Once, I met a girl through a friend who put her hand on my leg at the bar underneath the booth we sat in and it both startled me and flattered me. When she offered to drive with me to the next place, I thought of you and wisely declined. You know this already. What you don’t know is that I wanted her, but not in the way people ordinarily want people. Not for sex, nor because I was curious whether her lips kissed differently than the lips of others [although, if I’m being frank, there may have been some of that too (after all, I thought of these things as I sat down to write this so of course I must have wanted it, whether then or now)]. The thing was that she was small. Small, yes, but not (perhaps never, but I didn’t know her long enough to get to know) girlish, and it made me think how awful, how very awful it must be to never get the chance to sit in someone’s lap as an adult and feel beautiful. Never young, never coddled. Kept. Held, but without condescension or paternalistic pretense or even intimacy (at least as it is commonly understood). Instead, a more casual comfort: a place secure but not a hiding place, a time where you can be touched but still ultimately remain yourself.  So, I wanted her but only (or, fine, no not only but yes mostly) for that image I held in my mind of her sitting in my lap at a party under the ceiling fan light in someone’s den. We were so young into things then, do you remember? And though I loved you on that night when her hand fell upon my leg there were certain moments when I felt the cautionary catch in my throat that forecasts an impending mistake. But I did not make that mistake. And it was because I loved you and also (but, God, not mostly) because you and I are the same size. You have decorated my lap in the ceiling fan light of living rooms and on other occasions I have decorated yours. And I use this word with purpose because (how I should have told you before now) I felt beautiful there.

There was a time during the fall of that year when we would sit and smoke marijuana and read poems to one another out loud on the porch. I’ll admit now that I never understood them. The rapidity with which they gestured at meaning, their texture somehow reminding me of those plants which spend their whole lives underwater. They puzzled me. Now, I don’t even remember which ones we read. I wish to promise you, though, that it wasn’t for the warm haze of those evenings or the drugs that my mind wandered so. Rather, it was the way you controlled your breath as you read. In that motion were all the notes and words that ever passed through your throat. I remember that, and for me, from those evenings, that is enough to remember.

Dated

We meet on the river bridge
where we only ever walked together
once, and I mention to you that
lately I've been thinking about
the night we shared with
the cigarettes an the food
trailers out behind the bar
when I had been gone
for a while but was back
in town to teach and you
had just gone on your
first date since we split up.

And when we talk about it
It's funny that you treat it
like history while I treat it
like the reason I am standing
next to you on that bridge at all.

With Heart

When the novelist decides to try her hand at poetry
it is more about articulating her sensitive side, less
about any value she might perceive in the form.

She's been waking up earlier and earlier.
It never seems to matter how much she drinks
the night before. The birds and the kids that exist
only for the sunlight shout down the outside streets,
cloy her, drive her from her bed.

She rises to make coffee,
to put on her mother's pearls and stand
before the mirror a while. To write
letters back to her publisher
as long as the books
that she won't send
where she repeats

that perhaps her anxieties
would fill volumes
but her heart is
not even one hundred
pages long.

It is four or five words,
simple as the materials
that compose it,
small enough to be engraved
on a coin and flipped.

Hate Letter to Spring Semester

Growing up, my father

pinned his best wisdom

to my heart—to never

work inside the offices

that had nearly killed

him

at dinner

you played audience

to that same advice

your eyes seeming 

so much wider after

but how our hands grew slack

enough to drop the hands

they carried

how we took off with

the lesson while leaving

behind the sentiment

I feel we have been

courting supplication.

An unbecoming thing,

not a game we knew

driving to music

with my hands

making a home

in you hair

or on our birthdays

when we were busy

renouncing the advancing world

for the strange honesty of one another

Love Letter to Spring Semester

We were once stubborn together

in palelight mornings waking

with hands clasped

I wanting always the windows

down to smoke, you dreaming

the future as every object

spoke history to me

with shoes off in the coffee houses

with hair down at the bars

with your drink raised to mine

in astonishment

over the inch of static

between lips held close

and the miracle of a pulse

found in body across the bed.

We were not to fall asleep

during our best dreams;

always with hearts kept

crossed, but fingers never.

Behind your back slept

only flowers.

Bath

When you would become the mirror

a shine collected in hazel iris

a shine collector you took

what long ago I threw

thrown back

the leaden weights affixed to swimmer's feet

bite your lip before you turn and walk

tell me what you feel in sunlight

now in dark

How the brine will

buoy a body

while insects in rattling oaks

sang summer months, we were together

practicing the deadman's float in your

parent's pool

and if you had read to me in the tub

maybe it would have all appeared

like an image seen in fever

But for how that water was only

built for one.