Rochester

February 13, 2014

Rochester

Your apartment was empty.

Dark. Your family

one thousand miles away,

in a place with more sun,

in a city less bleak and...

Not depressing. Just

lonely. For now.

You might have made some friends,

some people to share a drink,

a cigar, a conversation

after work,

on weekends.

But what did you tell yourself

in the tired mornings

in the empty apartment

to get up for breakfast

and the daily commute?

What should I

tell myself?

Make a wish

March 1, 2014

Make a wish

The night is clear and the stars shine through

like diamond pinpricks. They are the same stars that you see.

The pale starlight reaching our eyes seems young and new,

but it is ancient, weary from travel through such infinite darkness.

Perhaps this star just gave its last breath, a small cry from the depths

of space, before shattering brilliantly. We will see its death, so many years later.

The stars are far apart,

and we are farther.

Fall

February 27, 2014

Fall

We met in autumn,

when the leaves in their dying days

seemed more alive than ever before.

We leave in autumn. And yes, as autumn

leaves miss the ground they grew from,

I will miss you.

But not for long. No,

we will not have to miss each other

for long.

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.

love

July 1, 2010

love

one day we sat and watched a patient parade full of people with nowhere to go.  you waved a flag and those thoroughbred thoughts you were always so proud of and said, these are the kind of people who never leave this place.

the only reason i knew there was loathing hidden behind your eyes is because i had already learned how to read your voice. 

you leaned back to watch your dreams tessellate into such lovely patterns in the air: i’m not going to be like that.  your eyes drifted and decided to focus on the sky, and then you were watching the clouds as if scrying for the future. 

i wondered what you saw up there, but i was too afraid to ask.

i could never handle bad news. 

amidst all the others with rigid, black-tie-formal faces, your two eyes were like matchboxes and your smile was like the fire: beautiful and rogue and dangerous only to those who came too close to putting it out. 

i tried a vanishing act, but you laughed at me because, as usual, it didn’t work. 

i want this to last forever, you lied. 

there was never actually a place for me in your starry sky, anyway; i suppose i would have held you back, like gravity. 

goodbye, you said.

“goodbye,” i said.

the parade was still passing as you left. 

with a sad smile, i watched you fade away, watched what was left of the people who kept walking and walking but had nowhere to go, and tried in vain to differentiate myself from the rest of that faceless crowd. 

and you thought you were a good liar

May 24, 2010

and you thought you were a good liar

we exist quite cautiously

in this dark space

before the sun rises,

imagining the scent of summer

in the air.

in a place where your eyes can’t see,

my left hand, like a small ghost,

glows.

it’s something exquisite:

parhelia in the arctic,

fish scales,

or a mirage.

the effortless black-ink words read,

I’ll carry this secret to the grave.

Skyes, Blu

April 14, 2010

Skyes, Blu

Blu Skyes never cared to be known. 

My name should be Icarus, she said, tripping her pen onto the sidewalk below.  She leapt down from the tree at a height that would have made most people’s bones rattle in their skin. 

I stepped lightly to the ground from the bottommost branch.  “What do you mean?” 

He was such a failure, she replied. 

I wanted to tell her, “You’re no failure,” but all I said was, “I have to go.” 

Blu would have drowned the kittens of the Cheshire cat not because they would’ve died anyway, but because she would have been jealous. 

She and I were in some garden when she said, Reach me a rose, will you?  Their stems remind me of love and The Great Gatsby. 

“We all live in somebody’s future, Blu,” I told her. 

But I worry about the ones whose pasts we have already abused.   

If you were glass or if you were stone, Blu would rub you smooth, and you would shine.  Me, she never touched. 

The train lumbered along like some subterranean beast as we waited to cross the tracks. 

False face must hide what the false heart doth know, she quoted.  That’s Shakespeare.

I wanted to ask, “What have you done that you need to hide?” but I could only nod and add, “Macbeth.” 

What happened to those blueberry eyes, Blu Skyes?  That raspberry smile?  Did your faith take them with her when she left?  Or was it just a matter of time?

She skipped stones in the brook as I sat and watched.  Far too similar are kites and cranes.  Far too different are birds and planes. 

If I had had the courage, I would have demanded, “Tell me what you mean!  I may not understand, but at least I can try.”  Instead, “Who came up with that one?”

For once, her eyes were not wasps, but water. Her voice was not ruthless, but soft, soft, soft. I did.  

It was a sea that threatened her.  I had always stood with her, always ankle deep, but always behind her, and she would never know. 

I pictured us tightrope-walking along the thin line of our hopes in the dying sunlight.  If I ever glanced down, Blu would whisper, Don’t look at it too long, or you’ll realize it doesn’t exist.

If I were brave, I would have dared those spider-web dreams to disappear.  If I were brave, I would have pieced us back together if we fell.  If I were brave, I would have spoken up whenever I had had something to say.  If I were brave, I would have done what Daedalus never could.

I would have saved us both.