Is a quiet little thing
It’s tinny plop, a wet stone at the bottom of a long dark well.
No one remembers the eight small steps taken
But you can stand there in the dark and feel the water lapping at your feet
You can wear that wet emptiness like a burlap sack
And you can look through the needles eye at the top of the shaft,
And strain to remember/to forget, what the stars,
Booming balls of carbon and gas exploding,
Felt like on your face.
I made a bed for myself.
I was so very tired in my little red jacket.
So I lay my small body down, closed my big blue eyes
Let my little house blow down.
I want to climb under your language and wear it as a skin hat.
I want to carry you around on my head, like a market basket in Marakesh.
You are my food. I will take you into my body. You will bring me nourishment.
On my body, you will be bared, like a beached whale, jettisoned back to the tide.
I am the tide. I will bring you home.
And you can take me with you. I’ll take you and you can take me.
We will be heavy weight champions. We will be newborn babies.
We will learn to walk and talk and we will dance at parties we would otherwise have no knowledge of.
We will scale the fleshy flanks of the tower of babel together.
One morsel, one tendon, at a time.
Each whispering itself closer to eternity,
On a bicycle built for two.
Great expeditionists that we are,
We are the clumsy architects of change.
We are the rungs on a ladder.
We are all that is whole and mysterious.
Please let me peak into the tea leaves. Please.
There is no terror in love.
There is only terror in gunfire, in rape, in nothing else.
I know these things as much as I know each one of my fingers,
Each tender digit named carefully after the constellations inside myself.
Named Richard, Betty, Stue.
Named, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.
Named Take Me Away From Here, and No, There Is Nowhere Else To Go But Here.
But still. Be still.
Calm yourself. Teach yourself. You are all.
The teacher comes when the student is ready.
You are both.
You are all.
You are each.
And everyone.
You know this.
My sunflower seeds grow in my pots, on my folding table, in my small kitchen.
I had no idea they would ever burst through the soil
I thought, for sure, I was sending them to an early grave.
Death by exfixiation.
But now the burst, and bloom
Now they look at me,
“ I told you so,” they say to me
“We’re here,” They scream from the soil.
Precocious and fearless little things.
I brought them here—
Just enough optimism to will them into this world.
And now each of them,
With their tender fragile boughs,
Will me into buoyancy,
Ask me to leave my kitchen.
My love speaks to me in code.
A dewey decimal system spelling my torso into some stack somewhere.
The relic itch of longing antiqued by loss.
I want this. To take it in. To hear the explosions. To know finally that it is gone. Know, finally, that its all slipped away, like silt on the bottom of some marine animal domicile. At last drifting away down the drain. Done.
Oh, but remember when that lovers juice had fogged your eyes? Made it impossible to know anything but the folds of a baby’s hands? You watched the folds being made.
And still.
And still.
You had no control over where the crags and crevices would lay,
Willey nilley,
Fallen.
Archers make patterns in the snow.
You on an observation deck somewhere in Deleware.
You didn’t even know it was a state. But what of it?
Its time to step outside.
To feel the fog and not be afraid.
It’s a time for courage.
It’s a time for knowing without seeing.
It’s a time for hearing the faintest tinkering of a soul stirred, somewhere on the other side of the world.
Somewhere inside me.
I don’t want anything to do with anymore of this.
Here in the trees, its nice and warm, the light is honey and the trees are veins.
If someone could strike a match it would combust, and that would be fine too.
The nature of things is as such.
As it always has been.
That this equilibrium is really the absence of something stronger.
Less dilute.
More like a match.
More like brute force.
Muscles of matches.
Arms of flames, entangled.
Knarling bits of shards
Of nature,
In plastics and metals and dry foliage we meet.
In winter shrapnel pulled snug around our necks
We shake hands.
Thinking outdoorsmen.
Ministers of Maple syrup.
If I could hurl this across the lawn
In great dry heaves
In big wet breaths
Across the plexi that divides me from everything around me.
If my thrust could make a dent in the air.
If my nostrils could breathe in anything but heat and dead skin,
Well, then.
We’d really have something, wouldn’t we?
