’t have any air because I had been coughing, and I couldn’t tell when I was at the surface, and I breathed in more water and went under again. I couldn’t tell. Which way was up. Or anything.”

I didn’t know what to say. What can you ever say?

“The lifeguard pulled me up. She saw me go under. She was really nice about it, too. She was like, sixteen.”

“How long were you underwater?”

“I don’t know!” Anger flashed in her eyes as she looked at me, but it faded again, and she just looked tired.

“I’m sorry.” I almost laughed at myself. “But you’re ok now, right? You should get some sleep.”

“I’d rather stay awake for a while, you know?”

She sat in the kitchen and made her tea. I looked at our movie collection for something that did not involve death, near-death experiences, or water. I was faced with a handful of Disney (except the one about the mermaid) and the few romantic comedies that had been gathering dust on a back shelf. Woman stuff. Even Olivia disdained them.

“Do you care what we watch?”

“No.”

I put in one of the movies, hoping for something that would leave my IQ and belief in humanity intact 107 minutes later, and flopped onto the couch. Olivia settled next to me, tucking her legs in under her. We are our sandwiches in silence, unwilling to provide a laugh track for the film. When the pop song rolled with the credits, I got up to stretch but she stayed put and asked me to put in another one, maybe a better one. Grabbing the first one from the stack, I threw it in the machine and settled back down. As if I had anything better to do than watch crappy movies. It wasn’t until halfway through until Olivia spoke again.

“You know how they say drowning is like going to sleep?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It kinda hurts.”

“Yeah.” I slid over and grabbed her shoulders, pulled her to me in the hug I finally realized she needed. Her hair smelled like chlorine.

“You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes?”

“Yeah.”

“You know what I saw?”

“What?”

“Nothing. My own arm. Blue pool water, then nothing. I didn’t have any air, and I didn’t have anything.” She abruptly broke off her sentence, unwilling to say that she had that she had taken water into her lungs and surrendered to that oblivion.

“No childhood memories or anything. And I’ve got some good ones.” She pushed in closer to me, and I pulled a blanket up around us. By the time the movie was over she was asleep on my lap. I thought about moving her, such a few short steps to her room, but by then my legs were asleep and I was halfway to joining them. She was breathing evenly, without thinking, as she had been in the pool earlier. I nearly shuddered, looking at her closed eyes, her pale skin. Her mouth was hanging open. The moment drool appeared, I swore to the grimly glowing VCR clock, I was done. I was moving out. No drool appeared as I stared at the blank blue television screen, buzzing blue rays into my tired eyes. Blue pool, then nothing. Olivia had seen the worst thing she could imagine. She had clawed at the air and the water and tried to pull herself back up, but then she had relented. Odysseus’s mother regretting her decision as she saw the sand swirling around her feet. Blue water, orange and white plastic, darkness. Slowly I shifted so we were lying down, Olivia only smacking her lips and sloppily tugging at the fleece blanket. I’d never be able to sleep, I can never sleep sardined with someone else, but Olivia was just there, needing something better than nothing.

She punched me in the shoulder to wake me, told me loudly that I was a pervert and threw the blanket over my head as she got up. I listened to her pouring cereal into a bowl in the kitchen, humming an obnoxious jingle. Cured, seemingly. Reborn and undefeatable each day, while I, so unlike a phoenix, had slept with my keys and cell phone gouging into my leg. Better than nothing. I got up and leaned on the doorframe of the kitchen, where Olivia was eating dry granola with a fork.

“I’m going to be late for work” she observed, smiling her beautiful child’s smile at me. “You’ve got pillow lines.”

I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I opened the medicine cabinet and looked at the neat line of pill bottles on the top shelf. I closed the medicine cabinet. I filled a glass of water and, without looking at the hard water flecks swirling at the bottom, drank the whole thing straight down.

(lies)

It wasn’t your words,
it was what I thought you meant by them.
But your letters, pressed to my face
smell only of paper.

After I left
I thought about you fiercely for many days.
You said you missed me
because you knew what it would do:
Bring me back through the wires,
make me want you

like a cigarette.

Three Day Pass

They landed at midnight, three days later
their last two dollars landed in the cardboard box of a panhandler,
water-drenched fire eater at the Pier.
Beer cost four and there’s a store on every corner here,
San Francisco, the richest port, each step thick with gold and light,
stink of onions and steeples and dogs with strange names.

Miguel, drooping curls, drooping mustache,
old skin and mouth of an economics professor,
Miguel you gave a handful of hash to the Minnesota girls
before you knew their names.
Green California skunk smell, high school’s satan,
they will fall off the edge of the continent but
they will not say no.

Where on the streets have you fallen, Miguel?
And besides, who else has tripped down these hills,
scraped their knees and vomited wine, unable to find themselves
at the beach, too far from the Greyhound station, too far from
anywhere. Anyway,
how different can one voyage be
when so many others have died here, lost their shoes here,
fell in love with the floors of a bookstore,
slept on a couch and woke feeling alive;
half-woke and wondered how long,
knew it was too good to last, threw youth to the pigeons,
broke their teeth, turned their tongues through cable wires,
smoked away summer in the shadow of the sea.
We justify so much.

We take the handful of weed, the bitter pill in the bathroom
that carries time like a sleeping child,
gently high in Washington square (as if DiMaggio still cares)
to pace the latitude line and find a place between grass and sky.
Where are you, Miguel, what paths have you traced to come so far
from Puerto Rico, you said it meant rich port,
you explained it all to those girls from Minnesota you’ll forget tomorrow.

They will ride to the end of the line, throw themselves
elbows first into the sand, sun worn, glad and tall,
a departing plane heavy on their eyelids.
Later that night they’ll stand on prairie’s edge.
But did they find it?
The pacific call that has drawn dreamers beneath red Chinese lanterns—
not smoke or wine but the ineffable promise
that the waves would welcome them in,
that the ships could take them further west than those
last crispy hopes, those last two dollars.

the blues

Now I sing the oldest song:
my man done treat me wrong.
Where's the one to treat me right,
who won't drink or cheat or fight?
My man done treat me wrong,
owes me money and leads me along,
squeezed my heart until it bled.

But you bought me milk and bread,
you spent weeks writing me a song
that I listened to as I lay in bed.
We stayed up and talked all night,
now I don't know where you belong.
You held me close, you held me tight,
when we pitched headfirst off a sled.

The night you lit my hair on fire

The night you lit my hair on fire

we fell asleep side by side,

three in a bed, holding hands.

Already wearing pajamas beneath our clothes,

we were soldiers in winter

shoulder to shoulder. Sister and brothers.

We went to bed, fell asleep, woke up,

our feet tangled. We got dressed, cross at consciousness,

angry at the dawn that would carry us apart.

History Lessons

"They tell us, Sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when will we be stronger? Gentlemen may cry peace, peace- but there is no peace. I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death."

I should have known I was in trouble when I first read your name,
Patrick Henry.
In your stubbornness I saw confidence,
in your arrogance, pride.
They tell me, sir, that I am weak
to love you charismatic fools,
when will I be stronger?

I would have loved you,
Patrick Henry,
a moth to your flame.
More showman than gentleman,
unwilling to compromise
no soft words will sway you, no soft arms will give you pause,
your most formidable adversary is yourself
and I could never save you.

When I first read your words, your brash ideals,
I did not know you were my type,
Patrick Henry,
but still your speeches stirred me;
my only course now to follow you fierce fighters, fiery actors,
my heart fed to fuel your passions.
I would cry peace, peace,
but there is no peace in being at your side.

Ribbon in your Hair (Sea Shanty 2)

You asked me for a china dish
And silver from a fair
I brought you seashells from the shore
And a ribbon for your hair.
I cannot spare a copper
And gifts, they must be rare
But oh my love how fine you look
With that ribbon in your hair.

When I am drowned down in the sea
And in the ocean’s care
Will you wait for me upon the shore
With that ribbon in your hair?

Sea Shanty

We’ve been a sail a month or two
it could be three or four,
and I’m just waiting for my eyes to light
upon the distant shore.
For fish and salt and lumbered wood
I’ll sail upon the sea,
For water and wool and sewing pins
I’ll sail away from thee.

My sweater’s bare, my hands are cold
its dark and black below,
the shifting ocean ‘neath my feet
is the only life I know.
Take me home, gentle waves,
Take me home, rushing tide
I’m drowning in the steady seas
For I’m not at your side.

My mates all talk of heaven,
lands of gold and green,
The setting sun upon the waves
the only gold I’ve seen.
For fish and salt and lumbered wood
I’ll sail upon the sea,
For water and wool and sewing pins
I’ll sail away from thee.

My brother booked a passage
down to New South Wales.
Instead he went to paradise,
drowned in November’s gales.
Take me home, gentle waves,
Take me home, rushing tide
I’m drowning in the steady seas
For I’m not at your side.

I have ridden the heaving waves
when the sea-borne air turns grey
there’s nothing left for the sailors then
but to hold the line and pray.
Take me home, gentle waves,
Take me home, rushing tide
I’m drowning in the steady seas
For I’m not at your side.

I'd mess up my hair for you

The skin around your eyes is creased and greasy
no beauty commercial in your lack of sleep.
Like me you are no magazine,
I would hold your hand for all time.

December song

In winter my skin cracks and bleeds
red and raw as the veins of my heart.
You made a scarf to wrap around my head,
warm and heavy as a sloth. Algae fur, long arms,
I can smell the rain forest on it's breath.
Your love is tropical darling
It's so cold but
your love is so tropical.

From "Long Night"

So much had been lost. Memories, feelings, desires were packed away, buried down in the closed compartments inside him. Like the cities to the east, buried in ash with nothing left that was soft or pink or human. Just this, survival and the vague perplexity at his own existence. He didn't know what he wanted, but suddenly her eyes were before him, gleaming white, she was all smooth fire sparking against the night. He wanted to take her and fill her with everything he had, to say every word he knew and every word that had ever been, but she already had them all. Albatross, alacrity, temerity tuxedo murky volunteer the the a it she. Her. It was all inside her already and it would never be destroyed. He kissed her. "Shit" she said. Grammar, indigo, hurricane, her. He started to kiss her again, but stopped, tried to apologize.
"It's terribly cliche," she said, so close to him now.
"There aren't any other cliches left on Earth" he replied, and her peal of laughter fell like shining beads onto dark pavement. They rolled into him, lodged inside him and he pressed his face to hers and tried to remember everything.

Upon Waking, July 21, 2006

Sick and fevered
I dreamt of you
sitting at a cafeteria table,
two books in one hand.
It is how I know you best.
As I sat down with my tray
you began to argue, good-natured stubbornness.
The dream ended.
I lay still for a moment
recollecting reality
and wondered
what you had been doing
as
I
woke.

Teacher's Beau

Perhaps a century ago
we could not be seen together:
young man and schoolteacher.
Decorum reigns in your proper carriage, but
the sight of us would have scandalized young eyes.

This afternoon you surprise me, waiting at the door.
I fly to you,
open my mouth to laugh,
wave at my students
as you escort me home.

Eagan, we own the streets

It is so good to get drunk with you,
to roam the town
and laugh without stopping.

(title currently forgotten)

In the slow slope of a winter day
my heart rises, unbidden,
and trembles, a snowflake,
at the corner of my mouth.
I will not let it drop

into a moment suddenly suspended,
a white moth fluttering in the space between words
awaiting return.
Instead, when you look away distracted
I lean over and smooth your rumpled collar.

bitter haikus 2

Once, comfort between
our collarbones, hearts yielding
soft pounding pillows.

Sheltered in my arms,
called home my mind and marrow,
now you are cast out.

My best poems were
written for, wasted on you.
I don't want you back.

105 E. 4th

How often have I pounded down those steps:
half a hundred times a month?

Striding across the porch where we ate burgers,
beneath the slanted roof where we lay and watched a lightning storm.
One-two hips swing, three-four knees fling, carrying me
into the clear darkness,
Careening to a waiting car,
chasing jubilant into cold downpours,
drifting down the evenings when the starlings chatter
and sunset burns the leaves yellow.

Leaving
fucked up at five a.m. (dizzy with smoke)
vodka drunk at two or three.
Pissed, glad, walking tired,
barefoot, booted, swaying back together or
alone,
always alone on Mondays,
turned away from your screen door,
threading these sidewalks home
beneath a full moon, half moon, stark starry sky.

How often I have clattered down those four rickety stairs
and out across town:
one thousand steps from my doorway to yours.

bitter haikus!

I haven't seen you
in so long I forgot why
I loved you at all.


His hands stroked my hips,
nerves sang, my body betrayed
me, just like you did.


You never made me
feel beautiful, not once or
twice in all that time.

Place

The moon dangling from the curtain rod
is the same moon that was shining above the clock tower,
criss-crossed by cable-car wires,
a silent catechism in that coastal city.

Since then I have seen Orion's star feet
skimmed by an airplane's wing.
He stood for a second on the fleeting stage
and passed into the west.

Here the bright bulb is filtered all by falling leaves,
pine needles, storm windows.
It is not the same.
It rolls against the corner of my eye
like a marble on a slanted floor.

Self-Sufficiency

Open jars, go to bars,
apply, interview, qualify,
pay rent, vote, laugh,
open doors, vacuum floors,
wash windows, carry groceries,
fix a car, open jars...

Sometimes at night
I tuck
a strand of hair behind my ear
and wish
someone would do it for me.

Farmer's Wife

How peaceable to be awake and listening
to the slip-slip
of fabric over his skin: undershirt, buttons, jangling belt.
Six a.m. he dresses in the dark, leaving the blankets warm.
His smile a porcelain mug - thick white full of early morning coffee.
Tonight we will dance beneath that bare light bulb.

Winter Awake

It was not a May-time explosion of dandelion petals,

hummingbird kisses,

a beginning and an end.

It was the taste of ginger on the tongue,

lovely and true,

burning away November wind,

a thesis statement

proving what could have lain dormant all winter:

black water beneath thick ice.

Scalding and brief,

a sudden branch through spinning spokes,

an embrace like

falling into bed.

Alecto's X

You do not believe I am not still in love--

Every once in a while I cannot resist

reminding you just how comfortably I fit

between your arm and side.

After all, hell hath

no fury.

back yard

I'd like to sit on the back step with you,
feel evening settle over me.
I want to accidentally touch you,
and when you look at me
I want to kiss you
and for you to put your arms around me.

The Best Part

The best part of having friends, he said,

is how they notice when you take too much

but don’t mention it.

The taste of caramel apples will always remind me

of how I did not begrudge him that extra bite,

though we were sharing one between us,

and of how we had crept through damp alleys

past dumpsters and growling semis

just to buy that apple,

sticky, crisp and sweet.

Later, quarter to six in the morning,

we paused beneath a pale streetlight.

Hair tangled, nose running, rainwater and caramel

smearing my face. He looked at me, I saw

a strange look pass over him

and he said I was beautiful.

beyond midnight

Moonlight creaks on sidewalk cracks
and rusty playground chains
ivory light on yellow leaves
fallen, falling.
The long scarf of a windy night
howls victorious through skeins of fog.

Howls victorious!

windy night!

full white moon!

If ever there was a time for werewolves...

no one writes about goofy people

you've got thin wrists,
and a silly hat.
and a beard,
which is weird,
but ok I think.
why are love poems always so profound?

Driving Stick

Two burritos
but you’re driving
so I juggle both
belly-sized bricks.
I peel back an inch of foil
barbacoa beef
ready for the request
of your silent hand
outstretched.
After a bite you
hold it out again,
dripping rice,
I snatch it up
immediately,
abandoning my own
so you can turn the wheel,
eyes straight ahead.
The sunroof is open,
music is blaring.
Salsa burns my lips
as I watch yours.

First gear! you shout
and I don’t know where first gear is but
I grab the stick and shove it
up and over
we slide to a stop at the red light.
My god I say but you say second gear,
straight back and I do it and we go,
we’re gone,
your burrito just a sticky end
I cradle into your palm.
When you say chip
I dip one in guacamole
and place it between your fingers;
I will always be here for you.

Fall

The final day of August drooped over pastures, ditches, dry corn,

slats of old tree forts,

fields heavy with cicada song.

Noon still shimmered,

moonrise quaked,

stars telegraphed the dark.

The final day of August burned like lightning.

Two friends, drunk on mistakes,

made love in a narrow bed.

In the morning, September shuddered at the cold.

-

Purity of experience:

We’ll never get to the moon but

maybe

black coffee

straight gin

5 am

barefoot in the rain.

Plight of the Troubador's Friend

(for Billy Collins)

Your friend the troubadour
goes each evening to stand under some other woman’s window
You proofread his poems
and lay a sisterly hand on his head
when he returns each evening lovesick and disappointed.
He reads you his sonnets, asking
“Will they work?”
You do not tell him that they already have
and wonder what would happen
if he glanced up from his lute and into your eyes
or read through the poems that you pen late at night.
But you have long since decided
that you would rather hear him practice his songs on you
than never hear his voice at all.

Snuffy's

In the fall of 2003
I ate at the malt shop in St. Paul
Just a weekend in the city
Just passing through, was all

I didn’t know that down the street
You lived in a house where I would stay.
It would be a year before we’d meet,
But you were there, a few blocks away.

The arms that would someday hold me tight
Were dangling loose and still
We’d never had a laugh or fight
Or tumbled down a hill.

We tread pathways barely held apart
but they might never have ever crossed,
And you might never have held my heart
Never gained and never lost.

Without knowing we had a year to go,
So unaware, fall of 2003.
How strange I didn’t think to know
To miss you, when you had never heard of me.

Coffee

Clacking domino toes

seismograph feet

unfocused fluorescent eyes

fluttering sweaty lungs.

easy, this is easy—

fingertips swirl on a

styrofoam cup

click tap twitch,

rush of red blood cells

shout cacophonous

into pupils, knee joints,

chickadee neck.

easy, this is easy—

ah, caffeine.

Bright Knight

Orion swung in low on his eastern couch,
raised one fist against the deepening sky,
and dangled an invisible shield against his legs,
stretched in a stilled sprint.
“Come outside” he murmured, arriving earlier each night
as autumn bent itself into cold November.

Three bright points arranged around his gunslinger’s waist:
A clarion call for inexperienced lovers
looking to impress.
One holstered on each firm hip, the third, he admitted,
not exactly aiming for the navel,
but the darker universe within.

“Come outside” he urged, “or at least then let me in”
For him each night seemed the same age as the last,
withering leaves hidden by arrogant darkness,
winter passing in a single brassy stride.
How inviting to be so serenely young.

His casual fingers prodded at window panes,
brilliance probing past sunsets, curtains, eyelids. He beckoned.
A warrior waiting to advance against reluctance
–widening eyes, a gasp of escaping breath—
and blaze briefly in the shadows.

“For you I’ll give up Scorpio, and this bright view of midnight,” he called,
“If only you’ll let me in. For you I swallowed the moon,
I came to rest for you and brought the solstice.”

And yet he waved his club above his head,
lying through gleaming Grecian teeth.
Come spring he’d still be lying,
immortal beneath the horizon, vanished from sight.

So I did not
unlock
my window.

haiku 1

I misquote Shakespeare
Three words, but you understand
and hold me closer.

St. Paul

I am pulling out of this city on a bus,

it is just after dawn,

the clear light cuts in angles the tan sides of buildings.

Somewhere in the jumble you are softly asleep,

your hair lying curled on the pillow

kept dark by still window-shades.

I think of you lying gently curled in a nest of warm blankets,

eyes shut, unaware.

As the bus lumbers around a corner and groans out of the morning city

you turn a little bit, and sigh.

"guard down, socks out"

You sleep
as unselfconscious as you pretend to be when you’re awake,
one knee bent,
one grubby-socked foot sticking out from the small soft blanket
draped over you.
Your hand twitches,
it is long and tan and knobbly-knuckled.

You sleep
more loudly than I write this poem,
the metronome of your breathing steady.
You are unaware, and
undemanding.
Light settles over the angled planes of your face,
soft curls follow suit, tussled on your forehead.

Pines

Two pines side by side

Standing in a hedge of snow.

Thin afternoon sunlight

on the straight sides that have spent every moment

mirroring one another,

measure for measure since sapling days,

a matched set with pavement at their feet.

Unmovable as we fly past,

companions on the grey-spoked winter highway,

two travelers with our knees bent

through curves of ghostly birch and incurious evergreen.

My heart catches for a moment on the symmetry of that

simple pair

so still by the roadside.

As we pass I turn to the seat beside me

And see your eyes on their distant stance

a smile on your lips

as you watch those two pines

in the rearview mirror.

this is just to ask

Did you see the town lying still on the solstice?

The moon was swallowed by silence and

Orion balanced by his belt buckle on the steeple of the church.

Love Song (for Sherlock)

Lightning quick,

you peel back the layers of a mystery.

Your

keen grey eyes–

Your

long clever fingers–

Let me lie here while you smoke your pipe.

Poem for John

Where are you going?

The sidewalks of Saint Paul miss your tread,
worn and torn in grocery stores,
slackjawed in awe,
you will never know a silence of thought.
Caffeine keeps you frantically awake,
howling elbows,
civil-war ribcage and
San Francisco smile.

Where are you going?
Screaming turbulent you can’t decide,
Unsettled quivering legs
Deny definition, then
shrill loneliness comes creeping home
to play the lute below your eyes.

How will you know when you get there?
The ages call you home,
Unkempt in cardboard,
Sticky post-scripts:
You are nothing but your words,
And we are nothing but the songs you sing.

Why I shouldn't study psychology late at night

I know how you sleep
and I recognize you as I read chapter five of this stupid textbook.
As I turn the pages I remember how you shift and settle
before that quick drop-off into unconsciousness.
Stage one used to be a surprise, now I barely startle
at the twitches of your relaxing muscles,
the sudden mumbles as incoherent as this vocabulary.
Stage two is when your steady breathing fills the room,
when you're spun along on spindles, held fast by delta waves.
I've studied you better than my notes, I see you in the words.
Stages three and four--I hadn't known the name of that heavy,
immovable time of night, now you are my mnemonic device.
It is not so safe on the inside as it seems on the outside,
an I wonder what happens in the confines of your brain
as you lie so still.
There is nothing in this text about the things you see while
I am awake and watching you.

Strange that the rhythms of your sleep cycle are as familiar as my own-
frantically I turn to the glossary,
flip through the index,
but there is nothing in this book that explains how I love you,
much less why.

12:30 am, December 11

The one o’clock train is early,

hustling through a midnight town

already covered in salted hoarfrost.

Its expectant whistle drapes over the crunch of steady footsteps on frozen beds of woodchips, grass subtle as statues.

It wavers and is gone.

Beneath the half-moon,

One leaf trips across the pavement,

and dormitories blaze with a

vastly

inferior

light.

This is

This is my shirt

remember when I wore it last, the soft cotton slipping over my skin.

It was not cold that night,

and we had one blanket to share.

This is my shirt

remember when you felt the smooth fabric of its inner side

your hand slipping over my skin.

This is my face, my hair, tangled with uncertainty

And when you asked if this

was the end of the world

I stopped your words with my lips.

This is your mouth

smooth salt I had tried so hard not to kiss,

though we both saw this inevitable advance,

it was in our smiles that night

and we had one blanket to share.

This is my shirt

remember how we paused to wonder, muffle our voices in the dark.

This is the sleeve, the collar, your lips

and oh this is your face slipping over mine.

This is not the end of the world,

but this is how I’d like to spend it.

Storms

The morning after

a rainstorm

like so many other mornings after,

found unspoken.

Opening one eyelid in the thin light:

Lightning-scattered leaves, thunder-tangled branches,

closed furrows of grass still damp from the downpour.

A hesitant awakening into the humid day,

Some small pressure change,

Languid limbs unfolded at dawn,

draped with verdant sleepiness.

And in the air, the quiet uncertainty

that memories of the night before are not

quite

real.

Together

The wear in my knees tells me already

I’m going to die,

though I have only been eternal a handful of times,

and our paths are converging only for the tread of these few years.

Your flickering eyes – the finely veined fallen leaves of autumn –

will see ten thousand sights

before closing in a dusty clamp, a private pocket of ground.

The notched ivory keyboard of your spine,

where once I played with silent fingers

the discordant symphony of cartilage,

will dry and go still,

locked by my brief memory

– the same span as one quivering aorta –

into this muscular moment.

Let us try to forget that we do not have forever…

Find your hat and we’ll take a drive,

enjoying the absent-minded summer air and

brief contact of our floating atoms.

We will forget each other before the end.

Here, now, we will ignore the mossy, irrevocable future

While I, at least, cannot deny the certain quiet comfort of knowing that someday

We’ll be lying in the same earth.