Tumble

Tear it down.
I bit back the thought, love
It’s a hard idea
And when I set the table tonight
And smoothed my napkin in my lap
And felt my own revolutionary hand
Wipe across my thigh
I made a “no” flick
With my head
To nudge the thought out

I am not the crash of an era
And this is not the eclipse of an empire
It is just
Dinner
It is not the parting wish of a prince
It is not the last cry of the last Caspian Tiger
Not even a plate
Holding a late October plum

But as the fork teeters in my hand
And I see the subtle bend to my fingers
The same bend I saw
My great grandfather use to clutch me
I suddenly believe in the evolution shaking
At the end of my strong young arm

And I bite
And I swallow
And I wait for the fall
And in my mind’s eye I watch me
Tomorrow
Full
And kicking the stately ruins
Like nothing but bottle caps
The tumble like trimming
To a wide and busy sidewalk

tonic

A comment wormed from childhood
Protests that life delays
And once averted stations us
In heaven, bounty paid
Used as a balm to every when
That hasn’t had o’clock
Quells private revolutions
If a thunderbolt unlocks
So just sit tight, appeals the voice
And let the tonic spread
Eternal life is promised you
Just wait here 'til you’re dead

Mine

Tonight, I am tasting the Atlantic on my tongue
I think of the spray as swallowing the end of my country
And sampling the beginning of Europe
I feel like an ambassador
Soul kissing the continents
I point my face in the direction of Ireland
And offer myself to it and the lands beyond
With America at my back
I say
Mark me, Old World and New
I exist to touch you like a builder
We have kissed and You are mine

Constant North

Tonight I stretch and think of you
I put on my new boots, the watertight ones
A coat, a scarf, two gloves
And I go out walking north
As an explorer would
The wind puts its hands on me
Like a bouncer
And I travel bent
Into the total eclipse of winter

I don’t think of arriving
Or the journey
Or even of you now
Only the sound of the trucks passing
The fixed harmony of machines
Invincible gears
Eternal hums
Behind me, at me
Longing away
Gunshot beams staring forward
Like the possessed eyes of a painter

Awe at first threatened me
But now
Makes me feel safe and steady
Like I, too, am inevitable
A tardy, but inescapable, season
Only
That thing that was my light
You
Is indistinguishable now
Behind the blast of constant horizon
Oh I fear the machine of me
Will continue far past you
Into Canada and beyond
Wiping all memory of home away
As an obstruction on my windshield

corners

It was a quiet little corner
And I had gently folded up
Like human origami
Arms crossed on my lap
Neck long and twisting
Ankles laid one on the other
A single paper crane

I saw the other woman
In her little corner
Leaning on her bracelet
And cutting her eyes sideways
With one remaining yawn of shrewdness
Extinguished
The man, smiling back without delight
His arm around her shoulder
Like he had slipped it
Into her purse

My corner felt big
A lifeboat before its filled
Still lashed to the side of a ship
A hollow but friendly vessel
Agreeing to carry a paper bird
As they gathered like a crowd
On a dance floor across

Then, perched in my corner
On the verge of wondering at
The spectacle of their clinking glasses
I abruptly dismissed them
The way I'd inevitably turn from
The sight of a vacationer
Fretting before the whizzing windows
Of a slot machine

harness

As a buckle to the doorstep
And the city’s forceful draw
She knits the house and landscape
To pull the wheel of all
Then works to stare down morning
With level eye and lip
And convince all to work as fuel
Instead of driver’s whip

The Getaway

And so there is all this space
The space of a table set between us
And I have perched myself listening
And you have leaned yourself in
And we enjoy the table like the ridge of a fence
Or the middle cushion of a large sofa
Mutually relieved to see the face across
Inhaling an air made fresh through remembrance
Like a man back on his native soil
After a difficult and lonely trip
One on which he hadn’t the heart
To hope for return

And so to think of a get away
To think of the way home from this
Gets muddy
Because this feels like the arrival back
The trip up the front steps
And my question about your doctor
Or your sigh about my job
Seems a molecule removed
From the finger round your belt loop
And the breath upon my blouse
And the road out is obscured
By a tangle of growing green

The Fever

I had wanted to tell you, Doctor
That when you reached over me
Lost in your employment
The thread from your blue shirt
One evicted thread
Had hung above my lips like a fishing line
And in the terror of illness
In the swim of my body’s madness
I accepted it, as a prescription
I let the thread hang on my tongue
Greedy for it
Assuming some cure

But I know now, Doctor
Now that I can sit up in the bed
And take my food without help
That it was merely
A sign of your man’s carelessness
A thoughtless thing dropped
Over a lolling creature with the darting eyes
Of an animal

But I must tell you
While I am confessing this
While I sit here, well, but depleted
My hair all wet
My nightgown gathered to me
I must say that in my fever
I had such clear dreams
The ones that seem like memory
Or prediction

The story now is lost
But in my dream
You had filled my mouth
With something that worked
Like concrete
You had done it on purpose
So that I could not speak to you
To watch my expressions
To direct my gaze to you
To force my little hands
To flutter signals for everything
I could ever need to say

And even now
As I tell you this
As you hold your blue cuff
As you stare silently
At the sharp crease in your pant leg
With that startled, condemned expression
The memory of this implausible handicap
This indefinable and airy crime
Has made me ill doctor
‘Til now
It has made me mute

tomorrow morning

In the morning you’ll write a poem
Not now
Do it tomorrow
When your mind is fresh
When you can sit, day lit
With all the optimism of coffee
And write something about ambition
Or the bend in the road

In the morning
You will know your limbs
All over again
And come to realize the head of hair
And recall the glory of a bank account
Whatever its contents
And sound
Like a national anthem
Or like the stir of a triangle
Your pinky lifted
Purr thinking of the sunlight ahead
Your home away from home

And then
When you press your soles down
one to the hard carpet
the other to the wooden floor
You will recall the shape of the world
And that while it is under you

It is not you

And then
You will feel the electricity of that collision
The blast of it, its big bang
And a poem at that point
Like the dark sliver you cut
Into the white air
Will be the inevitable
And collateral cousin
To the launch of day

cocked

He saw himself a student
And thus set free to be
As yet unschooled in everything
A cocked capacity

“I know I’d know the numbers
If I cared to see the sum
But better just to walk towards school
Than ever have it done

"There’s the bench I pine on, Mondays
At lunch I thrill at gates
On Fridays I just grab my chest
Slumped under nameless freight"

And so he stands at windows
He marks each weekday’s pass
Tucked snug into a dignity
Expectant ignorance

Should I tell the splendid novice
Conclusion not his key
To evaporate approaching is
Arrival, finally

The Arrow

Because I saw the brute because I saw him
Because I said, “you are a brute”
Because the policeman stared at me
Like I held the gun
The red blank impassable cube
My face
Because I had felt somehow
Like an arrow shot into sunlight
Shaking with velocity
A single clearing hot sweep
Into pale skies
Because of this
When I had finally put my body
Into a bed
And pulled the blue sheets to my neck
And forced myself to close the light
And bid myself, earnestly, to dream sweetly
I thought of my life
Like a final draft
And remembered myself
As my favorite character
The one who said
What I had hoped she would say
The one who knew me
In my most private conversations
And the one I would long for
After the book was done

barefoot by the window

My Dear, remove your wallet and change
press the hair out of your eyes
could you
stand in the light
don’t try to find
what rolled under the dresser
find me, here
bare footed and ticking even
unbothered and slender
a needle washed to the top of a haystack
put your fingers across my fingers
i like to think of sewing when you do this
and stand still while I remind you
of the first time we kissed.
Bend your face down to mine
turn to the window
you showed me the skyline
my lash passed a shiver
over your rushmored bones
don’t worry, the pain of waiting
will last just a moment
your skin is like canvas
something unused and
waiting for color
my small mouth flushes red
against the desert of your
hard temple
pressed, drawn, then deposed
the kiss slides from mine
to yours
the bridge of this breathing
the success of this meeting
here again
in our first kiss

bent to splendor

A hurricane is promised me
So on the skies I’ve trained
And grabbed my throat in ecstasy
And recoil of the rain
And on my tongue I’ve tilted breaths
Of terror and relief
And forced to move my fingers
Like the welcome to a chief
My muscles stiff to splendor
But obedient in the end
I duly bare my body
Like the saints do to their sins
I’ll never know what holds the sky
Nor never understand
Why keeps its temper from our skin
That waits on its command

Someone's Boy

And when I walked the blacktop
And saw the boy at play
I shivered when I saw the case
For lengthening the days
And when he craned to watch me
Accusation on his brow
I saw the need for turning down
The love I felt somehow
And when he went back to his play
It altered just a bit
For now he knew my heart was in
The capture of his mitt
All afternoon we never spoke
But plainly stayed a pair
Until his dinner called him home
And left me dizzy there.

suspicion

I have a small suspicion
That like a block does weigh
That in this life love brushes by
And solitude does stay
I do not think this has to be
But must if men do spy
The sight of spinning heaven
As the place that makes them die

Beethoven

i should tell you before this thing goes any further,
before you try to convince me that your cuffed shirt
and the fact that you have never cheated on any of your girlfriends
is Something,
before you start to weigh whether I would be the girl to meet your mother,
and would i be good on double dates,
before you reach across the table to start the compromise in motion,
you should know that once i sat and watched a pianist talk Beethoven to me.

"this is the whole of me, " said Beethoven.
i listened,
and in the end i could not imagine that he had written anything else
what else was there for him to say?

wait, before you place your hand on my knee, i think you should hear this.

"this is what I am," he said. "this is everything i have ever been.
this is everything I have ever been frightened of,
this is how big the world has seemed to me, when i was little, yes,
but not just when I was little,
this morning
when I stepped outside and let the mist drop on me.

"and all the terror and lust that largeness has put inside me,
this is how i began to climb it,
this is how i faced it, lungs sick with anticipation,
thin air, dizzy delirious, mad with hunger
lonely as the last man
and when i helped myself to the world, finally,
when I held it as mine, this is what it felt like for love to come over me.
this is what it was to bend her back
and be bent by love
'come and let me have all of you,' i said to the world,
and then there was no argument

"and this is how i will die, and what a painful admission that will be,
to concede to let go of her,
this world, that even I will have to let her go,
how i will have to watch her slide away from me,
that she will go on without me, how i will call after her,
this is how my voice will sound as it leaves my body,
and how i will look up, once, into the trees, squinting,
and this is how i will let her go,
this here,
finally and with all my love
and this is me placing the final word on my life,
and what a sublime act, to say
'this was me, I was, and I was this.' "

and when i heard him say all this, i knew, at that moment,
that i could never love anyone but Beethoven, not ever,
i could never do better than him, and i could never allow worse.

So. clap your mouth on mine, if you must,
but you should know now, that my heart is gone up the mountain with him.
forever.
this is the whole of me
here in this dim room,
in my heels, haloed by this hair,
draped in that soft piano music
this is me, I am, and I am this.