Forgetting

In a divine sort of sinking
I devote myself to time
Let the hours collect
on my hands, my face,
my wrists.
let it pull apart
the weaving I have done
unknit itself into fractures
like the splintered remnants
of a dream.

I am forgetting things.
Lost in some other
flow of birth patterns,
the rippling spells
of the universe.

I lose my way,
my direction,
myself–
often ending up on
street corners and
in buildings
not knowing how I got there.

I try to explain this
(an apology)
when I lose my way
taking us forty-five minutes
in the wrong direction
speeding down the 295
my mind caught up on pine trees,
on pictures,
on altocumulus, cirrus, stratus. 

I offer that perhaps I am negligent,
unattentive?

I don’t say there is
this sensation
like a knot in me
that I am being pulled into
a different world
and only slightly
a part of this one. 

dreams

my mind
is a collection
of inverses.
the harder i push away,
the more comes back. 

it seeps through the
plaster-cracked ceilings
of my absent mind,
the greyscale playback
of my subconscious.
warped and blurred
by faulty memory,
it always makes things
softer
than they were. 

last night, i dreamed you–
and how hardhearted are the senses,
that steal too-true feelings
of touch and sound,
feeding them back to us
one miserly bit at a time.
the shshshing of your whispers
had me believing. 

i find you in the strangest places.
unpacking boxes,
humming 
lifting a shirt to my nose
half-expecting your scent to
linger on it still.
i caught myself doing it,
and laughed. 

i dream of her, too.
always good ones.
hers arms are always
soft,
and her hair
is always sweet.
she is kind even here.

and then there’s the ones
that trickle through
the windows i have closed,
the doors i
have locked,
the quiet in me i have
grown.

she comes in swinging.
the colors are too bright,
the noise is too loud.
addictive. 

even dream-me thinks, again?

 

Scars

I have the kind of body
that does not heal itself
quite all the way. 

take my knee–
right one—
the circled splotch
that turns purple and
shrivelly in the cold,
like a rainy moon.
a bike collision.
I was eight.

They reveal themselves to me
strangely.
in the shower,
the water pouring down
works like magic ink–
unclothing my skin to
show the bruised tissue
lying there.

red islands in the center
of my palm–
leavings from
a summer I spent
harvesting garlic.
a precise incision
on my chin, burnt white;
a curved reed with
taut edges
in between my thumb
and forefinger. 

If I clench my fist,
this one turns
into a tiny frowning face.

Is it perverse to feel
so proud of them,
my skin-collections,
the residue of bruises, failings,
falls,
my inaccuracies?
I like to think of them
as things I’ve been through
that now belong to me.

a notch on my knuckle,
a tiny needle
along the crease of my palm,
a moon-sliver
behind my eyebrow.
these webbed lines
strewn over my skin
draw my history together
like a map, or a script. 

I’m trying to be transparent. 

sitting on the sink,
I study them carefully;
this is an act that assures me
the past is still there,
unfolding behind me
like layered carpet. 

I try and explain this
to my friend
while lying on her bed,
studying a light blue stain
forming on the top
of my hand.
she looks at me with
questions in her eyes;
strums her guitar,
shakes her head with her lips
turned down.
I put my hand away.

I think I have a prepossession
with answers.
to me, my body
these imprints
do not feel insignificant.

 

the mourning dove still sings!

Red light seals the sun
lifting from the water
like a dog raising its head.
It burns away the ash
that drifts over the marsh at night
sends clouds
wisping towards
the top of the sky,
or nowhere,
I guess.

It burns and burns and burns.

In the grasses that
stir below the window,
little birds feel what sunlight is
and I think
they are happy.
There are many reasons
to sing, though–
new light may be one of them,
death of nighttime
could be
another.

I read somewhere that
the birds have stopped singing.
Or, the birds have stopped
altogether.
We did that
with our cars.
And our refrigerators.
Climate change. 

I thought I noticed it, too.
The sound of morning didn’t
percolate with trills
and twitters and snaps
anymore.
It was the sound of
a stoplight turning green;
that is to say
nothing.

But standing by the window
the little clouds raising
and the marsh
gleaming like pennies,
the sun pulling the red dirt of morning
and shaking its roots out
over everything,
I can hear a mourning dove
sigh something
like relief. 

seedlings

I could tell you
about the life I’m going to have.
Or the life I imagine
I’m going to have.

I could tell you about
books, and sweet grass,
and warm stoves, and a laugh
growing inside me.
I could tell you about reading in
the dark,
my eyes sore,
stretching, yawning,
falling asleep with
my glasses on the table.

I could tell you about looking out
train windows,
and feelings of loneliness,
and the still pale empty walls of
art museums
that make me cry.

I could tell you about the life I’m
going to have,
but sometimes telling
is too much.

I have all these little futures
growing inside me like seeds
I try to care for them,
to sing to them and water them
(just enough to soak the soil,
like you taught me)
but I am afraid
of what they might grow into.

Sometimes I think it is better
to let them die.
To dry them in the window
and watch their fibres
stiffen, yellow,
crack along the veins.

Other times, I am so full
of growth and green things
stretching tall towards the sun of me
leaves brushing, clustering,
budding,
flowering;
I can barely breathe.

I could tell you about the
life I’m going to have
but that would take
three seasons worth–
maybe more.
They’re changing all the time.

 

 

to unknot

In the noon time call
of hands that stretch and pucker
and ring
time from me like rags
I find my fingers shaking
and the hair
from my head, straying like
fractals of light
split in the water, and glinting.

I can hide in
the sway
laugh until
my sides knit up, like-so;
but in the night
when my room
is dark
and breathing
the minnow of my heart
wrests strings from
my chest
my eyes have stripped
wide open.

 

adeline

In between the
laundry line
where the clothes hang
soaked in the sun
and the dark green shade
from the stooping trees behind–
I lay in bare feet
with the sun painting oils
on my back,
eyes closed, but squinting,
red beads
making mirages.
I fold my hands across my chest.

here I am stolen
 my mind makes roots
that sprawl and suck the
sugars from the soil
every sight and sound
like a stone in my pocket
for the thickened water above
i am filled, yet filling

the birds are calling
heaven to each other from
 across the trees, and the rushing road
 beyond the fence
surges and silences
it collects

I collect, all these fragments
and pour them into
myself
and when i give
it shall release

I am the heart softening 

night, collections

in the evenings there is
an opening
         a white magnolia
striking a match against
descending blue,
fragrance mixing in the air
with summer grasses, charcoal fires,
the tense friction of thunder
rubbing soot into the sky and
the scent of rain
into still humidity.

the house is rose
legs smooth from the flint of the sun.
dishes clatter, and murmuring
ice cubes tinkling
applause to the songbirds
whose calls
perfume
the dusk rising
and the peepers pouring
poems from their breasts,
this night time breathing.

with the dogs
pooled limbs on the sofa–
boy’s eyelids droop
sapped from sun and
careless invention.
plucked from the loving tangle
made clean with soap and lavender
at last
tucked into bed,
the covers warmed with
yellow lamplight.

dewy sleepiness
thick
on the eyelashes,
a smooth voice
turns book pages into
a silky substance
making dim the rain
that has
begun
to
patter

the creak of the box fan
whirring slowly in its cage
counts one,
a lilt
the gentle fingers of dreams
nudge,
two,
a pouring sleep drifts
up and over;
a troubled sigh drifts from small lips,
resistance, giving
three.

tidal

The moon
sheds its skin
across the sand
a cold and quiet place

A wind gnaws
along the jawbone
of the
coast
and the horizon
is a clouded
empty
white

Footsteps taken
now sink into the
darkened blue
the swollen silence
lusting after little pinpricks
of light
filtering through the
sodden sieve

A life
looms there
in the green
sonorous weeds
wailing softly in
the undercurrent,
the suspension
of
song

A world unkempt
dwelling beneath
the patterned
winds

To drift up and
gasp the naked sky
is to stand in the salt and
let the sun bead weak gray
into your eyes

adrift
on the whispering spoon
of the earth.

art of living

this is the art of living:
to take something strangled
and make it beautiful.
Every day I take the
leaves off trees
curl them in my fingertips
put it in my mouth
and suck until the taste
of the earth runs rich on my tongue.
A papery supplement.
I smell the rim of the collar
that holds the
secret scent of a person
when I hug them.
I watch the way people look
at each other when speaking,
the thoughts that flicker
in their eyes
droplets of water disturbed

I buy my books used
to glean the personality
behind the pen marks
scratches of thought
purled into the margins

Is this what it’s like?

By myself
I try words like incantations
into the whisper of nobody’s listening–
elide
elude
efface

I give myself instructions
but watch myself stray from them
like a child commanding a butterfly
to stay
watching it flit into the places where the
light takes its wings, transforms them.
When a hand touches
mine
I am startled
to have been placed back
into the world
and I think to myself
is this what it’s like?

A hundred years from
now
when the things I am afraid of
have all passed
and all that locks
me to
the earth
is the pooling light
of age
will I still be wondering

Is this what it’s like?