Elegy on Sleep

December 17, 2012

Elegy on Sleep

night falls

we are still awake

in bleary gray in the dark

illuminated only by halogen lamps and sleepless

delusions the small possibilities of the past seem almost

to materialize in our hands slippery soft as candle wax

or starlight we handle them with such delicacy

as we might an impossible task and still

they melt through our fingers why

do we do this to our bodies?  

eyes heavy and caffeine-rimmed filled

with the red of memory and distance the thrall

of self-indulgent melancholy we cannot

remember the nights once studded and bright

with magic or starshine dulled and frozen

                                                          the mind slips

dreams sharp and black as scrawled ink

curling bits of volcanic stone clawing

at the soft tissue of the brain but don’t

retrace spiked cavernous thoughts don’t

let yourself why do we

do this to our bodies?

night leaves me at the feet of a dim

white dawn dissatisfied

December, shyly

December 9, 2012

December, shyly

The evening clouds,

gray and heavy-hanging, begin,

slowly, to shiver down

in white, disparate pieces:

sleepy; star-tangled.

The sky drifts down towards earth,

dry as dust, dry as bones,

but time drifts across the ground,

through the empty, wind-limbed streets

of the city, settling.

The shadow of our night bus merges

and emerges, steadily passing through

the faint yellow pools of light

held, suspended, by the streetlamps. 

Somewhere in the distance, the bus driver

chats strangely with no one in particular. 

The light snow whispers to itself as it falls.

The blackbirds call to one another,

if only to hear their own voices shudder
through the quiet air.

Caterpillar

October 15, 2012

Caterpillar

Caterpillar, you are full of thought:

as every day you crawl across the leaves,

you traverse the pages of the world

and notice everything.  I find you pacing,

tracing lines across the supple skin

of apple blossoms in the delicate spring,

with each slow step remembering their design.

You overlook no detail, miss no trait:

no beautiful thing ever escapes your gaze.

Then at the end, you shed your final skin

to reveal the inevitable chrysalis beneath.

gone, the careful movement of your eyes,

the strange off-rhythm of your tiny steps

as you dissolve into a mess of cells

and then emerge, condemned to chase the sky.

I drag this tired body through the day

with bones that ache and creak, dissatisfied.

an ancient winged thing I have become,

so blind, so distant from the lovely earth.

Birdsong

September 30, 2012

Birdsong

I open my window to let in the morning.

Beyond the sill, the birds bring on daylight, their wings

shining in the sunrise. Sparrows here, sparrows there,

flying in flocks with such mathematical grace, such

lovely arithmetic: tessellating in mid-

air, geometric shapes.Their pitched sounds follow them,

too musical to be language, too deliberate

to be song. What instinct could be so intricate?

One small winged thing lands delicately in front

of me, tilts its head, and chirps. Surprised, I reply,

but my concave mouth is shaped wrong, and the air ca-

tches on my teeth. I blink. The sparrow calls again.

My voice searches for sounds as sweet, but suddenly

I am tone-deaf against such perfect pitch. I try

to mimic in english, then spanish, maybe some

mandarin, but I can’t seem to get the notes right,

throat too complex to sing as purely as pan pipes,

too old to learn these melodic oscillations.

Little bird, little bird, perched on my window: as

you twitter and trill, what riddles do you tell, with

your ambisyllabic sonorants? What sonnets

do you spout, with their jumps, leaps, and resolutions?

Brown bird, you take off and familiarity

dissolves like a fog clearing; each wingbeat reveals

a glittering, alien scene,

                                        a strange new sun

rising on a foreign country, a foreign world.

October

September 16, 2012

October

Day

breaks, and suddenly

the sky erupts in blue, as if

it’s the first sky, as if

the earth died and was reborn

in its sleep.

I breathe in the dry, volcanic blue

and its embers ignite my lungs,

blazing through my bones, and my body

aches to feel the wind through its fingers,

the sunlight coursing through its veins.

My feet slap the hard ground, my

limbs stretch and lengthen,

muscles burning with this

young fire as I

run and run and run

and remember the world:

raw and new and alive.

Distance

September 11, 2012

distance

Consider

the space between the gull

and the sea, its separate levels:

here the disparate mist,

still cold and white despite

the sun’s heat, a chilly rainbow or two;

here nothing but air and particles

of dust, floating in the currents; and here

other seabirds, swooping and calling

in scattered swarms,

and the one gull,

apart, eyeing the horizon

or the sand, until,

diving downward, crossing through

air and dust and sunlight and water,

it makes the tiniest of splashes

as the open beak touches the waves,

and emerges, and soars back up.

I consider

the golden-red stain of this October, and how

the leaves in free-fall drift along rivers,

tracing the miles between here

and there, as I, with hands

and feet, slowly pantomime

whatever I’m asked to

without you.

I long for the kind of moment

when the night sky is streaked with rain,

the stars like ocean spray: a moment when

two strangers walk past each other, and one

decides to smile.

Somniloquy

September 7, 2012

Somniloquy

i.

My head still rests

on your chest, and I think

you’ve fallen into sleep.

I can hear very clearly

each breath you take;

the movement of air

creates a slow, deep resonance

in your lungs and in my ear.

The sound is low and grumbling:

a thunder reluctant to cross the gray

cloudy sky, sad to signal

the impending autumn.

The slight rain, though, is cool against

late summer’s heat – quick

and cold, its song

awakens the skin, and I can

feel

       each

               drop.

ii.

A murmur escapes your lips.

it’s just a whisper, but suddenly

I am filled with a longing to know

what you’re saying, what secrets

or lists you’re reciting from.

I want to understand your idiolect,

write definitions for your personal lexicon,

transcribe the orthographical patterns

of your sleepy speech.  I could map out

the acoustics of every apical consonant,

the irish fricatives and african clicks –

sounds all strung together, or perhaps

clipped short by your teeth.

I want to imitate your fine-print

tonal shifts until I’m tongue-tied.

I want to decipher this rhapsody

of vibrations in the air,

interpret this revue of breath

shaped by your throat and your mouth.

You mumble on for a bit, and then

you’re quiet again, breathing in

and out,

low and deep.

I’m left with a moment of wonder:

a strange and lovely sensation,

like a small glimpse

of pages filled

with someone else’s words.

iii.

The smooth, even cadence

of your heartbeat, at least

seems to say love you,

love you,

love you,

and maybe this is only me hoping,

but I don’t think that’s sleep

talking.

The things you think about on clear winter nights

August 30, 2012

The things you think about on clear winter nights

A comet criss-crosses through a sky

studded with stars that shine

like city windows, like

sparks of electricity. 

Its hyperbolic trajectory traces

arcs through deep space, or maybe

it hurtles around suns

like an airplane around the earth,

like an electron around a nucleus.

You interstellar traveler,

do you ever get homesick?

I know you race on farther than the glimpse

we catch, faster than numbers race through wires,

or an electrical impulse across synapses in the brain.

Pulled on by gravity, or destiny,

blown on by solar winds,

comet:

I wonder,

do you ever long

for your cold nebula home?

If you could, would you ever return?

Or are you like us,

the planets,

the molecules,

wandering forever and yet

trapped by your routines:

your physics, your fate.

March

August 27, 2012

March

Spring steps barefoot through the dark woods,

and a dusting of snow clings to her skirts.

She feels the slender bow on her back, barely

bouncing with each footstep, the frozen ground

firm and steady under her feet.

A bird cries out through the early air.

The winter moon,

the westward moon,

the wayward moon,

full and gleaming in its cold light,

leads Spring between the trees,

the snow glittering like diamonds before her.

She marches on. The sun rises slowly, and the world

is beautiful: white as china, paper thin. The trees stand dark

as ink. The sky is clear and forever blue.

And soon, in a clearing:

Winter, the sleeping bear.

Swiftly, Spring nocks an arrow, draws

back the bow, but pauses. A chill breeze

drifts through, carrying scents of wood smoke

and pine: the memory of a smoldering fire, far away,

the last embers drifting up to burn with the stars.

Spring looks down, taking aim again as Winter

snores softly, shivers in his sleep, and her shoulders rise,

and fall, silent as snow. She shifts her stance, preparing

for the bitter chase. And then Spring looses her arrow

and races away.

9:10 Metro-North to Stamford

July 27, 2012

9:10 Metro-North to Stamford

i hope i have the right train she

did say track 19, didn’t she or maybe

that was just 9:10 no, it was definitely 19, this is

the right train i sit down

in the back car, the first one i come to i

don’t want to miss the train

a man with a blue cotton shirt and a sweaty forehead walks

up to the conductor in the aisle, asks for the bathroom

every other car, the conductor says

we’re leaving in like five minutes, right the man says

no, in like one minute, the conductor says

the man says, that’s okay and walks

off the train my mom tells me this story

of one time she was on a train and i was

a baby and she had to get off to use the bathroom

because the one on board wasn’t big enough

for both of us, only the difference is this man

doesn’t have a baby, and my mom

got back on the train

i slide down a little in the old vinyl seats, their

familiar colors burgundy, navy, dirty beige,

like a faded fourth of july parade, like the ones

i went to as a toddler with my family, when we sat

on the hot brick half-walls near the sidewalk on the corner

of our street and main street and as the parade

passed, my brother and sister and i clutched little

paper bags hoping some of the parading people

would throw us some candy we didn’t care much for

the fire engines or police cars or girl scout floats

or the really loud guns they fired sometimes, right in our

ears, it seemed, but we just wanted some treats

for wearing the right colors and being very good

at mamaronek, a large woman in a dark blouse,

pencil skirt, tiny high heels moves up from a different car,

sees so many seats are full, and slumps with a sigh

on the bench facing backwards, right next

to the doors and i remember the times we used to ride

on the metro, when it wasn’t as busy as this, no tired

late-night commuter ghosts with silent mouths and white wires

stringing from their ears, but when i was a kid in an empty

train, if i ever sat down it was in a backwards seat,

because it was like a rollercoaster, and i never got sick,

just like if we spun our swing at home around and around

and around and then let it go, sitting tight curled up

on the seat, we would ride and ride and ride and ride and never

ever get dizzy

in the seat across from me, a routine man has hung up

his black suit jacket on the luggage rack, making him black, white,

black, from his hair to his shirt to his pants, a sitting barcode

on the red white blue seats in his hand he has a can wrapped

in a paper bag and it makes me stare for just a second because

i didn’t know people actually did that my dad

never did, but he never drinks except two beers with dinner

every night, and sometimes when we were younger he’d let us

taste just the smallest sip of it, and it tasted awful,

but i remember a few times i was very thirsty and i didn’t want

to get my own glass of water and i would want to drink down

all of that awful stuff and maybe

there are just a whole lot of really thirsty people

a few hours ago today i walked through the dark city

streets for the first time in seven years

as the rain soaked the thirsty earth

and all the lights made the wet asphalt glitter like fireworks

i must have been grinning like an idiot even if

my throat was choking up a little, not

because it was really beautiful, but because it might

have been mine if i’d stayed, and now i was just

a stranger there was a man with stringy gray

hair that mopped his head wearing a cardboard sign

saying why life, live 4 beer, and he did a sort of

half-dance as i watched him and walked past, and he said, you

have a good night, smiley

Whispered thoughts and curled fists

June 12, 2010

Whispered thoughts and curled fists

Somewhere in the past, lightning

tears silently at the sky

until a sort of insatiable thunder rings out

and tumbles down.

You heard it.

I saw you, flinching like a jack-in-the-box,

you and your wet

artichoke heart.

Charisma, you spat.

That’s all we have.

You began to throw at my feet

every compromise you ever made,

and crushed them under your toe

until they resembled the residue of that marrow bone

your dog chewed for hours

yesterday on the hardwood floor. 

You imagined any possible

tetrahedral, stained-glass afterthoughts

we might have had,

and threw the biggest rocks you could find

until it was all just a heap of shattered stars

in our heads.

But let’s face it:

we both did.

After all,

we dreamed up such big futures for ourselves,

much too grand for the lives we led,

and for the overwhelming reality

of the way we are.

Way before us,

a thin rain starts to fall.

I needed a good storm.

You and other failed wishes

June 11, 2012

You and other failed wishes

I think I might be starting to see things differently.

Every time I catch a glimpse of you,

my heart does something funny and unpleasant and

it makes me wonder how many bruises it has,

dropping from such a height

into my stomach.

You were never one who could see constellations

in the freckles on someone’s skin, and you

never understood why my spine would crack sometimes

if I breathed in too deeply.

You never knew that I didn’t like

the things we kept in coffins to stay there for long,

or that every time you hid behind your smile I had to fight

myself a little harder.

So many things began to go unspoken

until I had so much trouble distinguishing

the truth from the not-so-true and I

never truly realized that behind your eyes

you never cared about my mental health, anyway. 

You could always keep pushing it

because in all honesty, I never caught on

that I needed someone

with much better intentions and many more words,

someone who could appreciate in the same way I do

the folds in the jeans at my knees,

or the way the trees in my backyard can sometimes catch

the sunlight.

But I blink.

And I see you

seeing me

differently.

You see the way that my voice is a little too loud and

my laugh a little too much and

how every second I have, I feel the need to prove myself.

You’re beginning to recognize

that I never really had a life of the mind after all,

and I’m actually just one of them

with a very convincing disguise.

My eyes are dead and I still smile mostly

because they tell me too, but I could never manage

to watch my words and not much has changed after all, has it.

No, nothing has changed: you’re just beginning

to get that you really did fool yourself in order to cope

with some reality that sometimes still bothers you

even though you don’t let anyone see it. 

I give a fake little scream at

a ghost or a spider and I believe all the while that I’m

wearing my own clothes when I don’t even own

the thoughts that flow through my head. 

I am so disgusting and obvious and shallow and

it’s killing you now that you ever thought that someone like me

could be beautiful

or in any way good for you. 

I have to close my eyes.

I see too much.

I think about how I have to try not to look angry

even though I am nothing of the sort,

and I feel this creeping hurt in my bones

and in my head and still it makes me tear up

to think that these are the only things

we ever accomplished together.

I still scatter the dandelion seeds,

but if my pride will ever let me,

someday

I think I’d like to look back on what became of us

and wonder,

what kind of wish was this?

The Meridian

June 10, 2012

The Meridian

To me, we could be lost at sea, with only the illusion

of land in the distance. The shades of water meaning

nothing to me, I saw only dangerous colors

of unknown depths and darkening clouds. The light

above our sails began to fade away as wave after wave

rose up, close, close beside us; I thought of what a fool

I was, knowing nothing about a storm. But the sky could not fool

my father, who pulled taut the lines as though the clouds were an illusion,

the darkness nothing more than a trick of the mind, and the waves

just the water’s joke. Somehow he understood the meaning

of the seagulls flying above us, knew we had time before the light

disappeared, before the lake put on a foamy dress the color

of midnight, and of stars. My father’s eyes were the same color

as a clear sky in June, and as the sun shone on the water like fool’s

gold, I watched his gaze, navigating our way like a seabird. The last of the sunlight

sparkled on the spray and on the thick, wet ropes, creating illusions

of rainbows. But my father’s corded arms and tough hands knew the meaning

of a hard day’s work, and I knew that no matter how the waves

grew, we would be safe. And sure enough, a buoy rocked and waved

just within sight, a beacon pointing us home, its bright red color

a happy change from the never-ending seascape, a sign meaning

we were close. The dark storm behind our sails, however, would not be outfooled

by the likes of us – the gusts of wind grew strong and fast, sweeping away any illusion

of escape, making the sails billow and snap. As the light

faded into gray, we could just see, on the distant buoy, a seagull had alighted.

Then the storm struck, its heavy rain lashing at us, its wind tossing us about, its waves

crashing into the hull of our sailboat. But once again, the illusion

of the lake did not frighten my father. His face was the strong, solid color

of determination, his jaw set in the effort to evade the inevitable, to fool

fate. I yelled to him through the rain and wind, meaning

to help, if I could. But he looked back at me calmly, and I knew the meaning

of his gaze: the Meridian was my father’s boat, even in light

of this storm’s power. It was his, so he would protect it, no matter the wind or the waves

that faced him. The storm struggled on, but so did he, and soon the harbor was no illusion

to be chased away by a howling gust. I looked back at the water, and perhaps I’m a fool

for thinking so, but it seemed that this was the way my father saw it – its colors

all wild and alive, the meanings of the waves

clear and lovely. Way up through the storm clouds, the sky was the light color

of a gull’s wing; not even a fool could think that this beauty was an illusion.

Garland Girl

June 7, 2012

published in on the cusp's magazine "cycle" Summer 2012

Garland Girl

My sister, she sits on her summer swing, dressed in red,

the wind making her skirts billow, and all the cotton

seeds drift and scatter.  it seems like something more

should be happening, as she clutches a handful

of faded white daisies, flowers from her youth.

she stares off at the coming autumn, as I stare at this photograph

of her.  Years ago, she used to photograph

everything, especially the valerians in their dying reds,

the ancient daisies as they lost what youth

they had.  She’d sit by the foot of the poplars in a cotton

dress, watching summer disappear just like the handful

of dusty petals she held.  She would say, no more

are the days of sun and daisies.  And no more

were her days of sundresses and songs.  The photographs

she’d taken she burned until all that remained was a handful

of ashes and aged coals, the embers left burning red

only in her eyes as she watched the snow come down like cotton

quilts over the earth, like down plucked from goslings in their youth.

She longed for something golden or green, for the youth

of saplings as they stretch up to the sun, needing more and more

every day.  She wanted once again to dance through the cotton

fields as they spread their seeds.  Like a postcard photograph

the poppies would all bloom, gold and violet and red,

and their pollen would cling to her hair and her dress, a handful

of summer fairy dust.  In the long winter nights she had her hands full

of old daisy chains and pressed petals, stripped of youth

by january’s chill.  One by one, she pasted them all onto little red

valentines, her fingers shaking and tired, until she had more

hearts and dead flowers than she could count.  No photograph

could keep them alive, as no enchantment of the sun could keep the cotton

from blowing away in the wind.  While the world was draped in a cold cotton-

white she sat resigned, but in march was she ever a handful!

when the first green appeared in the snow, slowly showing through like a photograph

developing, her body remembered all the wildness and youth

it had lost when the leaves fell and the flowers wilted.  She needed more

of the life she saw growing, digging through snow and earth until her hands bled red.

Growing with the cotton, changing with the seasons of youth,

living and dying as inevitably as a handful of daisies; it’s hard to tell anymore,

but in this photograph, as we sit on her summer swing, our lips are stained red, red, red. 

Adirondack

June 6, 2012

Adirondack

I clamber over rooftops,

perch on lighthouses, to watch

the dawn as it breaks, overlooking

the rocking masts in the harbor,

a few early boats with their sails up and full

of the morning breeze that swells

along the lake’s glassy surface.

I lie in the ferns at night with the does

and fawns, white-tailed and calm

as their felt-furred bodies settle into sleep.

I sing to the birds as they dream,

as I slowly number the trees

and the stars. The breathing

of the forest is hushed

and soft.

I gallop through the ravines,

the glacier-torn canyons,

a hand along the worn-away, pock-marked

granite or sandstone sides. I

touch all the splintered trees, war-wounded

and crutched, where lightning struck or fire
raged or floods ravaged.

I chat up the waitresses in cafés

and bagel shops, sitting out on the patio

at a black metal table, talking about the weather or

how lovely the water looks today. At the bar, I lean
against the solid, polished oak, tracing

its knots with my nails as the bartender

and I stay late, discussing the meanings of things,

and the sun drowns its sorrows in the dark lake

behind us.

I walk along village streets, gazing into

cheery little shop windows, all bright and lit

with color. I’m counting the thousands

of cracks in the concrete, visiting the soup

kitchens with their old and cobbled stone,

pounding the stakes of foreclosure signs

into the soft earth.

This place,

I become its wildlife: its predators

and its prey, padding over entangled roots, drinking

from cold streams, diving down

the waterfalls. I cry from its canopied leaves

for more, more, more, because

nothing I have is ever, ever enough. 

t h e d e a d o f w i n t e r

June 1, 2012

t h e d e a d o f w i n t e r

i.

Hope is beautiful.

It hangs in the air
above our heads,
spinning, shining
like sunlight, or
a piece of crystal,
dancing in its
aurora borealis,
shape-shifter way,
never quite holding
still for long enough
to make sure it’s real.

         
But we go on

                            and on

                                                and on,

                                                                        not caring.

ii.

The problem with fear is that it begets more fear.
The problem with sorrow is that it begets more sorrow.

iii.

A small kiss lingers on my cheek.
A snowdrop,
a tear.
They string diamond necklaces down my face.
How melodramatic,
how sublime.
(How pitiful,
how pathetic.)

iv.

You see, I have dragon’s teeth,

but you’ll have to kill me to raise your army.

         
So tell me to stop hoping.

It's 1 AM and there are ghosts in my head

May 31, 2012

It’s 1 AM and there are ghosts in my head

My ears echo – scattered

laughter and other sounds that belong

to sitcom reruns – faint

whispers above the soft rushing

of the ceiling fan. 

Under my eyelids crawl

harmless bits of movie trailers, dissolving

into the smooth darkness that surrounds everything. 

This darkness, this

secret place under my skin,

behind my bones,

where I imagine

the shining yet-to-be,

the bright-blinding

firework future:

white feathers, white

petals, white gown,

white fading

into everything, everything

fading into white. 

But perhaps these are only advertisements

and job descriptions,

magazine clippings

and music videos replaying and

playing and playing

as if they comprised the quiet

inner-workings of my brain.

Maybe,

I think as I drift off to sleep. 

Maybe tonight I’ll have dreams of my own.  

I want to wake up early with you

April 10, 2012

I want to wake up early with you and walk through the morning village

Dew like silver on the black bridge,

a silent fog on the water, a canopy

softening bare silhouettes along the canal.

The sky, blue-grey,

still sleeping in a warm bed, in a room

where the cold clings to the curtains and walls,

a house with a dark, creaking floor,

the air heavy from a long winter’s night.

Four birds in the distance,

barely separate,

move through the morning and

                                             drift away.

Seventeen dreaming

January 10, 2012

Seventeen dreaming

I love

driving at night

on the highway

when no one else is around

and it’s so quiet

that I can hear

everything. 

I can feel

the quiet compression

of the pedals

under my feet,

and the road reaches

and reaches and reaches,

as if stretching tight limbs,

white parallel lines

yawning on

forever. 

The needle

on the speedometer

glides up

to sixty miles per hour,

and hovers:

a small, slender,

silent bird. 

The world ahead of me

breathes

in the darkness,

a warm lake of night sky

that never ends.

epithelia

December 10, 2011

epithelia

my hands, you could never be strangers –

more familiar are you to me

than the beating of my own heart.

rough as burlap or smooth as eggshells,

how is it that your calloused palms spell out fate

when every day you work to carve out

a future of your own? 

you might open like lotus blossoms

to hold another hand, or

a gun, or

the world as you would a child.

every wrinkle and crease of yours

tells a history I can only dream

of remembering, but then,

quick and wise as you are, your pale

half-moons fumble in the cold

not with ancient questions

of right and wrong, but only

black buttons

and ruby scarves.

when the night sky

is just an inky reflection of earth,

you reach up to send ripples

through all of the stars;

the few golden leaves left

on the late-autumn trees

are planets on an infant’s mobile, suspended

just above the cradle,

and when you set them in motion,

each independent part spins

in harmony with all the rest.

the heavens go round and round;

the newborn falls fast asleep.

better than bitter

December 7, 2011

better than bitter

hissing, spitting, the wind takes my hair in fingers

that are like yours except much, much more

harsh.  damn.  I took a walk to clear my head, but

all I can think about is you, you, you, and how I’m going to have to write

some really bad poetry.  these trite phrases keep beating

in my head like the ticking of clocks, a metronome to my own

insomnia – I hammer the same old words into place,

trying to find the right angles, like leaves against the wind

in a storm, but somehow everything comes out in a snowy

slush.  I miss your run-on sentences, your definitions

of words that don’t exist.  I want to say something

that’s as lovely as you are, something as real as rays of moonlight

spilling out onto wet asphalt.  I want to write

things that are barebacked and blackened

like church steeples and treble clefs.  but now,

I am famine-struck, and

    red as hunger.

instrument flight

December 5, 2011

instrument flight

yesterday

as I was walking home,

a firefly landed on my thumb.

I continued on my way

while it found a comfortable perch;

I watched its fishing-pole antennae

cast out into the shallows of this colorless landscape,

and twitch with curiosity

at every new discovery they happened to catch,

bowing, searching, and then springing

up with delight at minnow-miracles

I could not see.

instead, I looked over

its smoothbeautiful leather back,

imagined the secrets that lay furled underneath,

and the starlight

that must have been just waiting

in the wings.

I was drawn to admire

the thin amber legs

that lightly gripped my thumb:

boston ivy clinging

like soft, tiny kisses

spanning not even an inch

of my tender hand.

but then,

inevitably,

the winds changed,

pulling the little creature away

as it blinked a half-mournful

morse-code goodbye,

and I kept walking home.

it was then that I thought about

tracing patterns on the backs of your hands,

remembered thinking

that if my fingers had been fireflies,

I would have left so many henna tattoos

shining, bioluminescent, on your skin.

ode to artemis

November 13, 2011
published in on the cusp's magazine "hunt" Autumn 2012

ode to artemis

lady artemis:

the wild beasts of today are no calydonian boars,

but pretty pop-culture vampires with shiny teeth,

fresh from makeup or their tiny diva dressing rooms. 

instead of the ceryneian hind, we have

werewolves with stars in their eyes brandishing

coca-cola logos that scream, “this is happiness, this is happiness!” 

ogres and giants still ravage innocent towns,

until they forget their next line, and the set lights go on,

and the director reminds them, “roar.  all you do is roar.” 

maiden huntress:

our hunters prance about in faux-metal armor,

casting their ragdoll eyes and sloppy smiles at anyone

who might be willing to take their picture. 

the orion of this age is some pre-teen one-hit wonder

actor/singer/pop-star who even has his own tv show

and always walks around with his hands ready on his hips,

frantically looking over his shoulder because he never knows

if he should strike a pose now, or now; like this, or no, like this.

dear sister:

today, all our girls are damsels who flounce and pout

and pine for some hero to complete them –

they fling themselves as shoddy sacrifices

upon any adonis look-alike with a tacky dollar-store costume

that’s already wearing away at the elbows and knees.

true goddess of the hunt:

the gods we worship are billionaire movie stars.  brand-name sponsors

serve as their blessed ambrosia, applause and canned laughter

their most sacred nectar.  their enormous faces expand

across mile-long billboards; their names transcend any natural death.

o, artemis, divine and perfect:

let us remember mortality. 

save us from this action-packed

comedy-horror-romance-adventure-thriller

sub-reality in which we now exist.

this pulse is just a reflex

September 28, 2011

published in Westminster College's journal "ellipsis" Spring 2012

this pulse is just a reflex

the man at the front of the room, the one with the funny legs,

crab-walks from side to side, his back to us, with stilted, aluminum steps,

scribbling the notation for conic sections and riemann sums, sketching

the curves of cosines with a lover’s care, but all we can see are his legs;

he stands on his heels so his knees don’t buckle

because his bones were twisted by blacksmiths, mistaken

for yet-to-be ironwork railing rungs that they attached

with ligaments made of copper, eggshell-thin.

outside my window, the distant whirr of cars on the highway

is the same sound as the soft hushing-rushing of felt against slate,

and if I shift my body, my joints all make small chalkboard sounds

as they click into place, imitating chiseled white ‘x’s and ‘y’s;

I am made of bronze or well-tempered tin,

my eyes forgotten in the midst of remedial metal

splints for arms and legs, smooth steel mechanisms for heart and hands,

and intricate clicking gears for the best of brains–

we might all be hephaestus’s automata, beautiful the way

calculus and clockwork are, and nothing more.

not even doctors can fix us

September 22, 2011

not even doctors can fix us

she lies under the streets.

people look for her in the sky, but really

she is beneath them.

she is a python

(or maybe an apple tree).

I walk past smokestacks and

fire escapes and

something is wrong with my mouth.

I can only grimace.

I spit out insults

(that aren’t mine)

like broken teeth

(that could be mine).

there is cigar smoke in my throat

even though I’ve never touched a match.

I choke out whispers

as if I’m in a hospital.

a sunset makes

a fire take

the trees and all around them

the birds are choking, too.

and then I remember:

she borrowed my lighter that morning.

garden snails

May 21, 2011

garden snails

three of the creatures slowly explore my hand

while I crouch in the dirt

to take a break from weeding.

their small bodies are translucent

and wet

across my thick palm,

over each of my fingers,

cracked dry and desperate

with evaporated mud.

one has a shell of swirled amber,

a crystalline fragment

of some heavenly design:

tiny,

and perfect. 

curious little things,

content to make maps

of the landscape of my skin,

sometimes turning back

in methodical circles

to make sure each crease is accurate,

each wrinkle precise. 

their smooth bellies cool my hand,

which still burns from the friction

of careful, violent tugs

on stems and roots.

I look up for a moment:

the green earth glistens

with sunlight and the work

of a thousand garden snails. 

three of the creatures slowly explore my hand

while I crouch in the dirt

to take a break from weeding.

and oh,

how my fingers tremble.

American

May 2, 2011

American

I am the Cosmopolitan Casino,

all blinking lights,

party dresses,

and people laughing

as you spin the roulette;

I am the thrill of risk,

danger,

chance,

and maybe filled

with nothing real

at all. 

I am September twenty-second,

the day you lose the taste

of something you could never keep,

that delicately powdered confection

that you chewed up too quickly,

swallowed too soon,

forgot to savor,

which is followed down

by me:

the bitter,

unwitting draught

of equinox.

I am a New England rain,

the chill knocking you

out of any reverie

so you’re falling down to earth

like a jet plane

or a shooting star,

leaving a hurtling trail

of smoke and space dust,

crash-landing just like

a myoclonic jerk.

I am Crowheart, Wyoming,

a near ghost town,

all cold red desert sunsets

and abandoned forests

of spruce and pine

by a dammed-up Bull Lake,

as you make your way

speeding past my earthen walls,

through and through

this empty landscape.

I am the coffin of F. Scott Fitzgerald,

if only because it’s an ending.

Because I'm not careful

April 30, 2011

Because I’m not careful

i.

I used to sit and wonder why

the sensitive shadows of the leaves

didn’t correspond to the watery movements

of my hands.

I would have to hide my tapping fingers

because to him, they meant impatience

instead of piano concertos. 

But I picked up these burdens

as if they were those cold, beautiful

Venetian streets

in February. 

ii.

The blackbirds patrol the edge of Lake Ontario.

They navigate the air currents like whitewater rapids,

shuddering against the wind the way you might have,

holding someone’s hand

and walking with her script in your pocket.

paper dreams

March 4, 2011

paper dreams

when I think of what might become of us later, my mouth takes on the ashtray taste of probability, a dark coffee that sweetens slightly at the thought of you, staining and becoming the gold rings that sometimes appear in your blue eyes, as bright as the sun that shone above us ages ago when we laid on our stomachs in soft grass, with friends, laughing, not knowing what was in store for us in the future, just like

I don’t know now.

my words, they live in the palaces I built for them in the rich deserts of my imagination, with the air stirring around them filled with the scents of spices; in skyscrapers I constructed among the vivid city streets of my past, all thronged with pigeons and raw beauty; on midnight lakes under the golden august moons of my memory, the seagulls nesting quietly on the shore; but my words, the poor orphans, will never know

who their author is. 

we are swept inexorably onward by some dark, ancient wind, caught at the moment in the slow death throes of snow and ice; as this bitter breeze bites at my back and at my heels, I begin to shiver from damp and cold, from longing and regret, but then, as always, you, with your isinglass gaze and lion’s heart, remind me of cherry stems and seashells and pennies face-up.  you hold me close and reassure me,

summer will change that, too.

pen and paper

March 19, 2011

pen and paper

the meaning of life escapes us

in dreams lost to the morning,

conversations never remembered,

and the discarded peels

of tangerines. 

my wish for you

March 14, 2011

my wish for you

when you are this little and

cannot yet write, that you

discover beauties of sight

and sound

in language:

that you

delight in the complex burbles

and splashes of water flowing and

falling, the shivering of trees

in the wind,

the strange

curves of letters

printed on paper, painted on walls,

and the smooth, soft sounds of

the whispered words, “I love you.”

as you sprout up

and learn how

if you move

your hand just

like that, you

can make a line

that looks like

this, that the

words will one

day come bursting

out, pushing their

way from your

heart, through your pen, and as the sentences

come scribbling across your page, beautifully

misspelled, some beaten and chewed like your

favorite building blocks or barbie dolls, that you

will recognize them as raw and rare and precious. 

  

as you continue

to grow and

mature, learning

so many incredible

things, open

to what the world

has to show you,

that your words

will grow as you

do, becoming

as resplendent as

rainbows reflecting

off of ocean spray, as wild as running wolves,

each with its own spirited pulse, as magnificent

as the constellations shining above us all, and as

glorious as the sparkling waltz of the northern lights.

and as you live to be older, as you

become weary with a life of creation

and artistry, that you find the time

to rest, but

still to write;

that the words

you craft gain wisdom as you do,

taking on a more thoughtful tone,

but retaining their beauty and life;

that they

comfort

you and care

for you, remaining faithful companions

until your last days; that they might become

more pensive, but never lose their wonder.

all that glitters

March 14, 2011

all that glitters

though gold for us might coruscate

and tempt with false prosperity,

a heavenly home is our true fate.

we are called to conquer hate

and told to be a rarity

though gold for us might coruscate.

dishonest tongues will obfuscate

any celestial clarity;

a heavenly home is our true fate,

so let’s show them how we create

a paradise of charity.

though gold for us might coruscate,

and with its shining visions bait

us with such gross asperity,

a heavenly home is our true fate.

temptation will not desecrate

and reduce us to barbarity:

though gold for us might coruscate,

a heavenly home is our true fate. 

april

February 23, 2011

april

there’s something to be said

for the first glimpse

of raw, wild green

after endless months

of sick, chalky white,

for warm crayon-box colors:

the dandelion sun, the robin’s egg sky,

for the first sharp, biting breath

of a spring rain

as the frozen rivers dissolve

into a magical confusion

and rush,

for the rainbows on soap bubbles,

for the graceful arc of a red swing,

and for the chaotic ballet

my heart performs

whenever you throw me a smile.

to us, it's seamless

February 16, 2011
published in Live Poets of NJ's anthology "Inside My World" Spring 2011

to us, it’s seamless

the dying sun makes me

into a shadow-puppet silhouette,

carves my outline into the carpet,

pale light shining through

in soft rhomboid shapes

between my icicle elbows,

stereotypical hips,

fishnet ribs. 

with my fingers splayed wide,

some strange diamond prisms

explode open, appear

as starburst fireworks,

ocean waves shattering,

satellites winking in orbit.

the thought draws me up into

outer space, among stars, supernova-new,

and their stained-glass galaxies.

there must be so many beautiful sounds—

endless planetary symphonies,

continuous telescopic overtures—

and no one at all to hear them.

and yet here I am,

back on solid ground,

dreaming only of weekends

and of someone to whisper

his thoughts in my ear.

For the Cartographers

January 26, 2011

For the Cartographers, in the style of Edward Hirsch’s poem “For the Sleepwalkers” and ending in two lines from Mary Ruefle’s poem “On the Beach” from her book Indeed I Was Pleased With the World

Tonight I want to praise

the cartographers,

who have the courage

with their quill pens

and parchment paper

to spell out the horizons,

to scratch into existence

the edges of the world.

They sketch with an artist’s eye

the twists and turns,

the geometric rivers,

the flowing borders,

mapping out the past

and the future

until things that don’t yet exist

can provoke tactile reactions. 

I want to say something remarkable

like: in such smooth cadences,

with such elegant syntax,

the cartographers create

clever creeds, secretly

prophesying the rise and fall

of each great nation. 

We need to learn

how to stop seeing life with the lines

already drawn in. After all, it’s just a blank space

left for us to fill, the world one big possibility

for us to conceive ourselves.

We need to stop thinking

that soon we will no longer be surprised

by anything at all.

beasts

January 25, 2011

beasts

we began in the air,

at the top of the mountain,

skis poised for a moment

at the very edge of that narrow trail.

but then ready-set-go we flew down,

reckless, careless,

yelling laughing taunting down

as the wind whipped our bare faces raw,

and at the end,

our bodies each tucked tight under,

you would somehow always win. 

we never noticed how close we came

to the trees,

to the edge.

we would still be gasping, grinning

as the chairlift freed our feet from the earth,

until the air around us was only filled

with the quiet vision of our exhalations

our chests would still throb

with hushed rabbit-breathing as, always,

his head tilted carefully to the side

and rested on my shoulder. 

a soft snowfall brushed, stung, numbed our cheeks;

our blue eyes stared straight ahead;

our mouths said nothing. 

we both watched

as the peak of the mountain approached us,

as it always did.

we each wished silently

never again to touch our skis

to the slick, steep ground.

if only we could have stayed in the sky

forever.