Poems

Now, there is a new man who has a bent finger
carved into a curve as if it was something that could be graphed.
It reminded me of my Ex- and his accident.
The way his fingers had to be refigured to resemble themselves,
the skin stretched and patterned across the new muscle,
with the mottled print of science and fabric.
This new man asked if the bend in his finger bothered me
and I said No–
but I told him about my Ex and his hand, the way it had been
caught like a vivisection between tree and car.
Change, both simple and permanent.
Nothing that you would guess would happen.

Us new and together, almost naked, in bed, at our beginning,
talking damage, as if to say, "you will never be a First."










I am a little sad

I am a little sad. It’s the way that sad sounds like a damp washcloth. Cool to the touch
and soft like the inside of an oyster, as fragile and solid as rain. There is no future or past.
It is more now than the hands of a clock-- time is always playing catch up. There are two
parts to the word, sss and add. Sound and more.

I walked down a hill yesterday in clogs that pressed my toes into the front with every
step. My body relying on gravity and science with all of its guarantees, the way a mother
should tuck the edge of the blanket above the box spring until there is the gentle pull of safety.

Daily routines stacked like dishware. Checkbooks measured in withdrawls and deposits,
the way the tide lands a shell along the sand and takes it back. Nothing exists in one
direction. Sleep-wakeup. Clean and dirt. Seed and flower and mulch and sun. We are
always reaching back to construct the future, the way a tree needs to push its roots farther
into the ground to stay tall and branch; with wooden fingers that exist without the
clarification of language.

Shut in my bedroom with closed doors and the windows pressed down and covered as if
sitting shiva for the day. I saw the view in my room and said, "There is my life’s work all
around me. As unknown as the letters that exist between A and B. The view inside is a
landscape that exists with out sky and ground or horizon. It is desire and satisfaction,
hope and hopeless that meet and talk, like old friends, rubbing up against one another as
large as tectonic plates and as small as an exhaled breath.










I want to unbend my heart

I want to unbend my heart and let it straighten
as slow as a spine being gently muscled into its standing position.
I want my heart to have weight, like snow that will bend a branch
Until its tips makes grooves in the earth.

Summer 2004
At the edge of the nighttime lake
Kristopher and I sit on a bench. Naked after a swim.
I am holding in my belly as if trying to press it against my spine in order
to show him that is flat enough to be touched.
We drink wine and talk about hang gliding and Christina, the new girl
he is going to fly with next weekend.
he shows me how they will strap into their wings and harness,
bodies pressed together like palms held in prayer.
And how they will use their shoulders to mover through the air
as if they were stones being thrown across the surface of a pond.
I lean towards him and my neck is curved down like a roman arch
as if to say, "It is O.K. and I understand, and I surrender."

Summer 2008
Marco sits in the opposite chair and draws my portrait.
His eyes switch from my face to the page and back; very fast.
The table is narrow and my knees bang hard into the pedistal leg
That makes it tilt back and forth as if it were rocking heel to toe.
I can see the charcoal marking the page, lines both thick and thin,
As if to draw were the act of unveiling a latent image;
whole and complete the way the form of the body can exist
inside a smooth block of marble, waiting to be carved.
It is when you are seen that you are pulled into being
the way the vibration of sound needs the ear with its silia and bones
in order to be heard.










Signs.

I

I have dreams about Scott--
as a waiter in Ann Arbor.
I’m watching as he walks between tables
balancing an empty tray and a napkin hung over his forearm
with the stillness of a flag folded for ceremony.

His head is bent too-far towards his shoulder
as if being held in a brace
and his hair is animated as if hand drawn.
He doesn’t know I am there.
I am waiting to be seen.

II

In another, Scott walks straight to me.
He looks at me standing like architecture
and says, "I didn’t come here for you."
I can see myself nodding with the inertia of truth
as slow and deliberate as an act of forced kindness.

III

But this past winter I saw him again.
The first real time in ten years.
We sat cross legged on the carpet in his living room
and played Scrabble, picking scored letters out of a bag.

bridge, oxen, sin, racked, treat.

I asked if he thought the words were random.
Or if they had a story for us,
like watching a book being written.
Random he said as and reached into the letters,
exploring their edges with his fingertips.










Storage

Boxes left in storage must remain shut.
Sometimes, I have to keep both feet on a lid
like a surfer with arms straight out.
Occasionally, I have to talk the lid into staying shut
like making water boil before it is hot
or telling a moonstone to give its wearer dreams
about falling into wells that tunnel through the earth.
Once at an airport sink, I was rubbing my hands
together like old friends, when I saw the name
Scott, branded on the pale tissue used
to wrap toilet paper, and on the lid
of the paper towel dispenser.

Surrounded I became undone
for one moment lost in the open box
the way you can get lost staring
through the wood boards of a porch.
Casually, as if it meant nothing
I put my hand on my hip and float
it down to the back of my bear knee.
Letting it rest on the top of my calf.
Touching just the way he would have touched.

And than I am back like a braid re-done.
And I understand that every time I saw myself
living in San Francisco pulling meat
from the claws of crabs that run
over my tongue like dead knives
it was False Prophesy
like imaging the ring of a telephone.
I thought I could choose where I walk
or I thought that where I walk was chosen
like a stone path lined up tighter
than the overlap of teeth.
I was wrong and I was wrong.
And I said to my hands now dry:
I know nothing except that time passes.










The Dive

Sometimes is hard to remember all the things that you don’t have to be.
At night, dreams are what they are and declare their reality as loud as sound itself.

I remember being at the water
with rocks standing around us and the basin filling up
from 30 feet below; dark and comforting in the heat.

It is the moment before I jumped, all body and thoughts. Standing at an angle.
Arms stretched ahead as if reaching for a friend.
My legs on the rocks like soft pillars and my belly anxious and round.
And for one moment I forgot who I was and what I look like,
My mind holding this moment as a now now now.
The way a chant can never be about tomorrow
and the sun and its heat does not compare itself to the day before.

And I jumped,
falling into the cold water as shocking as a new beginning.
As unaware as if there were no past and no future.

It is these times--the spaces between,
when you fall into being as sure as the sound of a piano's note.
It is there and it will be gone like a light switched off or a tea-cup that has lost its steam.
Absolute, perfect, temporary. In the now of the now.

And I crawled back onto the rocks all slow and scramble.
Heart pounding against my skin.
Shaking the water off my body like a dog and sitting
on the rock in the water in the heat.










First Photograph 1942

First photography 1942, my mother Harriet, age three
who in ten years adds t and e because there is more to her.
There is no color but I can see it—
the ball perched between her fingertips; very red.
She sits on her mother’s knee as if it was a chair
her dress curved around her body like an eggshell.
Ella’s hand is pressed against her daughter’s chest, holding her.
They are in front of the young husband and father
who will re-marry Sylvia and eat cheese blintzes
every Sunday until he becomes incontinent;
Staining the cracked vinyl of the Flagship diner.

Second photograph is Harriette and Ella 1956;
St. Mark’s square in Venice. A vacation
from the long term death of Ella’s cervix. My mother’s
head is tilted back as if to tell us she is young and beautiful.
If I could reach into that plaza like an arm lunging
through the gloved lining of an incubator,
I would say to Ella; I am your child’s daughter
as unborn as my child and as solid as the rocks
that lie like headstones under your feet.