Four Poems on Learning to Exist

1: Loss

I am the drop of wine that misses your lips
on its way to the hardwood floor.

I am a drop of wine
I am in the process of missing your lips
until I hit the hardwood floor
and then the act of missing is done.

2: Solitude

I am a breath held in the lungs until they start to sear
and the room swims. I am the swimming room.

No one’s around and no one’s talking.

Some books are on the floor and fan is on the ceiling.

The fan’s not moving.

The room is quiet.

If the room is quiet it may as well

be for swimming. So I swim.

3: Sociability


I am one of so many things that can only maintain
the impression of being alive through constant motion.

A shark, an automobile, a comet.

I pace the sidewalk, the party, the after party,
across the rolling meadow down the road to your apartment
where sometimes I knock and ask to be asked inside
but mostly just brace myself in the doorframe

until I run out of breath and need to leave

I am approaching rapidly.
I am immediately receding.
I am not trying to hurt anyone.
For once this includes myself.

4. Intimacy

I am the set of teeth that clasps a quivering lower lip
I am the still, quiet room where hearts can be heard beating

Each of these things will maintain for a given duration
When they stop, I will parse through the soundwaves.
I will be unable to discern the attack from the decay.

Five Variations on Being an Asshole

i.

young hearts of my young friends are bursting now

winter pipes if pipes ever burst in winter around here

i’m feeling a little between the lines but it’s better
because it’s not about me anymore, thank god
but then i go ahead and make it about me anyway (asshole)

ii.
i read a poem that turns me on

go outside and smoke a cigarette

try not to make any phone calls (asshole)

iii.

i used to make phone calls all the time

they went like this:

when was the last time you slept well?

when was the last time you slept with someone who loved you?

with someone who didn’t? did you love him?

was he a better fuck than me?

I don’t believe it (asshole)

iv.
it’s really amazing how long it takes people who love me
to quit doing that
and even after they quit loving me how much longer
to learn to hang up the damn phone.

I’m at least trying to keep my nose out of that mess now

feeling more and more between the lines but it’s better

because it doesn’t really hurt anymore

I’m having trouble writing now, though
(what a way to think, asshole)

v.
when was i quitting cigarettes or learning lessons anyway?
here are some lessons I’ve been wanting to learn:

‘how to exist as an atom or less and not worry’

‘how to love ceaselessly without getting your guts everywhere”

‘how to swallow hard and take a shower when you think 'suicide'

because it’s better than drowning.”

it is better than drowning,

--more and more these days, I swear.

(someday you won’t be an asshole, asshole)

someday you’ll be a field of flowers.

~8

i read a poem that turns me on
go outside to smoke a few
try not to make any phone calls

when was i quitting cigarettes or learning lessons?

‘how to exist as an atom or less and not worry.’  

‘how to swallow hard in the shower when it’s better than drowning.’

it is better than drowning

--more and more these days,

I swear

it is a field of flowers.  

~7

young hearts of my young friends are bursting now

winter pipes if pipes ever burst in winter around here

i’m feeling a little between the lines but it’s better
because it’s not about me anymore, thank god
but then i go ahead and make it about me anyway

(asshole)

~6

And maybe I could move to Chicago and get famous writing dirty poems about you.

On the Passing of Jack Gilbert

I think that you would have loved us, Jack.
Maybe her especially.
It’s just a feeling I get.
There was a time two Februaries ago
when you were still alive
and the two of us had broken hearts. 

We read a few of your poems
aloud and it seemed like you knew
a lot about that. Much more than
we did. The Great Fires--Christ
you seemed so hurt and so were
we. But you hung on to love.
An intelligent, forceful, honest
love. Your favorite word was
still ‘heart.’ It made love seem
so promising and resilient that
we bit our bloodied lips and
dove into it, in spite of everything.

Thanks for that, Jack.

Since then, I’ve done some things
that might have disappointed you. Still,
I think you would have liked me
through it all even if you took her
side when there were sides to take.
She moved to Los Angeles a few
months ago, but the night that you died
she called me crying like she had lost a father.

You would’ve loved her, Jack
and she’s going to miss you.

I’m going to miss you, too.

~5

America I am restless What are you doing tonight?
Fuck the Internet and Cellular Phones Drop by
with some gin and a woman who will break my
nose Wipe the blood away with your monographed
handkerchief Send us both to bed for misbehaving

~4

I am a new and fresh creature
some broken shards of a clay pot
you can see the earth through my cracks
my roots gorged with water

it is nearly winter
and I welcome the last mosquito to my arm
let it drink of my blood for its perseverance

Election Day: Nov 6th, 2012

If I can fall in love with a boy passing westward
on 7th while I move east
If I can make a long distance phone call during my lunchbreak
to a friend who is sobbing on the T
and If I can smoke on a terrace while the bars are letting out
and the streetlights shine on the 100 people searching
for their cars Then don’t you still exist as we imagined you America?

The newscasters speak as if you were both halfs
of the iron maiden as well as the body closed inside
But I will spit at the feet of nostalgia You
still look young and sexy to me America

Full of potential

Too cool for the crowd you hang out with

I may be humanities educated but
I admit you are the body and I am
          just a fleck of your hot blood

If I want to kiss the girl through the mics of WYSO
as she announces election results in Yellow Springs, Ohio
If I walk to corner store for smokes in San Antonio, TX 
where the kid with trackmarks not much older than I am says
I’m having a hard time
says, 
can you spare...
and it’s the face of a former president on a piece
of metal whose smell rubs off on my fingers
that he wants but I only use those to pay
for laundry so I don’t have anything
to give him and I start crying
Doesn’t that mean the chambers of our hearts
are still conjoined America?
Doesn't that mean you still exist just
how we imagined you?

~3

A guy with a mustache
shot God at the theater premier last night.
We’d given him box seats for his birthday
after working on that play for what felt like our whole lives.

~2

The old poets write with their postures--
pressed by precedent into a daunting
straightness of line.

These poets and those who laud them
they say we write with the shaky hands of children
when really we write with the trembling hands of lovers.

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?