Oct/Nov 2012

I was reading poems outside the bar like a misanthrope
trying to look interesting. I was choking on a black
shard of desire too sharp for the sword swallowers.

Wasn't I precoscious and dangerous, once?
I remember thinking: if I continue being this 
charming they’re going to have to kill me
in my sleep if they want to kill me because
otherwise I’ll just talk my way out of it.  

My cigarette mouth must get so tiring.

Throw me from your bed and make me shut up.
Send me out in fresh dew, up all night, into streets
lined with slickbacked cars dreaming. It is 6am,
7am. The first time or the fifth. Who’s counting?

We do it to ourselves, anyhow. And sometimes
it hurts, of course, but I'll dab away the blood
from a million split lips before anyone tells me
it's not beautiful anymore. Anything that persists
in this world is beautiful, and you, darling, above all else.

Revision

Let’s try it again. This time
I won’t be laying stoned in your bed
while you’re putting on your makeup and your dress.

Maybe instead I could put on
your makeup and your dress and we
could kiss and take a picture like running
fingers over the inside surface of our passions.

We could try again on a bridge with a whole
mess of stars, too many to keep
out of our hair.

I’ll fish the shoebox of broken glass out from
under your bed. We’ll build a room to live in
and this time the closet can stay but forget
the handgun at the bottom of the gift bag.

We’ll try it again in a city
with no sharp edges or exits.

There will be balconies and photograph albums.
In every picture we’ll be toasting and our smiles
will look like two champagne glasses clinking together.

I’ll figure out a way
to keep those glasses from running dry if you can stop
bursting them against the walls whenever you get angry.

We can overlook that ugly moment when
I tried to break some boy’s teeth at a party
because I thought he was sleeping with you

and turn it into a magic act
where every shattered thing
gets transfigured into a bird
and nobody gets hurt.

Let’s start over
but this time when we meet eyes
through a crowd I’ll walk away.

We can find our own
street corners to occupy while we pray
for busses to come hit us and when
they don’t come I’ll get lost
and marry whoever finds me.

Her and I will move
to the city. I’ll quit
smoking and drink less.

You’ll be somewhere else
for a little while, getting happier

every day until one particular thursday
when I find you at the corner grocer
picking out flowers, running fingers
over the inside surface of their petals.

I’ll say, “It’s strange peonies
never seem to be in season here”
and you won't say anything,
just pick up some lilies
and smile at me while you
walk out into the crowded afternoon.

~1

Some nights you just want to smoke

and think about all the exceptional kissers you've known. 

Epitaph for Children I Don't Have

My children drowned:

a boy and a girl

not even born but that couldn’t stop it.

The cold lake was a place I had been.
I was returning. The white veils fixed
over their two faces, fogged breath
on a mirror that couldn’t help but
give back the world. My bare

feet on the broken bank beside
several small shells
that were all tokens
of special varieties of grief.

My drowned children: I have lost
            you, familiar as the water returning
            in brackish conversation between
            tributary and tide, I have lost you

not once but twice.
To the deep, then to the morning
when you never were.

You had a mother. When I pulled you
from the water of myself onto the shore
of myself, my breath frosted the mirrors
of your faces and they could not help

but return two images: hers and my own.

You had a mother, but perhaps
no progenitor more real than
the guilt that pushed
your small bones out
of my pores like sweat.

If I had spoken to her
of you, she would not have known
the names that together we gave you.

The news of your deaths
would have broken upon her as an empty wave.

This world a repository for small
sadnesses, cast earthward.
This world that turns up
empty palms in recompense
for all we have interred,
a gesture feeling of forgiveness
until the very moment
it does not.

Drowned children
the news of your two deaths
first in water, then in morning
might have appeared to her as
gift or blessing: the prophecy

of a future wound from which
to carry the relief of never having.

But a morning arrives full

of empty beds and bedrooms like palms

upturned to demonstrate how little they hold

and a night comes when you return

to the water and find it filled with your

children. Children who you pull from
the lake until the lake runs dry and you
are standing alone in its chalk center.

Above,
there is the moon and she wears

her white veil and drowns in the sky.

Below,
the dry banks replete with the bodies
of things you never had to lose.

There will be nothing else.  

Untitled, Sept 25, 2012.

i.

Look at these two circles,
one inscribed inside the other.

This first circle is your life.
The second circle is also your life.

I don’t know why there are two
circles instead of one:

maybe one is the measure of your heart
and the other the measure of your body.

maybe instead it’s like breathing:
this is you living with lungs full
this is you deflated

you in 2011 exaltant
you in 2012 disappointed.

ii.

Call your family with love:
you could have died on the interstate
twice in the past two months, if we’re being charitable.

you have articulated the limits of your body
and extrapolated from them the infinity
of your heart.

You may choose a circle and erase it.

Consider this bird

i.

I will tap on the hollow of your cheek:

--‘don’t you suffer, sometimes?

--’come to bed, won’t you?’

it’s hard to say if I feel one way or another about it.

these people
are something though, aren’t they?

the sky suddenly turning up gray
but always with houses to undress in, to dry off.

when we talk, no matter what, it’s as if
we talk about birds.

ii.

no sleep handshakes give us away.
practically gleaming at sunsoaked passersby
practically falling asleep in motion, sharklike--

look at you, yawning, hand over mouth

at us in delirium resplendent

iii.

there is a bird alight on slender branch, precarious.
this bird recognizes its own weight and feels the wind.

sometimes you are the bird and sometimes I am.
sometimes only the sound of flapping wings
and all the papers blow off your desk onto the floor.

sometimes we are all the bird, and I think this
might be best.

iv.

there is a rainstorm, so why am I still reading to you?
there is a robbery, and I’m still handing out money
I don’t have.

consider a life spent in between cities  
in gas station parking lots with nothing
but steam and grackles rising off of the asphalt

consider a life spent with the coin
always landing heads up--wonderful
til it’s terrible, but god aren’t we lucky?

v.

when the bird sees you naked it recognizes you,
when I see you naked I kiss the length of your
spine.

vi.

now, close your eyes.
I will trace shapes across the surface
of a bowl of water:

tell me what you’re seeing


vii.

--what if we had ended up killing that baby bird
we took up onto the porch?

--we did the right thing. it was raining so
hard that night.

viii.

don't you feel gorgeous when you’re
this tired?

consider the bird riding the updraft
over the sea: how many miles she
has travelled, how many more
to the ocean’s bottom.


what of longevity, then?
these bodies in bed, warm together
and kept from death so far.

isn’t it enough?

Want

I.

of course nobody believes what you’re saying when you’re saying I don’t
want anything. of course there’s nothing more exasperating than honesty.
if you lay your heart out on the table it looks just like any other object
in a still life, except worse because you didn’t choose it, this heart, so the
interpreters have nothing to work with and leave the building disappointed.

II.

maybe I just wanted more from you than can’t we stand outside for a second?  
or this is our last blue moon until we’re 25, so shouldn’t it seem bluer? I’ll admit
to being one of those interpreters; to clearing out the furniture and rooting across
the hardwood floors for anything I can work with. but be honest: show me again
how little vacant space exists inside your body and then tell me you know exactly
how to fill it up. tell me there’s always been enough blood running through your
heart. I might not believe you, but at least I’ll try to keep my hands to myself.

III.

these long showers, itemized lists of my component parts, things I understand.
this was our stop. this was where we got off and maybe I just wanted more than
you’re sweet or I love you and I can’t have anything to do with you. a little more
than a peck on the cheek as I passed out the door but I never took it too hard.
I was 21 years old and when you’re 21 stopping never means you’re done
getting off. not before the day someone says I don’t want anything and moves
their body down the street, not til the first one follows through, you can’t believe it.

IV.
so I could never imagine a tautegorical heart or help enjoying a set of fingers
collaborating to piece me together. so I itch for a surface complementary to
that of my skin. you are walking into the room and you are demonstrating your  
self-sufficiency and I am envious, wanting to feel like that, with so little empty
space inside: a hermetic seal over the back of your throat, the ability to kiss
without letting someone else’s words creep into your mouth. a knot so dense
it becomes a thing or a thing so whole it becomes real: of course I wanted that,
but instead I just kept saying I want you--I want you--I want everything until
the lights turned out and nobody knew what to say because there’s nothing
to work with there. because once you go into a building alone it only has
an exit, because you can see our stop from here. I will do my best not to be
disappointed when you decide it’s best not to see what comes after that.