June 2010
4 posts
Once in a vision I walked across deep land to clothe myself at the mirror. Who I wanted was reflection of me shadow of me— for her to thread the body through the needle of waking life— now salt from the bone of memory gathers, clouds behind the eye.
a love affair
You sat at the table turning wine into sweet grapes and I gorged myself on your voice; it was late. I followed you to the canals, saw only your footprints, you forgot my name and I was happy. Happy! Bridges spoke with mouths agape while strangers made love in windows and you were just a shadow by the water, under the streetlamp, whispering words I’d never heard before, in a grammar that still...
invocation
If I am to write, then page, fold into small windows and river of ink run up it, in this broken mirror I see my face. The wooden ribs of a house are scored with teeth marks, braille of swallowed prayers— you’ll find me in the rafters, palms pressed against the echoes.
marina tsvetaeva
She sings and then cuts through thick salt air, wakens the children, who think they’ve heard the crash of waves. It must be — the taking of water into water; the taking of line into line. Dash on the mountain, red sheet on the clothesline — she is watching from the well, mouth full of rope.
May 2010
4 posts
Because here flows even some hope from a bottle, he drinks to a wooden table all his evenings. Now the window opens to breathe; the music hangs around him smoothing his brow when he is all shadow. On the stairs, behind the light, under the portrait, he will drink himself out of the pool of memory, he will carry a folded letter writing to itself. Tasting honey, he screws on the top but the bottle...
Sinful women. Always unbraiding the night. Leavened breasts hurry the dark and the light of daybreak whips at lovemaking but something hums against the silence… Oh girl. I should have told you. There is a balm to stay the hurt, to ease the swelling, but nothing for those hollowed eyes, that plaintive hum. Oh girl, my girl. Listen to the mournful women, meet the quiet eye.
They said to love was to own was to steal— But what of leaving? how I was no one’s, the snake’s skin shed, curling on the floor.
Blouse unbuttons and I have fear. Surely the heart gives us away, with its stutter of feeling so fast broken it slows all else. You must see me shaking — the smallest ripple somewhere began. It feels like a folding, a foolish unpacking of myself into you.
April 2010
4 posts
I have a bed not a desk with windows that look while I sleep. If you had asked me in the morning what did you see? I would have told you that dreaming you is seeing you not through the window, but in it.
It is a slow memorizing. First the eyes. Brown swallows brown swallows me. Now I am ever searching because to what can I compare them? Nothing is lovelier. Lashes rising to meet — my gaze. Heavy with — not love — but a wondering. You bring me to darkness. I don’t even know your face yet; the distance from your lips, parted in smile, to your lashes will take a lifetime. To learn you would be a...
Haggard swollen teacup, chipped at milky edge, carried for only the morning— our sister’s breath on porcelain china cooled in an instant the tea we heated. Tired, watery, unseeing, her bluing eyes unmade the old photographs of swaying to the music under the shade of the lindens. Young, blind from crying aloud as one, we lifted up the stylus, as if she was listening through a veil one wall beyond...
To Nastasya
How thick the cloth is that covers your body. He didn’t know why he pierced such skin. Your name, I wake with it on my tongue, it slips through teeth. How can one believe in your name? His love was no horizon. It stretched, limitless circle, across his chest, digging its talons deep to cool down love. I saw you through the window, my hand was in the flowerbox. The fortochka, unhinged, loosened his...
March 2010
4 posts
When the sky folds into itself, at first with hunger, greedy, devouring color, now gently, lovingly, until unclothed, when night spreads its mourning veil — I walk. Thick from sleep, my tongue murmurs some love song given to dream’s ear by waves — they whisper softly, hug the curve of shore, sigh, and fall away. Yesterday’s rain has cooled everything, even my ardor. Now, stripped of swollen august...
The pail is full of rainwater, so it is already dark outside. Leaning forward, I touch my face, reflected, and it scatters. It is in this way that I first hear your footsteps, soft as if the ground reached up to meet your feet and guide you forward.
I would’ve lived with you then in a house with swollen eaves to hear the swallow by river of rain and your voice through hollowed walls. And in the house, afternoons hug spider web corners, there is an art to the folding in of things. You look so small, asleep on the ticking. On the wall — a pietà. I touched your face in sleep and it became my face. I found the suture, loosened the stitching, a...
Before he took up with her he had been smelling like tea leaves and jazz riffs — something mixed up, lost and familiar that clung to the august air long after he split from that corner with the five and dime where the mother is always breast-feeding in the thick shade of the COLD BEER awning. He must’ve tired of how city streets have a way of making you forget where you came from. you walk on a...
February 2010
5 posts
No one noticed the roses were burning, had been burning since last night, ever since the preacher went to bed and stuck his hand out the window to try to feel the rain, soft. No one noticed the roses were withering, giving up their cheap red to orange flame, letting blue light lick the parted lips. But the preacher is asleep now, with his smelling of rain hand draped across his face, he is...
You came expecting loam that you could sink your teeth into, that would smell of dew, that would maybe make breath, but this is dirt, this is dust and it sticks to your lungs and cakes your tongue and hardens your spine because there is no water, no rain, nothing save that warmth blurring your vision, stinging your prayer-worn lips, and staining the earth, but you don’t notice because all you can...
she smelled like oranges. as if she plucked the sun, cracked it like an egg, sucked the sweet rain of blood-red crescents, and let those seeds flower in her mouth. she smelled like oranges.
His hands — rough, ashen, calloused. My hands have never been so rough. I braid the grass, leaf through books. He pulls the rope, touches the sun directly, feels the jackhammer reach into the earth, splitting streets into pebbles. But at night, weary, when we see the same moon framed by the onyx sky, we might both think of home. What if I washed them? What if I kissed them?
salt
When they placed the salt upon your tongue did it remind you of the seawater that you hoped would hold the hollow ribs? You were made into the small space, bodies scrape wooden sky with no place to relieve yourself, so it is hard to tell the living from the dead. And when you read the dream of a robin lying at your feet with the sunset on its chest— The water stops the pass, they sang, but not...
October 2009
2 posts
I think about ink on my skin, ink on your skin, your skin on my skin counting your freckles instead of sheep — so many, I forget every night.
sleep and wake up.
Dawn breaks — Something jolts me from sleep, the riptide of dreams breaking away from the heartbeat in my hands. I packed my suitcase full of telephone wires and dial tones — I’ve been waiting to hear your voice appear on the other end. Outside my window the lisping whisper of rain fills tulip cups.
September 2009
2 posts
3 tags
What if your sheets still smelled like me? Fragrance is fragments of me rubbed off onto pillows. Did you know I’ve been calling out to you? You stand like a pillar at the center. Such weight cracks bells and thunder rumbles streets until car horns wail… and I awake to remember it’s you— You are some inconstant shape, cut out, gone. And I hear the gallop of train whistles threatening to...
2 tags
calla lilies
Words too big caught between heart and mouth, these are seeds amongst pebbles that make it to the soft place and take root, so if I’m not careful tarnished petals may flutter out of my mouth with inky love letters written on those silken pages.
August 2009
6 posts
4 tags
The Guest by Anna Akhmatova (1914)
All as before: blustering snowflakes blew Against the dining room window frame, And I myself am nothing new, But to me a man came. I asked: «What do you need?» He said: «To be in hell with you.» I laughed: «Oh, I suppose you read Misfortune for us two.» But having raised his dry hand, He gently touched the flowers: «Tell me how they kiss you, Tell me how you kiss.» And his eyes, looking blurred,...
1 tag
has anyone ever sung has anyone ever sung (cant shake these words out of my mouth) has anyone ever sung to you something that makes you weep because it touched something deep inside that you forgot was there? that you tried to forget was there? like when water hits the skillet and those molecules burst because nothing is ever lost because it can’t be destroyed because you can take a pick-axe...
3 tags
…and now camera lenses are permanently fixed over eyes. you look the same in every picture head tilted, arms akimbo. but I remember you best emerging from the chaos of snowflakes framed by my window, like a polaroid taking shape, coming into focus.
3 tags
Now, I know because I learned About the vena cava And the aortic pump That hearts are Things unromantic. But mine is a wishing well With penny-dreams Gathered at the bottom.
3 tags
flowers crawl up my sheets unweave my braided hair. like garden thieves we whisper. recalling dreams is trying to sew together tattered slips of silk that float upwards when you reach.
4 tags
white nights
rub your legs together like cricket summer symphonies. eternal heat-stick on my thighs. cool never comes when the sun lights the nights, when shadows play along the canal. even from afar, your lips, like a good red wine, warm my heart-space.