to explain wonder

it is after watching
the first basketball game
i could make it to this season,
and his team lost, and
he is disappointed, and
how can i explain
                             
                                 that that loss was
nothing, nothing short of amazing--and
i am in awe of his grace and
confidence and mind and
body moving in synchronicity--in awe of
how he can see all that is

happening around himself and
perform those miracles in
perfect focus. and that
it was such
a beautiful loss.  and i
am blessed by him, but can't explain

we are lying

this is our bay of night
the afternoon sun
our inked out sky
the pillows pulled
and spiraled sheets
and we are lying
on the floor
of desire

the walls, scale them

the walls we've built are brick and
brick and
high atop glass shards glint and
it is night, but climb. 

because we love as
earth loves earth, and sky the sky, but
imperfectly.  and

under the moonstorm trees bend
in the wind. limbs buck and bend in the wind and
so lean to me.  shiver and twist but

lean to me and see my dress, and i'll
let it slip, like this,
like this, and love,
take me in your arms.

petal

you call me petal and you have called me this
for thirty years and

       you say the long stalk of me is
       bear grass and bloom, and

                     you say: stay.  you say
                     stay as long as you can, stay as long
                     as you want.

                                   and you
                                   whisper of past and sad possibilities, and

all i can know is your body twined
in mine, skin and skin and skin and

       quiet.  and we are two.
       carefully, gratefully, and
              
                     we each hold the soft,
                     the secret, and the tenderest part of the other, and 
                     in my mind, i stay.  but i am already on the plane.

define failure

 

Today I felt like a failure. It was really more tonight, as I sat before the fire trying to read, and after Roy asked me to marry him.

He had just come in, and like a man on a mission gone straight to the kitchen, without saying hello, and I could hear things opening and closing as though he were looking for something he couldn't find, swoosh and clunk, and I could hear ice clinking, then he walked over to me in his mismatched socks with a bourbon on the rocks, and set it next to me.  And he smiled.  It was rare that I saw his top teeth.  I gazed past his shoulder and thought about how I had been happy moments before, reading Sherman Alexie stories, petting Lucky, and now there probably were cupboard doors and drawers left open and definitely were shoes in the kitchen and who was going to put those away.

Roy was silent as he got to his knee and how he asked me to marry him doesn't matter.  I heard the words but I was looking at his HIKE NAKED t-shirt, and before I could stop myself, before I could scan my thoughts through the Instragram wisdom filter of:  Is it true, Is it kind, Is it necessary? Or count to ten or do any of the other things one is supposed to do to be a successfully communicating human being, I pointedly stuck my finger on the line I had been reading and said, "Roy. I take my bourbon neat!"  Then I laughed loudly, maybe to play the situation off as a joke, add levity—maybe in mild panic--and his face slipped and fell and when I stopped the slightly hysterical sounding he just looked at me, and left the room.  I think he had been serious; I know I was serious.  Was he joking?

I could hear him in the bedroom shuffling around, things opening and closing swoosh and clunk, like he was looking for something he couldn’t find, which didn’t surprise me.  I heard a long zipping sound.  Roy came out and sat down, and looked at me with a pale, disheveled expression that usually filled me with pity, but somehow, today, did not.  Rinsing through my head were watery thoughts that Roy isn't a small child and his pants should be closed when he leaves the bathroom and I don't find experiments with how many days in a row a person can sleep in a shirt and wear that same shirt to work before someone complains of the stench amusing--at any age.  I said, "I don't want to marry you, Roy, but it isn't personal--I don't want to be married to anyone. " This may have been a lie, but to him or to myself I don't know.  And it may not have been a lie at all.  He replied that he was going to stay in his office.  I fished the ice out of my glass,  and chewed it before opening my book again. He got up and left.  I’d moved my finger from my spot, and where had I stopped? Chasing that line, I felt like a failure.  I didn't know what had happened.  I didn't know what was going to come next.  I found my place quickly—and I do think that what I said was true, kind, and necessary.

It's funny how we ignore red flags:  with eyes focused on the white flash of the destination, we register warnings en route only partly.  We stop for the hitchhiker, intuit that our gas tanks will hold much more than the E would indicate, we decide to wait for the next rest stop before pulling out to use the toilet.  All of these can lead to disaster, but often enough to keep us incautious, don't.  When I first met Roy, it was before the practically paperless days of today, when people used filing cabinets to store their documents in some sort of order or jumble, but at least contained in enclosed spaces, out of sight.  Roy had a filing cabinet, but it was empty, and instead, all across the floor of his basement were piles of papers, separated from one another but not coordinated other than in a vaguely concentric circle in which he could stand, in the center of it all, and look around the floor at his feet for what it was he needed.  When I saw this I was stunned by the glorious mess and overt visibility of it all, and I was charmed.  I did not think that he was showing me the hard metalled mechanisms of his functioning, and that those exposed gears were permanent.  I thought he was wondrous and other, and this was both true and my mistake.  I fell in love with him, though for all the years we have been together it has not been infrequently that I have found stray pieces of him spread so wide that they were actually in my belly button, and I have been resentful each time.  But I cannot say there were not red flags.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't know what love is, anyway.  For this reason I take

slight issue with my assertion, above, that I came to love him, when just before I noted that I had regarded him as wondrously other.  With certainty I thought that what I fell in was love, as I grew to know him.  But, I think my mind was blown by that otherness, that transparency: he was unlike everything I knew so well to be right and true, things like secrets, using filing cabinets, and not drinking and driving.  The line he sauntered was between order and chaos but he definitely tilted toward chaos, and this impressed me, kept me in an almost constant state of shock, and was addictive.  Too, while he was so relaxed as to be almost comatose with regard to certain things, he could be icily cruel, almost on accident.  And the blade of this brutality through puffs of softness was so familiar to me that I felt exquisite recognition, and a certain license to be the same.  That's what I came to, then: home.  I came to home.  I say this now in all honesty, but would be remiss not to mention that I'm not really that sure of anything.   Insanity is always so convincing, isn't it?

The nearest I can pinpoint to the beginning of this profound understanding of my own lack--but again, this is memory--was when I was old enough to wonder if I were beautiful.  I didn't want to be subjectively beautiful, I wanted to be objectively beautiful, but in a move that was equally desperate and fateful, the person I turned to to weigh in on this was my mother.  And mothers are not objective in their opinions of their children, which fact does not improve the outcome of this exchange.  At any rate, I asked, "Mom.  If you were driving down the street and saw me, would you think I was beautiful?"  And she replied plainly, merely, "John.  Beauty is as beauty does." And this answer meant, to me in all of my elementary school wisdom, that my own mother did not find me attractive.  This was probably not what she meant--or was maybe not what she meant, but it fossilized, the shame did.  To her credit, my mother had at least answered me in the way she best knew how, and did not tell me that boys should not be concerned with their own beauty, or that boys were not beautiful but were rather called handsome, or any other of the possible responses one could have when asked a delicate question by a young son.  My mother never overtly expressed anything other than love, in her way.  But we are limited, people, in what we can give.  It doesn't depend on what is needed at all--that is the myth of parenthood that can slay us, parent and child alike. I can safely say:  she did her best.  And it is not for me to judge the overall quality of that degree.   And like the turtle from the fable, this rejection lumbered along inside me, ready and steady and true to course, growing larger and larger until in my twenties, when it grew dissatisfied, trapped in a housing too uncomfortable to bear and unable to find another, and that is when I started cutting.

The first time, I was in my twenties.  I know that is late to start, but I was a late bloomer in many regards, and it's not like self-loathing, self-negating, or self-harming is a race.  I remember the relief of an actual physical pain, the relief of an actual flowing of blood that was the purest, loveliest shade of red I could imagine--the red of my childhood, the red of fire trucks whipping past with firefighters inside at the ready, my piano teacher's lips as she coached me to hold my hands as though they held an apple underneath,  the red of Christ's thorn-torn scalp as he suffered for salvation.  In this way the effect of cutting braided the emotional and intellectual.  I was mesmerized: by the chameleon nature of the blood of me, that it was blue inside my veins, and became red once freed--and by the metaphor of it: with each slice, and finally, I was receiving oxygen, was becoming.   The red instructed, saved.  There were so many things amiss, then, that this constant--a razor, a surface of flesh, and five seconds or less, the sting, the red, the breath, the rest--this sequence of constancy anchored me, and it was enough of an anchor, for awhile.  And then it wasn't.

And somewhere in my late twenties, after the hospital and all the rest, I met Roy, and I didn't need to cut anymore--he pretty much did that for me.  And he didn't need to hide his barely-functioning side--I pretty much did that for him.  We were a pair.

And when I tell you that there were red flags, unheeded red flags, and when I tell you that we tend to ignore them, for whom do you think the red flag was flying?  That is this story, the story of us.

pathos and logos spar in the nursery

“I want revenge.” said pathos plainly, and
logos returned, “I don't see why." And
adding to its judgment, it furthered its reply,

"You're the one who's wicked, and
she's the Hearthside Saint.”  To which
“Please define 'wicked'?” was pathos’ leading plaint.

And this request for the rational took logos far astray.
“It depends upon your frame of mind,” it was swift to say.

“Aha!” pathos cried out,  “Then sure you understand.  My morals
are my basic needs:  please help me craft a plan."

And since logic as it happens, is not altogether wise,
it joined pathos, id, and ego and they hatched a grand surprise.

hands

my hands have been empty for as long as it takes to

hold the air with certainty,

they know the heat

of pottery mugs in the dark morning, the texture of creamy

book pages turned hour and hour and hour uninterrupted, and the

sudden slip over the freshly shaven skin

of my calves.  they have been empty

for this long and they

carry my words before

setting them free to memory, and caress them, 

they way they did my babies, in

gestures of surprising passion.

my hands, with space to hold a body in them,
love fleeting things, love nothing, and 

when i imagine yours in mine, i see fullness, sweet and heavy,
and feel the quick burn of bourbon on my tongue, for a moment
and then gone.

myopia and the candle

flame and they are the pale moths come.

bold from the dark and

determined craving,

and with singular purpose

pushing. they are pushing toward lightness,
as shamelessly

as the moon pulls the skirts of the sea,

unafraid, and offering nothing

but their fragility--

this is the ecstatic cataclysm

of want. to capture bright and heat,

and the awful flailing against its hot edge,

and this is the sound of their smouldering.

this is the scent of their singe.

solitude

in a winter afternoon the romance,

of snowdown, treedown, alone,

in the woods small scutterings sound,

underbrush, nearby, it grows brilliantly,
dim and come alive,
come alive in a winter afternoon,

each faraway branch breaking a thump and

pulse of unknown, echo my heart
thumping pulse of unknown,

and evening, large ahead and crisp
quiet stretch, space stretch, time stretch,

breath, frozen in, frozen out, elastic

frosted thoughts reminding me:
i am alone in these woods and
there is no one to help with my plan.

in a winter afternoon the romance,

in the woods small scutterings sound,
underbrush, nearby, it grows brilliant,

come alive in an afternoon,

and evening, large ahead and crisp
quiet stretch, space stretch, time stretch,

breath, frozen in, frozen out, elastic

frosted thoughts.

winter

it is so easy to go.

one responsible, polite

breaking at a time,   

sinking unobserved into the soft horizontal sigh

of welcome, to lie down in found beds

of unhatched cicadas,

and bulbs of tulip, and tuberose sleeping

and to be still.

it is so easy to not rise 

like the crocus-bird, flying inches above some ice,

soaring amethyst and green 

against the whiteout sky

flashover

try to breathe but there is no oxygen or there is only oxygen and

we breathe together but we are so many degrees apiece 
and lifting your shirt, we touch and.

flashover.  skin to skin in the room blaze out

with no one to douse the flame and as

the alarm sounds, i am.  flyrock. 

sensible shoes

for many years, she had a lover who appreciated her sensible shoes,  and only borrowed

a little money at a time, who looked good in a tux and used cologne, and
who knew just how to unbutton her ann taylor loft blouses:  carefully, urgently.

  
and after moving the kids' helmets and skates, and your road atlas

and noting the coffee stained carpets, they enjoyed acrobatic acts on rainy

afternoons in her minivan and this kept your marriage strong.  you don’t know this.

but now he has died and no one told her, and after six black months of silence she found out

on social media, which is the way of death and modern lovers,  and the enormity of this loss

drove her a little bit mad, but you didn’t notice because of the steak and eggs.

they kept on coming, sliding onto the plate with a perfect regularity,  and only a little insane,

she kept the cutlery in the drawer, though she has started shoplifting again because

after twenty five years she can finally admit:  she has always hated the way you kiss,

and how else can she compensate for that now. 

marriage

i stood so still with

temptation poised on my head.

and you aimed below,

aimed for my hollows.

and i stood so still for you.

still, convinced of love,

i stood quietly

and watched you stretch the bow taut.

our life, before me

fingerprints

We agreed we’d pray together,

We dropped to our knees, face to face,
Two bodies posing

                        And now I can’t trust the art of asexual men

                        Who will make me wash the dishes after our erotic encounters

                        And complain of the ill-dusted towel rack.  

And when I touched your ears, I wanted you to touch mine with

the fronts of your fingers, the myth of you to join the myth

of me, and when we bent our heads together I wanted it

to mean something

if you will

i want you to read what i’ve written, but only

only if you will admit that daisies and dandelions are related and that what i have written

is fine.  i offer small-stitched goats embroidered by a blind woman on yellow silk, careening 

wildly, a perpendicularly sideways perspective, and pale green tendrils to entwine, and

impossible brass keys with ambiguous purpose, maybe to the dull entries in diaries burned long ago
or maybe to nothing.  or to everything, if you read,

read through the raw bruised shine to the pulsing beneath, that gives meaning to my pulp,

that gives color to the backs of my hands, that is the clink of ice against the glass trap and a

full marrowed snap.  open and open and the words do not matter so much

i want you to read what i’ve written, but only

only if you can look past despite and into because.  if you will 

look squint through the eye of the needle at the camel staring back at you

and see possibility, look to where 

the rich man has been standing at the door of great,

cut, passed by, because.  then i want you to read what i have written

and i have a dream

what’s the difference between the dark brown and white speckled ones?

ambiguity.

generic names.

dark brown, oval seed,

 

lotus bead eyes.

we sacred, perennial, we aquatic and pure. 

we sprang from the divine

navel. 

and this earth is the pedestal on which we sit

or stand.  heaven birthed, we are the

eyes of creative force  

and will live in mud for hundreds of years.

counting while reciting our mantras.

follow enough tangents and

seeing comes, loving comes

bubbling to the surface hard and 

dense.  with small holed  

moons and tiny black stars.

high density as resin and wood textured,

a solid and dense we.

we is the mystery

solved

he had a dream

and i see a school principal raising her babies alone because her family wants
better things, a love separated

for 13 years, and reunited when finally

the money is enough and the legal path is cleared, and six months of together later,

dad is dead of an American heart attack and mom

is working the Wendy’s window and cleaning offices at night and i see the three

boys from El Salvador, that the other kids calls taco, sleeping on chairs in the living room

and raising themselves with a one bedroom roof over their heads and a soccer ball

and no English and no warring and. 

and i see a woman smuggled into the country in a roll of carpet in the back of a truck

to be with her green card holding husband,  a surgeon bagging groceries and
delivering it to online shoppers all day until evening, when he drives uber,

driving drunks home from the Kennedy Center, being called brother

by slow slurring middle aged hipsters who want the music louder and sing

sloppy in the back seat and might vomit at any moment,

one car, one ride at a time toward a better future for his daughter who isn’t allowed

to go outside other than to school and a wife who can't work and ICE breathing down
everyone's necks and.

and i see achievement gaps in top high schools,

statistics mulled over and worried like broken beer bottles

into sea glass by the board of education, and finally

after a year of deliberation

and emergency meetings, steps are taken and these are renamed

opportunity gaps,

and every student receives a new personal computer,

and my students don’t have internet at home and

no one talks about that.

and the children are painstakingly writing out their dreams

with borrowed pencils and borrowed paper and are

chewing gum against hunger and with eyes open

spend a strictly timed 90 minutes writing five paragraphs describing

that with a roof over their heads and no official war, they

will see their dreams of being professional athletes and the
best doctor in history come to pass, after all the sacrifice made

by everyone who is anyone they love dearest, including God,

through prayer and faith and His good grace,

their dreams will come true if they just believe in His power enough, 

because in this worldly place, somehow one thing is sure

they don’t believe in themselves. 

home

clear rain washed concrete,

and seagull feathered air blew.

and mist rolled to land,

in the center of

a sidewalk in a city

of hills, the leaf scent,

green scent of fern and

leaf, of algae and wind, of

the insides of shells.

this is cologne of
outside, streaming from your skin
this is your wild, mine

growing

From crisp summered perfume of dew coming in the screened door

on the early morning breeze and coffee, and scrambled eggs, and
strawberry freezer jam on grandma's warm biscuits and

marijuana plants growing tall outside the window, behind
the bearded iris and behind the rainbow of gladiolas and
before the sunflowers, with their sunshinepie faces trembling down
on us, banks of flowers with secrets, and

a fort under the skirt of the Japanese maple where we could read
about Betty and Veronica in the shade and occasionally glance
through the weepfall branches at the strange people

who were our relatives wondering at the figs fattening on a branch, and
plucking sprigs of basil from great green pillows of it, and
plucking raspberries from the vine, and sucking whole eggs in and out
of the slender necks of liter bottles to amuse the children,

and the scandal of the aunts who didn't wear bras under their t-shirts, and
Mount Rainier was in the background, and the sky was
the clearest bright blue of all of our eyes, to afternoons with

prostitutes appearing from beside scarlet rhododendron hedges 
on the side of the road, cars weaving through the rain and
slowly near and stopping, red lights flashing quick and then white and
disappearing again and we didn't understand where they went,

what they did, who they were, and then you.  That crystalline
night I pushed your car over the ice to the nearest service station and
advised you call the police for help,

stupid youth, stupid me, with those tracks up your beige arms
and I took you from under the stars to the hospital instead and
I held your hand, and they lanced your abscess, and I fainted

stupid youth, stupid me,
dizzy from the bright florescent light and
the stench of this life,

Pinesol saturated the air and
nothing was clean anymore, anyway.

Hisses

you would have been dead a year when

i learned of it, and i did not feel sad and

i did not feel happy.  i feared the

energy that had splashed from your many heads
into the universe,

the ferocious ink and dribble of your soul, vicious
sprung free

you still, my chocolate nightmare

you lurk hydra in my me, you

slither down my back, sneak attack,

a liquid cocoa poison,

oozing wounds 
until i wake

it’s still the same.

and no one there was listening.

so i salt my apple pies and

i iron the pillowcases and i

dream that i can run

from believing.  dream that

relative is a place,

beyond seduction
                    thrust and recoil

and love is a place,

beyond seduction 
                    thrust and recoil 

but all those years i

looked like hell and was
an embarrassment, from you 
i earned one dull black stone
and

you still, my chocolate nightmare

you live hydra in my me, you

swimming down my back, sneak attack,

a liquid cocoa poison,

ooze from my wounds 
until i wake

your long cinnamon breath, your slippers and 
sad eyes, your kindness to everyone around me

rendered

me 

dirt 
and cake my sleep, fear i keep

you still, my chocolate nightmare

you lie hydra in my me, you

trickle down my back, sneak attack,

a liquid cocoa poison,

oozing wounds 
until i wake

and you are still my nightmare