small matter
poor thing, this bug did not believe in flight imagining the world unseemly, resistably large, bulging too far at the seams with noise and fury. so despite the endless forage, the mindless fucking, things at home didn't seem all bad, really, this staying put, an unglorious but noble act of order-making, and everything in close, familiar, predictable proximity. of course, there was the small matter of the wings.
one egg
do not think me twisted when, despite the world's galactic ricochet of violence, i prefer, these days, the retreat of breakfast. over strong, creamed coffee i have time to contemplate the blessedly innocuous catastrophes: burnt toast. a shortage of butter. how to make the meal for two using only one egg. believe me, i know how lucky i am.
loud and clear
see what it is to be afraid. feel this galactic uncertainty of am i good enough or am i good. see what it is to be afraid but not more than you can handle, not enough to keep you silent. let everyone see this. let you see this. loud and clear.
home remedy
sometimes i want nothing but symmetry and consonance. that ancient, sacred alignment of bones and poetry, and it won't come no matter what. still, i insist on wrestling words from the mouth of a great, churning sea. better, tonight, to make cookies instead. great big chocolate chip cookies. apparently, i can eat four of them and forget why i was tugging so hard.
summer recipe
Eat as much as you like. Drink half-n-half lattes. Wake up and have great sex. Keep your eye off the clock. Swim. Put fresh mint in whatever you're drinking. Slice strawberries on top of pound cake. Add fresh whipped cream. From the can. If all else fails, be wild in your love. Reach out your hands toward the beautiful, blinding sunlight and hold onto whatever you can.
bearable
it is not always the ballooning relief of oasis that makes a woman bow down in a bald, tuneless prayer of thanks. sometimes, it is just before sleep comes, when love is silent and tender beside her, that bends her deep at the knees. every day, there is a moment with God just bearable enough for prayer.
anything more ludicrous
she could have been called foolish,
or willful, or reckless or
a hundred other names,
for is there anything more ludicrous
than a woman barreling her way into darkness
without headlight or helmet?
but she knew her purpose.
her bike never toppled; her legs were loyal as dogs.
and with the twin glow of memory and hope
she steered herself toward home.
fuck the poetry
Don't even think about it, for God's sake.
You're about to make a meal
out of a sunset, or midnight,
or the call of a distant shore bird,
or the perfect way the daisies
lined up like soldiers.
Sometimes you have to fuck the poetry
and instead, take a fork and stab at something
you're actually planning
on eating.
like baptism
at first, it was merely an unbuttoning,
a disclosure of skin and anecdotes,
a superfluous and cagey revelation
of where you were last week, and the restaurant bill
that unburdened your wallet, and little else.
now, you are finally down
to your barest minimum.
each night, her hands press into the whole of you,
like baptism,
and dip you into sleep.
not enough water to go on
the map can't be any clearer, the road straight as a spine so
of course, you want to take the whole trip
in one fell swoop of an afternoon.
but not even midway through and your throat
burns in protest, your muscles joining in off-kilter chorus,
and suddenly, it all seems too steep, impossibly long.
when there is not enough water to go on
the wrong thing to do is imagine yourself a hero.
instead, turn back, unfinished, vicious with want and dissatisfaction,
and take a goddamn drink.
katrina
no one really understands the atlantic
the way k. did - vast, impossible nothingness,
a chilling void where echoes of
island rum jubilation and coconut revelry
nagged like Sirens, like a playground taunt.
no wonder she hit land so fast,
barreling over the Gulf like a rabid thing,
full of electric yearning for some honest-to-God company,
a sense of brief, knowable belonging,
so much like all of us.
evidence
when the day begins with coffee
so perfectly sugared and creamed
there is the briefest glimpse of the world
at right angles with itself.
the day tumbles after that, unperfecting, disassembling.
there are perilous cracks and losses.
and yet, there is tidy evidence
of our fevered, earnest survival
shopping lists. deadlines. or this:
a lover's cheek imprinted with our goodnight kiss.
fissure
i thought it was my careless trudge into the house
that set the course for this catastrophe
because really, how could one blue egg fall on its own
from the backyard bamboo tree?
maybe the fissure in the nest came from a fault
somewhere deep in that architectured earth,
not my bumbling bad luck at the great balancing act.
maybe this has nothing to do with worth.
all i know is i can't save it all; and so little is impervious to breaking.
somewhere a bird, tight in its shell, is almost waking.
Mary for breakfast
I would not have been a good gymnast -
body too long and imprecise, and by adolescence, simply
untrainable. Still, watching Mary Lou Retton in 1984,
I had a brief but palpable yearning for a certain notoriety involving
backflips and flawless turns on the balance beam.
She had that smile, the tan, that impossibly taut body, an irresistible,
glossy goodness landing her perfect 10s and a spot on the Wheaties Box.
I was destined only for scraped knees, dislocations, and a scrappy desire
to write as many poems as I could before lights out.
But I did what I could. I ate Mary for breakfast.
Croissants
Instead of criss-crossing lines at the Louvre,
I order croissants from the cafe waiter,
add butter and thick sweet jam, then scan the waterfront
for long boats and sad musicians and swoony, tongue-tied lovers.
Inside the museum, Mona gathers her usual crowds,
winking possibly, although I think it's more of a wince.
She misses...what exactly? Weekends away? A good glass of bordeaux?
Her childhood cat? A friend to braid that endless hair? Some privacy?
She never wanted to be this famous. What she wouldn't give for a few
untethered, unwatched moments, loosening her belt for more bread.
Loose Translation
Who knew that in French, I'd be such a babbling toddler
veering off all highways of adult discourse
and lollygagging in the sandbox
of such turbulent and loose translation.
Later, consulting the dictionary, I realized I'd told the waiter
how much I'd please him if he brought me a carafe of water,
how charming and vigorous the steak turned out to be.
No matter if meat was underdone, the waiter inattentive.
For a moment, there was a girl in a sandbox,
alive with such wonder and adoration for the world.
Departure
Of course, you want it to be glorious.
A grand pooh-bah of a sendoff,
confetti from your hotel room, champagne, a shower
of the pinkest roses.
Then, on your last day, juggling your last museum,
digging furiously for souvenirs,
the locals bump you off the sidewalk
and dog shit threatens your new shoes.
Pompous tourist. No one cares you're leaving. What matters
is how, always, home wins you back again.
Tulips
How much, some days, you just want to bury your head
under the duvet, that great billowy cloud
of total, beautiful anonymity. Imagining
you could take breakfast there, and the pile of mail to go through,
your backlog of magazines.
Inches away, on their last morning, the tulips
are waking up to the very edge of themselves,
unwrapping their petals shamelessly against the sun,
bending toward the light in great, voluptuous bursts
of orange.
neat and devasating
Here you are again, pulling the weeds
from your sprouting rooms, making rows of things,
opting for order, fluffing the garden just so.
You must be so exhausted.
I wonder if, for a halted moment, you would step inside,
away from that tidy garden. Watch the rain come down.
If you could you wait through the downpour, even, the slosh of mud,
the moment of truth, the inevitable erasure, and then after that,
if you could find in that neat and devastating work, a clumsy, lawless root
of forgiveness.
moments after watching a depressing documentary
just past that last reel, and i know how easily i could fall in love
with all the things i didn't even know i cared about -
other people's thighs; the sad deli man at the corner grocery;
some forlorn drippy toddler needing a kleenex; any midnight in november.
suddenly, i want to take giant fistfuls of myself,
hurl them at the hungry, edgy pigeons battling for sidewalk scraps,
spread whatever's left to the Target clerks taking on another receipt-less return.
it doesn't last. a day later and i've forgotten it all, except what i should never forget -
which window brings me closest to the moon,
and which fingers can touch stars.
dancing with my mother at a cousin's bat mitzvah
It's her hands that surprise me first,
the way they reach out at the song's first bars,
an eager schoolgirl's decisive clutch that brings my fingers into a C-curl.
Then we're off, in brilliant, twinned velocity
as Aretha launches in the meat of "Respect"
and it's almost otherworldly how everything about us
comes into the sort of unison one never expects
after that languorous, bygone time in vitro.
But it does. Even twirling, Mom's got me in her hands,
as if I'd never left at all.
angling for a midnight epipany
It's like watching water boil on low heat.
You want, at the very least, to scream. What did I think, exactly,
would fall out of this particular night's sky? A shot of divine lightning,
some voltaged wisdom careening from the heavens and onto my lap?
It's getting so late, the bones in my fingers
whinnying in narcoleptic complaint. And still I persist,
squinting at the dog, at grapefruit, at Malcolm Gladwell,
at anything my small and frantic mind might sniff out from the ether.
Sometimes, it's hard to be this patient
and this hungry.
brief and glorious
give me your ribcage, your bellybutton,
the small of your strong back.
give me your chin, your neck, your elbow.
give me your marvelous ass.
give me your eyes, your shins
the soft, precious expanse of your palm.
give me your ears, your knees, your collarbone.
give me just a minute of your hips.
or give me only your naked heart,
and let us fly with brief and glorious wings.
Tomatoes
They aren't in season, of course, and yet
I keep insisting on tomatoes.
At the fancy grocery store, I make a beeline for Produce
and with clumsy fingers, grab at a waifish pile
of sexy, buoyant hothouse cousins.
I don't care if summer's not here. I'm smitten, and starving,
looking for anything of luminous, immoderate possibility.
And it's here, in the airbrushed, airlifted globes of Holland,
taking one last turn on the runway, while the local beets idle,
steeped in their vigorous, teeming earth, patient and quiet as continents.
What saves me
The clamor of the bar is almost enough
to drown out the both of us.
It's a dizzying volley of drink orders,
a great, jubilant reunion of the city's Gen X-ers.
Gaggles of office girls slinging back vodka tonics
and dangling their cell phone numbers while
aging frat brothers push through the next round
and hope for a night's speedy good luck.
When it's too hot and fierce for words, what always saves me
are your hands.
On second thought
Though I did as much as I could to avoid retail
I didn't realize how much love I could feel
for a pair of striped socks.
I mean smitten, gut-struck, heart trembling for
knee-highs with an interlocking tango of color
only J. Crew would know to call "persimmon," "pear," and "parsnip."
The slimmest percentage of cashmere, the toes double strength, and holy God,
I'm done for, just like that, slipping fingers around an ailing Visa card,
palms aching for another caress at the stripes, inches from a perfect, pleasured union.
"On second thought," I pant into the thick and torrid air. "I'll take two."
Stretch
The first thing I'm going to do this year
is cancel my gym membership.
I meant it - all those shoulder curls, this business with the free weights -
it's just not practical anymore, and who needs a class called "gyrokinesis"?
Like algebra, which seemed, at its beginnings
to be the code breaker of all things inexplicable, but brought me no real math,
the gym was born of a kind of purebred mythmaking,
and I signed on, gave myself a year, said yes to the nice man with the good deal.
Now, two months in, I stay in when it rains, flex the pages of a good book instead,
make two cups of coffee, stretch myself a little closer to where you are. And breathe.
Watching Nina bowl
The guys in the next lane are all biceps and beer,
their eyes on the prize of a night's high score.
They fling the ball toward the pins as if the lane was mere afterthought,
an inconsequential distance toward the meat of their destruction.
Nina cuts a slight figure in the evening's lineup.
The ball looks so heavy in her hands. When she steps up
to the starting line, her knees are unsteady, shoulders quivering.
Watching Nina bowl, I see it takes all her weight just to hang on,
and she does, and what happens next is a triumph over the scoreboard entirely,
that terrible, blistering need for perfection. Without looking where, she lets go.
oblivious and free
Sometimes, after watching the news, I think my body's on the verge
of closing shop, inches from total, unceremonious oblivion,
and it's amazing how easily I can admit defeat,
collapse on the couch with ginger tea, or Pepto,
call for an extra set of hands to prop the pillows,
unearth the slippers, a novel, massage.
In the morning, bouncing to the next task,
I forget exactly what I sounded like, so plaintive and still.
I unremember the evening, when I lay so prone and empty, with nothing to give.
I disregard the red light and run into the street again, oblivious, full, hopelessly free.
Starting with A
Awe-struck. What it was like in Switzerland, at 15,
staring from the balcony of my little hotel room
into the sweeping vista of the Alps, facing a symphony of wind.
For a moment, the world...the world seemed like it was made of the simplest things.
How strange and beautiful to feel, suddenly, so permanent,
to believe I was chiseled out of the earth, too, like mountain, like wind,
like snow, like the ice on Interlocken. How easy, then,
to ignore the pain in the lungs from 20 degrees,
to still the feet, which tended to run whenever they could,
and witness the unspectacled, infinite peace of night descending.
dancing
You, with the dark hat on, the coat, the collar turned up,
trying to blend in like nobody's business, like background noise,
like an act of disappearance, like who could possibly be watching -
that quiet spill you took on the ice that turned your ankle,
and that move you made just afterward, the silent recoil,
the anywhere-but-here wince that gave you just enough
to stand back up and leave the rink alone and vow not to return -
let me tell you something.
I love how you fell, untidy and artless and so far from perfect, your body
one long misbehaviour. Even from this distance, you were dancing.
this isn't where the work is
What brings me to the track on a Monday night
is the thought that with the Walkman in my ear,
I won't even notice I'm running. Of course,
this isn't where the work is. That first lap snaps me back so hard
I barely know what hit me, Madonna disappearing
behind the harsher, histrionic pounding of my own small lungs
and the belief that maybe, just maybe this might kill me.
But then time passes, and the feet learn that the ground
is best covered by stopping occasionally, and I don't end up dying.
Just tired, a little.
valentine
Funny how a day can loom and rumble/its way toward you like stomachaches
leave you bitter and anxious - worse, humble
to its grand power and the sound it makes
in store windows and candy boxes, each flower shop
singing its praises from petal to petal/while I grimace and snarl at even the red stop
sign placed innocently at intersections. I'm ill/with the thought of love so loud, roses
hopelessly adding to the clamor. The scents of chocolate
scandalize the streets. My heart closes/as billboard lovers swoon and manipulate.
I wanted only the simplest of tenderness.
A tiny shudder in the veins, or something less.
cherry blossoms
It can't get any more winter than mid-February,
even when you live in California. Somehow, despite the proximity
to such excellent surf, a rollicking bike ride down Mt. Tam,
a body needs to hibernate, excuse itself from
traffic, wishful thinking, arguments, then settle in,
unfasten buttons, clamber for a seat near the fire,
and give way to heavy sleep. Once there, one dreams of sunlight
again, that lucid forgiveness, a burst of clear-eyed magnificence.
The skin warms by degrees, and the heart, tucking into itself,
witnesses the sudden, radiant windfall of cherry blossoms.
On Patience...or Why I'm Not an Olympic Figure Skater
There is a slight problem with heroism;
the last-ditch, mad-dash, no-holds-barred launch
into a lonely stratosphere, flinging wild limbs until
you're a spectacle of peerless golden endeavor. And then:
the bad legs, missed opportunities, televised failures.
The spiral downward into piercing, chilly obscurity.
I'll take the slow ache of a falling sun, its tender shifts
of bending light that keep my perch steady on the sand,
knees genuflecting toward horizon while the water comes in quiet ebbs
just as it should.
Inventory
Look: I'm not sixteen anymore, there's no chance
I'd race you on the court as fast as I did
in the throes of my aerobic adolescence,
when, jumpy as a foal, I did my best unbridled.
Now, my back, unprovoked, can seize up. My arms tire
sometimes, simply hanging loose by my hips.
I don't even need to say how bad my eyes are,
or name the vitamins I'll take on overnight trips.
And yet, despite the ruthless caution aging is demanding,
my heart, that sly accordion, fools me by expanding.
meanwhile, my windows
Just last year, I was finding certain communion
in the lonely March rain, watching fat drops of it multiply
on my back deck, leaving vicarious early evidence of spring.
Though, of course, I wanted only to hunker down, rest up, keep dry.
Not much changes in a year, at least that need for easy refuge.
Now, from my desk, I see the gutter spilleth over,
sodden remnants of earth clustering around a deluge
of oak leaves. I keep my slippers on, flip the thermostat, find cover.
It's alright, I say again. Take care. It's better if you just stay in.
Meanwhile, my windows, shut so tight, are locking out the jasmine.
lemons in the off-season
Why is it, shopping for produce before spring more firmly
sets down its verdant roots, do I reach for pineapple, flown here
straight from the Big Island in cratefuls and warmly
welcomed by Andronico's at five bucks a pound? This time of year
is perfect for root vegetables, a good cabbage soup, some baked thing,
and yet here I am, tiptoeing around the exotics, ever vigilant of a sale,
hopeful for a bumper crop of whatever Chile's early fields bring,
skipping past the local goods, overlooking the yellow beets, each purple kale.
Now home, fridge full of future meals, I'm embarrassed at my ignorance -
Searching for that one ripe starfruit when the lemons were in such abundance.
lesson plan
Is there some strange cosmic calendar dictating
that sometime in the early 30s is the perfect season
to be learning, finally, how to be a good adult? I was gestating,
apparently, in all my 20s, which is, perhaps, the only reason,
now, at 33, I'm getting the lesson plan full-on, surprise tests
on how to deal with conflict, communication, and commitment,
since these are the real issues, not where my lover's toothbrush rests
or whose turn it is to win this week's dishwashing argument.
Yesterday, in a brief reprieve of quizzes, I scanned the wet terrain
and saw that even sodden ground can take another bout of rain.
forecast
I love how the news likes to call the weather,
referring to a landslide as cruel and vicious,
saying the tornado was so angry it refused to tether
those innocent mobile homes to the ground. As if this
were something a tornado knew how to do.
And when the swollen Navarro "pours out its wrath"
against the Mendocino citizens, it makes you think
a river had a conscience, the ability to choose its path,
some malintention of finding out where the houses would best sink.
How strange. The irony of "vengeance," this "raging fury of a flood."
Maybe that's why lumber yards keep silencing the redwood.
fraction
A visit to the accountant on the Monday before tax day
might be worse than my annual check-in with the gynecologist,
who at least tries to get me comfortable,
eases me into the stirrups with a gentle round of small talk
before that cold, cruel slide of metal clamps my eyes shut tight.
I guess the H&R Block lady gave it to me as best she could,
saying how nice it must be to be a writer - "I wish I could..." she sighed,
as she flayed me open, unraveled the whole year into a set of bloodless numbers,
until I became even less than a fraction of myself -
a hand that could write a check, sign a name, pay up.
while waiting for the plane to land
When your love leaves for 12 whole days, your first thought
is how much online Scrabble you'll get to play, or
how late you'll stay up watching bad TV when you ought
to be reading. Grabbing unhealthy midnight snacks, you don't notice the floor
speckling in a growing sheet of crumbs, and the dishwasher, you leave
until there are no more bowls or spoons with which to eat your cereal for dinner.
Hours go by like water, and the silence, while not exactly a reprieve,
feels like the break you needed. But then: fast, uneasy decline. The house grows thinner
by the minute, like meat off bone. You rush to close windows, the wind howling louder,
then fall asleep with arms around vacant air, wondering how you ever went without her.
rice fight
"I've made 4 cups of rice," Laurie announced, nodding toward the kitchen.
"What time will we do it?" her daughter asked, eyes wide, hungry.
"Let's eat first," the other grown-ups chimed in, missing the point.
"More salad? Hummus? Another bowl of chocolate mousse?" The clock ticked toward 5.
"Isn't it time yet?" asked the pair of young blue eyes, deep and wise as the sea.
"Will I need to change my clothes?" asked the grownups. (They didn't want to get dirty.)
"It's 5," the wise sea eyes insisted, turning to the door.
"Will I be cold?" the grownups wondered, fingering their nice scarves, their finery.
"Will I get hurt?" the grownups worried, thinking of all their soft spots.
"It's just rice," the blue eyes said. "You can't get hurt."
random questions on a monday night in may
Will the warm spring air dull my brain, turn me limp as lettuce leaves
left to wilt in the bottom of the veggie bin? Should I cut my hair shorter
this time? Dye my eyebrows? Wear more lipstick? Will my pet peeves
do too much to suffocate a growing love? Will there be a sense of order
in this heart, this house, this country? Should I attend those protests against war,
give more money to the women of Darfur, write letters to my congresswomen,
go to Israel, go to Auschwitz, learn Polish or German, or
stay at home, clean up the trash at the beach where everyone's been swimming?
It's so big of a world sometimes and perhaps too much I aim to please
after the indulgence of a solid meal or all those hours, writing on my knees.
first scones
In the midst of cooking jobs, I'm unafraid of hastened chopping,
and rarely fearful of the strain that bending puts on bones.
I plow through peeled potatoes without slowing, never stopping.
But then the real fear hits - will they like my lemon scones?
Will my itch to find my inner Martha make them swoon and sway? -
I'm thinking this as citrus-scented dough collides with oven heat -
or will my baking skills fall flat, collapse like souffl�
and cause an instant stomachache with that first disastrous bite?
I'd like to know if Martha's first attempts at scones resembled hardened plaster,
or if, while tending to her minions, she almost craved disaster.
how to write a poem in half an hour
You are not somewhere in the Greek Isles swooning
over the electric blue of the water, the hot white sun on your back,
or clinging off of Everest with an oxygen tank ballooning
behind you, a small team of Nepalese porters fronting the pack,
grinning in their sandals. Though it can feel like a desert,
you are not in one at the moment, cradling your last sips
from the canteen, scanning the veld for scavengers, alert
only to your own death. Your last words aren't ready for your lips.
No, you're simply home, paying the electric bill, cleaning up your daily mess,
while outside all the trees enjoy their practiced art of nothingness.
life span
Goddamn the mosquito, flitting like a teenager about my ears, then biting,
while I, in earnest, prepare my laptop with a blank document,
intent on a fresh start. This afternoon I'd set aside for writing
what I'd hoped would be better than the last piece I sent
to the famous literary journal in the harsh midwest, thinking it the perfect line-up
to a series of fashionable successes. Now, the mosquito taps against my head
aimed to rub it in, a pestering reminder of you're-not-quite-there. This growing pile-up
of rejection letters buzzes just like him, and the blank page stares back, almost dead.
But God always know's what what, and this bug will get his due -
He's lucky if he gets to stay alive another day or two.
a matter of time zones and luck
Sometime, while we shopped for dresses to wear to a wedding,
the techtonic plates of Java shifted terribly, and Richter rose
to shatter that earth at 6.3. We didn't know the real terror setting
foot in the islanders' homes as we chose our gowns, considered hose,
fingered earrings at the front counter, splurged on a necklace
we'd never intended. Only later, snipping tags at home
did we listen to the BBC's stoic reportage and cringe. How is
this? we wondered. One hemisphere rejoices while the other's almost gone?
And still, the death toll reels and climbs. And still, the marriage must go through.
And still, I'm holding you this close. It is the only thing to do.
moths
What if you look in mirror glass and I, in swimming pool?
What if you're reaching high for stars, while I find their distance cruel?
What if you love a flower for its petals, not its stem
What if you speak in riffed-up jazz and I, in requiem?
Will our echoing reflections still entwine with eager love?
Will the night convince our gaze to look, in unison, above?
Will our hands collide in gardens, fingers clutching in the soil?
Will we recipe a language out of babbling turmoil?
We work so hard to choose our sides, displacing wrong from right,
while in the dark and tangled wood, the moths erupt in flight.
losing the weight
It's not the pounds I'm after. Anything less
and my sister would kill me dead. But there are other things to lose -
that strange fear of too much happiness,
whatever fibrous knot of restraint reigning in my loose desires
like so much cattle, every blank canvas I've left to bleach
in the hot sun, plans drawn up and long faded on their boards,
that thing I said once, years ago, about wanting to teach,
the songs I've begun but abandoned to their nascent chords.
I want to lose that plumped-up guilt, whatever hope chest I threw hope in,
forgive myself of all those doors I unlocked but didn't open.
how to reduce my personal emissions level to almost zero
It's tempting to scream holy hell to the man driving the Hummer
but instead of flinging my bruising invectives, I'm going to enjoy this summer
by smashing tennis balls against the practice wall, improving my backhand
enough to join a team in the fall. I'll visit the neighborhood lemonade stand
to support the local economy, then bike to a nearby swimming pool
where 20 laps will do me the favor of keeping me cool
until the November elections. I will read the mounting backlog
of novels instead of feeding an addiction to reality TV. I will love fog
again, its inching fingers along the coastline, its moist kiss on my cheek.
I will hold my hissing tongue and wait for gratitude to speak.
the end of June
Behind my house, the hills have turned the color of starch,
this equinox upon them at last and the noon heat relentless
as a dagger. Still, the dogs peruse the earth, arch
their ears at the nearby wood, listening for a scattering of footsteps.
It's ninety-five degrees and I, too, am panting, my heart
a loosened snare drum in my chest. Is it me or does June
admit the passing of a luscious, bursting spring and the start
of a season that tests the sturdiest grasses, the most vigorous bloom?
And yet without complaint, the soil complies by getting thinner,
and underneath the brush, the ants are scurrying toward dinner.
missing the ride
The last time I was on a rollercoaster, it took me a whole week
to recover, my sides sore from that fast and bumpy swirling,
my ears near deaf from the sharp macaw of kids. I can't speak
of rollercoasters without remembering the nausea, the vicious curling
my stomach made, flirting dangerously with the back of my throat,
my fists clutching my seat in an vain attempt to fight gravity.
It's the kind of memory that sticks like a still-wet varnish coat,
the dull pain of nostalgia colliding with this harsh reality:
I'm missing the ride, despite the safety of my tranquil walls -
those slow and aching rises and perilous, spectacular falls.
breathing
Underwater, it is silent as Sunday morning,
an unnameable light, a kind of prayer in reverse,
language back to its first syllabic groaning,
a song without its harmony or verse.
Here, it is simply a matter of oxygen,
whatever a body can manage to hold.
I swim my laps and count my strokes to ten,
unwrap myself into this liquid turquoise cold.
It doesn't last. The lungs resist, then start their seething.
Look up, they warn. Find air. Start breathing.
another look at sweat
I can't help it - all this heat and the stuff is beading
out from my hidden nooks and crannies, which lay so nicely dormant
this past spring. Apparently, all my pores were needing
was a little invitation, a rise from a thermometer meant,
in a former life, to announce a childhood fever, the prelude to a flu.
Now, each crescendo means not just shorts and scoop-necked tees
but a disrobing of metaphorical proportions. What more can I undo
aside from buttons and shoelaces, to match this steady rise in degrees?
Can I toss my misperceptions? The smaller failings of my love?
What else is there to melt away? What else can I get rid of?
A Basketball Parable or If Lebanon and Israel were 8th graders playing on a Junior Varsity team in 1985
Shauna Carter and I were definitely not best friends, not at all,
yet from among the small circle of 13-year-olds there the big night
of the JV tryouts, we both made the team that fall.
She got in for her point guard skills. I got by with height
and left-handedness, the only real tricks up my sleeve.
During games, we never looked at other when we passed
the ball, never gave the high-five. We became the other's pet peeve,
avoiding contact even after a hard-won victory, until at last,
the season came to a close and we did not make the finals. Yet
what I remember is not the score, but instead - silence, filmy hope, regret.
before Babel
Imagine this: language as birth, that first hello
we nod to a passing stranger on an irrelevant street
something of an exit from our quiet womb below.
Picture the wet, trembling arrival into dialogue, sweet
relief from all that solitude. See the ripening of words,
each unfurling syllable a string of endless opportunities.
Now watch that careful synchonicity of flying birds
and wonder how they could possibly do it, merging into their perfect Vs.
Notice, even squawking for space, they seem to get along.
Listen as their idle chatter turns, eventually, to song.
alarm
Who doesn't love to clasp at sleep,
and slide to dreams as dark night falls?
Who would insist to leave this deep,
this quiet house, these placid walls?
What captive muse could raise her voice
to find a bending, urgent ear?
What timid sound could burst to noise
and wake the dormant body here?
And if I stay too still and wait,
will all my patience make me late?
dinner / ceasefire
Evening, and because it's already past eight
we'd gladly pillage the kitchen cupboards
for their deep cache of soup, any quick armament
of calories to fortify and fill us again. The stomach lords
over this testy battle always, and yet...we've been apart
all day, you in the garden, and I, reclusive in my words,
and what I want is to elongate this meal, make art
of each fresh course, lean from the table toward
you as you bend to your steaming plate, then lift your face
to mine, close our eyes, unwrap into night with simple, tender grace.
a brief disappearance
The sign - Albany Waterfront Park - promised the dog a frolic
in the waves, the frothy digging up of sand and unspent energy,
perhaps even a new friend, a temporary pal with whom to flick
a tail at, or sniff, or somersault into jubilant reverie.
At least, that's what it seemed to me, nascent dogwalker, a girl
who doesn't really know dogs, doesn't see the beautiful distraction
of a trail leading into the nowhere of dense and dirty brush, or the curl
of a smile that can dent a dog's mouth into a sly parentheses, or the attraction
inherent in making a brief disappearance from an overzealous crowd,
slipping into simple, undisturbed obscurity without uttering a word out loud.
Something of necessity
For a week, the writer stowed her pen neatly
away from her purse, where it usually tucked under
the Chapstick, adjacent to the breath mints, within easy
reach for jotting down epiphanies, any impromptu wonder
she might have observed. Almost seven days and not a word
erupting onto paper, not a fragment of a poem, not a phrase
unraveling its careful syllables, its tenuous, delicate bird
calls. Hours went by, and multiply the moon rose,
then went unwritten. The wind and stars were still as clever.
And the lovers, unrecorded, ached as beautifully as ever.
(a)wake
You know what I miss? The quiet of that first almost-fall day,
its earnest, smoky sweetness (someone burning
the inaugural evening fire, unearthing a warm sweater that lay
docile, in a bureau, all season) and the sudden, palpable yearning
for hot chocolate, a blanket for the couch, a curling nap
in front of the evening news, staying in on the weekend.
Instead, this: George Bush hammering the television, the clap
of thunder from his words, saying how the horror won't end
until we have our country's wounds fully, wholly rectified.
Watching, I hardly hear the lullaby of fall. I'm too awake and terrified.
a curious religion
One could live a life by turning to a cereal box
or following the drama of the Doublemint twins.
It's easy to find religion from a street sign - a single word unlocks
any bolted door if you're feeling desperate enough. "Merge lanes"
you read, driving down the 5 towards LA, and that tells you
everything you need to know about love. And yet, just ahead,
the gas light comes on, or "Caution, bumpy road," and a few
hundred miles later, a billboard for "Lost" seduces you instead.
The advertisements chatter on, a cacophony of listless birds.
Mouth opening, you wonder who you are without your words.
walking the lake three days after the Jewish New Year
I've never been here before, I said, and yet this walk
is almost familiar, the same trees whispering after us,
twinned cattails flirting with the water, ducks ambling the sidelines
as the air turns cooler, purpling with the gathering sunset.
And yet we are arguing, slicing this innocent evening
with hard words, scrambling upward as the road forks left,
shoes gripping the perilous stony path, which - though circuitous -
has taken us too far, up and over the hillside, out of view
of the lake's easy curves. It's late, and we don't know how to get back
except the way we came from.
the drive to the airport
I love playing chauffeur, that vehicle for departure,
the segue between apartment and airplane, an ellipses
linking last-minute packing lists and the aperture
of the lens that is the coveted window seat for the overseas
flight. My friend is on her way to Africa - a long-lost
wish to see the apes, go on safari, leave this city behind
to retrieve her elusive wildness, no matter the cost,
because this is where her wise heart has divined
she should go. I drive her to the curbside check in, almost hesitating,
then wish her well before returning home, where my own work is waiting.
bully
Oh George, you big bully, rattling fists
from your crumbling pulpit, wailing
threats at the camera, checking your lists
for the names of your enemies and failing
to pronounce them correctly, even daring Kim
to make a move so you can show him who's boss.
You know what? No one believes a thing
you say anymore, not with all this sorry loss
gathering in your wake, years of needless, bloody dissection.
Be warned: My vote - that trusty sword - is coming this election.
safe as kittens
Mid-song on the popular radio station I listen to
on errand runs and traffic jams, the news comes on
clipped and urgent, the DJ suddenly thrust in the role
of a nascent Walter Cronkite. A small plane has disappeared
into a 50-story highrise on the upper East Side and no one
has yet ruled out the possibility of another you-know-what.
Meanwhile, the great building of fences along our borders,
the secret wiretaps, the ruthless prisons, and on and on
until we're what, exactly? Safe as kittens? Free as birds? The mightiest of men?
Cozy in some wayward fantasy where nothing touches us again?
halloween in new york
Biking through Battery Park, sun blazing, the slightest breeze,
and it's almost possible to forget the crowds hustling through office doors,
or the whirring of video cameras along the WTC memorial, the bees
of tourists crowding monuments, swinging through Macy's busy floors
for the perfect souvenir. I'm glancing at the water for cruise
ships, lost otters, brave swimmers, any lingering debris
from the long, languid summer. Two days ago, I got the bad news
from a friend that someone we knew had died, wrongly, too early,
and now he's in the waves, too, his funny, lopsided smile, his big blast
of a laugh, chiding me for trying to ride this road just an inch too fast.
glimmer
I know - the news these days, and yet
my eyes fixate on the headlines, an awkward dance
down the page, skittish, timid, unprepared, but
glued nonetheless, as if cursed into a trance,
the need to know today's fresh sorrow.
Each week a shock of new pain, precise and searing,
and the ever-present question - will there be a tomorrow
if the skyline of the human race keeps disappearing?
Still, flying east last week, I awakened to surprise -
the winking glimmer of a luminous sunrise.
my father visits
and i tumble into his arms, small, five years old,
breakable, as if freshly injured from a fall
off my new bicycle, some lucid disappointment, the cold
pain of a distant, unmet longing - i crawl
toward him because there is no other safety
quite like this, and because the girl
who was me can be here, too, and she
is precarious as ever, listing wildly, a spiral
of need and indecision, an open heart, an open plain,
an inkling of herself again.
racing time
Hard not to want to move these days, squirm
out from under afternoon highway gridlock, the thrum
of lines at the grocery store, a threatening rain
verging from tumescent clouds. There's so much to gain
from speed, or so it seems, and the thought of lingering -
an outdated and fruitless ambition. And so, the restless fingering
of watches, the hasty retreats, the quick disappearances even I'm
getting good at, though I notice how tired I can look from racing time
to the finish. I wonder how the leaves do it, resisting the pressure of it all,
taking their own small infinities to fall.
summit
Inside the brutal wind, the wisp-thin air,
a mere half-mile from Everest he was,
Sir Edmund, pointing, panting, "Look, it's there!"
And from the clouds the stoic summit rose.
So on they climbed, Sir Edmund and his guide,
though woozy with the work of heading on,
imagining what lay ahead defied
their fear, the view worth all this betting on.
And yet I wonder, as they shuffled closer,
did they regret their trip was almost over?
solstice
Though i've been arming myself with scarves, a coat,
I wake this morning with winter's first true impression -
a slight achiness, the scratchings of a sore throat,
first twinges of a cold which make me want to stay in,
take tea & toast, dive more deeply in a good book.
Except I didn't want this, thought I'd leave the year
with a bang, some strong-armed solstice salute, a long look
toward a horizon of huge proportions. Instead, here
I am, laying low, angling for salves & dressings,
slowed down enough to actually count my blessings.
resurfacing
All week, it seems, reclining at a dinner table,
the tuneless shuffle from fork to mouth,
and I've nearly forgotten what my body is able
to do to keep my gut from heading south.
Downstairs, my bicycle waits, superbly patient
while I take another bite of something sweet and rich
The wheels, dusty from disuse, herald this event
by staying absolutely still, unruffled in the ditch.
Sometimes a silence is the only constant thing
I need to lure me toward resurfacing.
welcome
I awoke to lucid sunshine yesterday, (lucky
California girl), and an invitation - the reprieve
of good weather - led a desire to rise from my mucky
existential questions & their itchy demands, and leave
for the beach, that exquisite expanse grazing -
so delicately - the edge of blue oblivion. I criss-crossed
a path along the sand and picked up trash, razing
the shore of beer bottles, plastics, the detritus
of an old year, and watched the sea recede and swell
in baptismal wash of welcome and farewell.
houdini and me
we like to disappear, shrug off
chains and lockboxes, blink our eyes
and slither down wormholes, laugh
at implausibility, invisibility, surprise.
no one knows how we do it, and we cling
to the secret like a child wraps her heart
around some mucky, misunderstood toy-thing.
we love the darkness of this sticky art,
its stretch of solitude, each unseen brilliance,
the language gathering when we fall to silence.
while my friend is taking photographs of endangered animals in India and I'm in a hotel room watching the Golden Globes
It would be easy to wring my hands
in self-judgment, chastise my vapid hunger
for star-gazing, flashy dresses, the demands
of keeping my eyes on the screen for longer
than three hours, while she is offering her love
and attention to a far needier, nobler cause.
And yet, when she writes to tell me of
all that she's seen, what I recognize is
how we've each been moved by a similar directive -
opting for a brief escape for the chance to gain perspective.
nowhere near sleep
Midnight and I'd lie down if I could,
count sheep, then drift off into never-
never land, find a firm foothold
in a dream or two. But I can't quite sever
my ties to this long-winded day, this endless night,
the perfect solitude accompanying the silence in
this heavy-lidded house, where away from sound or sight,
I am most at home in my own skin,
drifting in that weightless atmosphere
of not quite there, and not quite here.
a clearing
There are places on the body - trivial,
lackluster locations, reasons for protest,
complaint, argument against an inevitable
aging. It's hard to see oneself as a forest
of fresh discovery, a budding shoot veering
into verdancy, the wild subsurface bloom
unfolding in the earth. And yet, last night, a clearing.
You stretched yourself beside me in our room,
my hand across your naked back, and I felt just then
how love could make me new again.
after the argument
the body tight, small, so fiery. a glass, smug in its cabinet row,
looking ever so breakable. the night, moonless, anonymous.
the car, a means of escape. the fantasy of flight entering a room.
the eyes, mapping the distance, heart leaping toward a beautiful
kind of nothingness, erasure, something clean and undisturbed.
the hands, almost at the door, almost at the door and then,
all at once, away from it. the dog innocent on the couch. your love,
sleeping in bed, warming the sheets with patience.
a dim light ruffles the dark, something resembling
forgiveness, and you remember where you are, and you stay.
on deciding to protest the troop surge in Iraq
Needless to say, I'm signing the petition in bed,
the safe harbor of pillows, soft linens from
Pottery Barn, strong coffee to my right,
steaming and sweet. A shower is imminent,
all the hot water I could want, then breakfast,
and the day will spill predictably into work, traffic,
the aisles of a grocery store to buy more butter,
small variations carrying me home to dinner, then sleep.
Meanwhile, a man my brother's age is shining his boots
for a third time, checking his watch, saying his prayers.
beachside meditations on global warming
In case this is the year all hell breaks loose,
I've brought my camera with hopes of catching any prescient evidence
of extinction - the disappearing footsteps of seagulls, the ephemera
of clouds, the broken trophies of the sea emulsifying in the sun.
But like an unbending promise, the ocean keeps lapping the shore,
returning stubbornly to greet a ragged but determined coastline.
Here, tireless dogs flounce in the sand, never doubting the longevity
of their bliss, their endless excess of bursting enthusiasms.
geography
I hope, in my last good hour, I remember how it felt to watch the waves
fall and rise again, blessed with the fugitive good luck of the living.
I'm underwater in my dream, silent, and direction-less.
It seems I didn't know the language of the natives on shore,
and in my embarrassment have hastened away on my little boat.
But I'm unprepared to man the thing myself, and it bobbles and breaks,
splintering off plank by plank until I have no choice but to abandon it
for the chaos of the waves. Asleep, it's still possible to breathe this way,
to stay alive even in exile, to swim for an entire life alone, but the shore
beckons with its discombobulated noises, a viscous human thrumming
where even sorrow finds a shoulder. From this distance, I can see
the world I will wake into, its stubborn geography of blessings and light.
vacation epiphany
This was going a poem about how simple life could be
if I could snap out of my restless search for meaning
and haul myself out to the beach once in a while.
But even on vacation, I am inextricably human,
blaspheming a sunset into metaphor, naming the night crickets
as harbingers of hope, painting shorebirds with voluminous adjectives
they'll never understand. It's true, I can pause, speechless,
before an unraveling night, watching the moon rise precise and silent.
But I don't want to imagine a life where I couldn't tell you
how my heart rose, indiscreetly, aching to hear every syllable.
disembarking
Despite the sluggish air at 35,000 feet, bodies compacting
into small, stiff seats, the bad coffee and broken reading lights,
it was possible, rising above the cloud cover, to believe
that your life could just stay there, suspended, forever.
It wasn't as if nothing was waiting for you down below.
It's that you knew, disembarking, how quickly you'd forget
to keep still during the patches of turbulence, the exit sign
luring you instead, with its pulsing red heart, to disappear.
And yet, it is with vivid relief that you touch down at last,
the door opening like a great mouth, gulping the last possible oxygen.
the best dream in the world
Last night, you found yourself in too-large ice skates in the middle
of a dance tryout with no choreography to speak of.
The word "clumsy" doesn't even begin to describe it.
You were disastrous, inconceivable in imperfection,
tumbling into the stands, the judges' table, thrashing
your blades through the floor in an animal wildness.
After the music ended you ran, mortified, backstage,
thinking you'd be banished forever from competition.
And yet, somehow, you were called back, and told
yours was the kind of surrender they'd been looking for.
what art is
I am afraid of the blank page. Specifically, the thick-stock pad
of dimpled paper I bought - and always buy - when visiting the art store.
It is impossible to ignore the electric whiteness of that paper,
the tingly, earthy smell of it, the starchy purpose swooning me
into swift purchase. I dash through the aisles and think,
This will be the year I make art! - grabbing fistfuls
of colored pens, pipe cleaners, bejeweled ribbons,
anything to sparkle and surprise - but I never do.
Instead, I make toast. I make love. I make a mess.
I make myself get up every morning and do it again.
readiness
It's not a matter of how willing you are. I could tell you
about this morning, the not-too-early hour, a certain light
insinuating itself through my windows, coffee adjacent,
the perfect invitation for poetry, and I was willing as ever.
I could tell you about the lover who, years ago, insisted
love was a fortress to defend, a daily survival of blows to the heart,
and I was ready then, too, believing the battle would do me good.
Instead, what lay before us was the bloody ferocity of war,
and no one should ever be ready for that.
prayer, revisited
Just before death, all these hopes to cast heavenward,
birdseed words to scatter seaside, at the moon,
at an old photograph buried in the attic.
Once the permanence arrives, we are feverish with
entreaty: "Don't leave." "Not yet." "Not now."
But the daily work of keeping the body alive -
I barely notice the fragile skin around my ears,
the defenseless curve of calf, the virgin line of belly,
permeable as birch bark. Sometimes, I fling my own heart to the wind.
Tell me, what are we waiting to pray for?
on not getting a king-sized bed
It's true, standing in the middle of the showroom floor,
my eyes went glassy at the sprawling landscape of the
giant Simmonds Beauty Rest, its plump white
belly murmuring a sultry invitation to climb up
and fall asleep. So we lay there, both of us, open-mouthed
with excitement at all those extra inches, picturing the countless
Sunday afternoons we'd spend in bed, all the fresh love
we could make stretched across such a wide blank canvas.
But when I looked over, you were a million miles away,
and I'd retreated like a fallen army, alone and terribly lost.
adjustment
It's not just my bones in misalignment�
it's the thought that too much simplicity is dangerous,
paving the way toward an insomniac boredom or, worse,
an unceremonious decline into the forever that is death.
So easy to be swept into the dizzying kaleidoscope of headlines,
ignoring the cues from what remains perpetually, quietly unwritten�
the deer I saw on this morning's walk, her patient selection
of herbage from a neighbor's back garden. The way she gazed,
without drama, at her two-legged intruder, remained stock-still,
waiting for me to pass so she could eat in peace.
May
My office, an uproar of bills and deadlines.
Loose bits of paper I'm forever reshuffling.
The feeling that time is a pinhole leak in a circus balloon.
The lists I have begun to make for everything.
My growing population of gray hair.
The morning, gelatinous with conference calls.
The wayward musculature of my lower back.
The interminable piles of laundry and breakfast dishes.
What needs to be fixed or cleaned or thrown away.
And yet, this one promise made good: the lush, emboldened birth of May.
still life with poppies
Even threaded in the train tracks,
they're blooming - great apostrophes of orange
separating metal from vicious metal.
How do you save
what's left of the world?
The poppies are mutinous,
refusing to disappear,
slicing through each pulverizing mess
with the unstoppable precision
of fury and hope.
not enough sun and yet
The tomatoes are in it for the long haul.
Planted too soon in a hollow echo of cold shade,
they've stayed silent for weeks, peeking
shyly from the soil on the warmer afternoons,
watching for the first insinuation of early summer
to hit the northeastern corner of the back deck.
Now, mid-May, there's still not enough sun and yet
I can see it advancing�slowly, precisely—and I'm thinking how
even tomatoes have to wait for the right moment to rise up
and show themselves.
the next
Returning to the track last night to fulfill
my seasonal promise of maintaining a higher level
of personal fitness, I took the first half-lap by storm,
charging down the asphalt like a woman on a mission.
But then, turning the corner, my lungs�already palpitating wildly�
whinnied in defeat, and I had to stop to catch my breath.
From then, I tried a pared-down jog that took five times as long,
and I finished my last laps as the sun began its descent behind the hills.
At home, I felt the flash of self-congratulation, then realized it wasn't
this mile that would matter, but the next and the next and the next.
something of this day quiet
It's lovely outside, just the right amount of breeze
to make it feel like spring's still here. From my perch
at the desk, I see a ripening cherry tree circled by bees
in the neighbor's yard. The day is ripe for storytelling, yet the search
for words leaves my mouth dry, and I find myself, instead,
wanting to keep the airwaves undisturbed even by poetry,
something of this day quiet, virgin, unsullied by the strange dread
of trying to make art out of what is already art. At my knee,
the dog is fast asleep, having wiped himself out from his morning run,
taking deep, unwatched breaths, lacking for nothing and no one.
30 minutes of radio silence
You are taking the ferry in order to save gas, because right now it's hovering
near $4 a gallon and you think that's criminal. You are taking the ferry
to your downtown writing gig because the parking and bridge tolls alone
are eating away at your income, and because gridlock
makes you antsy and almost always makes you late.
But what you don't realize is that you are taking the ferry because
on this boat you are gifted 30 whole minutes of radio silence,
and you can't remember the last time you sat this quietly,
your eyes tilted toward a traceable horizon, the spray of solitary sea
pushing you back, making you forget the words to everything.
the monkey on the couch
He is softly familiar and easy on the eyes,
and while I lie here, feeding myself with bad television,
he sits alongside with a beer in his hand,
belching every so often in indolent satisfaction.
He does not say, "Shouldn't you be writing letters to Congress
or volunteering at the local soup kitchen or joining the effort
to clean up the tidal pools and coastal trails spilling over with debris?"
He doesn't remind me about the dentist or getting my skin checked
or signing up for yoga. He lies back, gorging on white noise,
unconvinced there is enough time left to change anything.
a poem for my father on his 60th birthday
It makes me strangely glad
that I
will never have
quite enough
of the right words
to say even
a fraction
of what it is
I mean when I say
I love you.
at best, a seedling
Next to the retired men at the Del Monte Golf Course,
I was worse than amateur, swinging so hard
my shoulders blossomed with ache by the 3rd tee.
In their billowy chinos and polo shirts, a cigar tucked squarely
between their lips, the men chipped and pitched and drove
the ball exactly where they wanted while I, at best
a seedling, zigzagged and stumbled through the course in jeans
and flimsy Converse, missing everything save the final tidy putt.
And yet, there was something of relief in playing this badly,
inching along with nothing to lose and so much still to learn.
the deficit of a bad night's sleep
I want to blame the dogs, I do, for howling
so impertinently at the scavenging raccoons outside
while I paw my way through the night's
second or third dream. But it is not their fault
my subconscious is a screwy machine, convulsing
with strange horror and vibrant pain I can't possibly
reckon with awake. In this nightmare, I am (I think) in Vietnam,
scanning a sepia landscape for mines, tiptoeing through wreckage
in the hopes of saving something�a bright swatch of cloth,
a wind-up toy, a teacup�any surviving remnant of what is still good and human.
back into the pool
The suit doesn't quite fit in the way she wanted but still,
it is serviceable enough for the laps she's planned for this
late afternoon, and no one's looking anyway. By now, the chill
at first entry is familiar, that briefly stinging kiss
of welcome. After that, and underwater, a consonance
of molecules, her lungs hording their long draft of air,
her body, arrowing forward, married to a single purpose �
what she has to do to get from here to there.
Later, swinging wildly at the undulating tasks at hand
She wonders why she hardly ever swims as well on land.
blackberries
it is not for nothing that I am here,
deep in a thicket of punishing brambles,
reaching at an awkward angle for the fruit
left at the far branches after a weekend's easier picking.
dark globes dangle like gumdrops, redolent with promise,
which is why I can ignore my ankles, tracked red
in the wake of low thorns, and why I don't even care
bees are hovering nearby, filling their own primordial hunger.
I will take this inconvenient pain, this careful science of patience
guiding me, at last, to the ripest of things.
On maintenance or Waiting for Bush to come to his senses
The leafblowers, with their gasoline-powered backpacks,
are destroying any attempts to keep the peace in this house.
I don't quite understand the task of gathering the dusty leftovers
of a hot, dry summer, further disrupting the earth by noisily hustling
her castoffs toward the garden waste bin. In my innocence,
I see this as the worst kind of intrusion, an unnecessary
displacement of that which has already been defeated.
Yet the men with the hoses are barreling through the yard,
razing the defenseless and the dead, blind in their disbelief
that something could ever flourish here without them.
how to celebrate August
Make your own popsicles. Watch a Little League game.
Take time to sew a button on something rendered unbuttonable.
Write a letter by hand. Contemplate a road trip.
Stop reading about famous actresses who will never know
your name or meet your family. Instead,
fall in love with the blank page, its solid, burgeoning potential.
Stay awake for crickets. Crawl through whole
midnights silent as wood, waiting for that bright
and throaty chorus. Eat fresh tomatoes. Return a compliment.
Lift your gaze. Call your mother. Commit to any available happiness.
view from the floor
Most days, I am rattling around somewhere near the ceiling beams,
a little unhinged by the sense of all that is still left to amend and improve -
a career, finances, love, the what-ifs of the what-nexts. But today,
I am tired of trying to keep it all on such a ringing high note,
so I'm putting my ass on the floor, a small pillow at my back for support.
What I notice first is how I can't quite see what's out the windows,
and the doorknob that could be the instrument of my escape
is too far to reach. Here, with the dogs peering at eye-level, the world
has narrowed considerably; I am stripped briefly of certain lofty imaginings,
down the beautiful, bare minimums of here and now.
sandbox
To my friend who is going on a first date tonight,
the friend who tends to anticipate...if not failure exactly,
then a lack of good fortune, a light diminished, a reversal of luck
precisely when it could have looked its most promising,
to this friend, I wish a return to the schoolhouse sandbox,
a happily gritty offering of slopey rides and monkey bars
from which all limbs assent to a raucous stretching. I wish her
the spinning carousel, the pendulum solitude of the rope swing,
the wide arc of the seesaw, buoying up its two animate bodies
with deliberate equilibrium, back and forth as long as they please.
on acceptance
What happened to the blackberry bush which had
poured out its heart just weeks ago? The branches
have been picked clean, retracting their promise,
and here you are at the edge of the baseball field,
clutching, emptily, your small white bowl.
If you wanted, you could stay there, waiting,
believing summer will come faster this time, more expertly,
hauling its treasure trove behind it. But if you do,
you will miss the eddying light, the soft bellyfuls of wind,
the sound of the river readying itself for rain.
eclipse
When you forget to stay up to watch the lunar eclipse,
you wake the next morning feeling as if magic
has slipped through your fingers, some brief portal of light
narrowing to a blip and then disappearing...not exactly forever,
but long enough to make you think you may have missed your perfect chance.
And yet, there is still this: a broad cup of coffee whirling at first contact
with the half-n-half. Your desk with its skeletal beginnings of work.
A passport waiting on the upper shelf of your closet.
Your love, reaching along a sharp corner, testing its stretch.
All that is waiting to be drawn from the shadows and illuminated.
back to school
Even after all these years, I can hear the first scrape
of bright chalk on the homeroom blackboard. Late last week,
I reminisced about buying fresh pens, stacks of lined paper, a binder
to catch the year's assignments, all of those frazzled midnights
spent etching out epiphanies from Jane Eyre or Ancient Greek
or the distant universe of Avogadro's number.
Now, my teachers have cleverly disguised themselves, taking the form
of patient deer and bad traffic, late summer baseball games, the flagging
reports on the local news. But in the end the lesson is still the same:
Have courage. Look closer. Take your time. Tell the truth.
lost in Alameda
Last night, driving on an errand through the small island town of Alameda,
I took a wrong turn, then forgot which direction I was meant to go
to get to the tunnel that would take me back to the freeway, back to the bridge
toward home. At first, I wanted only quick escape, a chance to click my heels
for an easy transport to where I was most familiar. How I began to dream, even,
of the clashing welcome of the dogs, who never hold back. And yet,
there was something darkly magical about spinning my wheels in this sleepy place
instead, away from highway, from the bright lights of the city, from all the noise
I look to for comfort and distraction. Here, it was just me inside a silent car, edging
toward street signs I didn’t recognize, alive with confusion and purpose all at once.
after a good rain
I was going to say something about clean slates and bright, new beginnings,
the beautiful nakedness that comes after a good rain has barreled through,
the world swept bare of its excesses, baptized and pure again,
and how the shiny sidewalks can make you feel like you're started over, too.
But the thing is, you can't just lie back on the grass like nothing happened,
taking in the full measure of sun. Even a tentative walk to the post office
tracks back dark cleatfuls of mud into the house, wet leaves plastering
your jacket sleeves. The rain is careless with its luminous offerings,
and it is easy to be deceived that the weather has passed for good, that the earth
can take so much and remain unchanged, sacrificing nothing for its own survival.
jetlag
Okay, so you're waking up at some ungodly hour,
eating a bowl of Cheerios by yourself as the dogs
amble toward the kitchen, confused yet
available to the idea of an early breakfast.
The jetlag has confused you, too, made you softer,
given you a thinner yet more forgiving skin, and instead
of cursing at the clock you are struck by the rare beauty
of 4 a.m.: the easy silence of the house, your patient spoonfuls
of cereal, a million stoic, sleeping silhouettes,
the tidy darkness that equalizes everything it touches.
what October isn't
The sliding glass doors of Good Earth
opening to a thousand boxes of strawberries.
The woozy chlorine dive at the deep end, then the bliss
of true submersion, an entire world made of otherworldly blue.
Ice cream chimes rounding the neighborhood, easy laughter
from homework-less children, all that new time on their hands.
Love, don't think me stubborn for summer, though I am a fool
for late sunsets, the crackle of firelight beachside. Soon, this house
will be a kingdom of hot chocolate and early sleep. But my mouth
is still restless with fruit, and my arms are still swimming.
lessons from fingerpainting
Of course, there is the rich art of making a mess,
having the courage to dive in, spread out, turn ink
into pure jazz, deliver fresh riffs from an old tune locked in the body,
release what is too ordered or over-considered or simply left alone
out of the desire to appear sane, more responsible, free of unfinished business.
And all of that is good, all that fleshy exploration, those haphazard collisions of
color, the lyrical abstractions of shape, the borderless searching—I get it.
But at some point you have to stop pushing the paint around
and rise from your work before you have exhausted yourself,
while the canvas is still wet and gleaming.
first rain
You didn't realize, exactly, how needful the dirt was.
Sure, you'd done the requisite watering, but below
those first inches is another world entirely, one which does
not announce its deficits until the plant is nearly toe to toe
with death. When the rain hits, all you can think about is finding your
book, closing the shutters, keeping the dogs dry, and how lovely the sound
is on your living room skylight. What you don't notice is that the downpour
has assaulted the outside pots, flattening their greenery to the ground,
exposing their subsurface stems and with that, their long-buried dreams of
true magnificence, a lasting bloom borne from deeper, faithful love.
10 thoughts on autumn.
1. The trees like manic paint strips – crimson, orange, amber, gold.
2. A sudden thirst for apple cider.
3. Your mother’s blueberry cobbler warm on the counter.
4. The lure of the bookstore aisles.
5. Blue sky a gift just for you.
6. The perfect scarf, wool socks, hooded fleece jacket.
7. Wondering what you will really need for winter.
8. Making bets on the first snow.
9. A momentary grief about aging, war, the planet’s demise, apocalypse.
10. How brave the leaves are, keeping their brilliance even as they fall.
Costume
I'm no longer running around in a white sheet
with a sackful of sweets banging at my side,
but isn’t it always this easy to find a good mask,
layer the body with armor, level the shield,
imagine only the things we can scare away, the world we hold
at arm's length because we think that if we actually got
close enough, we'd ruin it, dash our claws
through every precious seam? Maybe it’s always the same ghost
we’re hiding in, whatever old story we keep telling to keep us
from asking what it is we really want, and how much.
scrubbing the pots or a lesson in courage
What did E. Roosevelt say? "You must do the thing
you think you cannot do"? This morning, it seemed impossible
to meet the deadline of the garbage truck, or avoid the dogs,
or clean the kitchen of its tomatoey detritus, or figure out
the words for a poem I had promised.
Of course, Eleanor meant something a little grander
than hauling recycling to the curb or relieving the pets.
I don’t think she was talking about scrubbing the pots, or poetry.
Still, what better initiation into courage than the small miracle of a finished task,
clearing a space where life is waiting to be seized and shaken.
packing up
The new house beckons with its sprawling backyard,
for which I imagine the dogs will thank us vociferously.
There is a place, also, to attempt a vegetable garden,
to contemplate a barbecue, to lie back in a chaise
with a good book and an entire afternoon unfolding.
And yet, we will need to downsize, compact our things
into the house's fewer rooms, decide what to keep and what
to throw away. These next weeks we will attempt to identify
and purge the clutter, reduce the risk of too much mess,
learn how to make more of this new life with less.
the girl at the jewelry box
At the Sunday yard sale, we spent good muscles to haul
everything downstairs before 10 a.m., then focused on pitching
the big-ticket items - a stereo, bookshelves, a coffee table,
an antique desk - once the first buyers arrived. We were itching
to sell and sell fast, make decent money to offset the sordid cost
of moving, which could make us anxious in a heartbeat.
While we bargained with the grownups, a young girl was lost
among the spoils from a jewelry box, making neat
piles of her favorites until her father said to choose. And then, quick divorce
from a necklace I once loved, and a new story poised to start its course.
piece of me
When you're fair-haired and freckled, a visit to the dermatologist
is an exercise in fortitude. She will tell you, with a certain criticism
in her voice masking as alarm, she is nervous about your moles, so you must
now come in 4 times a year instead of two. Then she will proceed to draft a schism
in the constellation, circling a handful of suspicious stars with purple ink
before rendering them obsolete. Lying back in my flimsy, daisy-speckled gown,
I am willing myself toward calm as the doctor pillages my skin, trying not think
of the piece of me she is hell-bent on destroying, even those flecks of brown
which may have turned hostile. Instead, I turn my gaze to the veins
so graciously ferrying my blood, to my pounding heart, to the body that remains.