Resolution

Holidays make me at once pensive and fanciful.
There are sequins on my dress that flash with sudden color as I walk.
If you were here I would kiss you at midnight.

I am careful with champagne because it goes quickly to my head.
It makes me think that I am much subtler than I actually am.
I would look for too long, and you would know.

That is the hitch: I am nearly always careful.
If you were here, and I weren't careful, I would definitely kiss you.

If you were here, and I weren't careful, or I were someone else-- or perhaps myself but more confident, myself more reckless--and if you weren't married,
If some of those things,
I would kiss you.

So for the sake of principle, it's good you're not here,
because there's a good chance I would ask you to help me ring in the new year with a sin.

In Cases Such As These, a Good Memory Is Unpardonable

Gloria scootches closer to the television to hear Colin Firth,
("He's so handsome,")
For the umpteenth time pronouncing Elizabeth tolerable
But not handsome enough to tempt him.

They tell me she may have to be put away soon.
Put away, like clean dishes into cabinets
Or put away like old toys into the attic?
She can't see anymore,
So she listens to salacious books on tape,
And every week awaits the snarky denunciation
Of the petticoats, six inches deep in mud
("That awful woman, she'll get hers!")

Gloria, in excelsis, must secretly be seething
Because her son and daughter-in-law
Have to clean her up now almost every night.
It is not just.
She was a woman, a Sicilian matriarch,
But now must assent to other people's hands
On her private parts, and cannot be allowed
Her indignity because it reads as ingratitude.

Gloria says a rosary.
She hums something Sinatra sang.
She says only that her bones hurt
And asks again for Colin Firth.
("Oh yes, he's proud. But just you wait.")

This Butterfly Business

"You leave us crying over postcards from Mexico. Baby, you're never far enough away."

"I take a breath. Take a breath with me, blow by blow. I take a break, take a break from you. You are here to stay. I take my heart out of my chest. I just don't need it anymore."


This Butterfly Business

Remember that time I made some discoveries, which were
somewhat painful but resulted in Personal Growth?
Remember those teachable moments
when I got thoroughly teach-ed?

To get through those times
I carried around a tried-and-true sort of metaphor.

I thought, "I will go through this time of Darkness
And emerge colorful,
with byzantine scars like delicate patterns
on my florid wings.
I will manifest with lepidopteran grace."

But then it so happened that
I cocooned and when I finished cocooning
I emerged, and yes, I was stronger and more
composed and might have been called a butterfly.
But I screwed up again. In almost no time
I was back in Darkness.
I have to say, in none of my elementary school
life science classes did my teacher say, "And then
the butterfly goes back into her cocoon."

At this juncture, there are only two options.

Either I am still a caterpillar, with no
idea about the true magnitude of the trials
I have thus far faced on account of caterpillars
have poor eyesight so maybe I just really
over-dramatized whatever I was going through, and
the real time of darkness is yet to come and
it is probably going to blow my mind when it does,

Or I need to find a new metaphor.

Orzo and Equanimity

Tell me things
Like why there are so many different kinds of rice.

Coax me out of these foxholes I've made,
Crumb by crumb,
And laugh at me in the helpful way.

Always, part of me does not consent.
Bring me back some Riesling
And have it with strawberries.

We can dance when you come here.
We can revel in food and in iambs.
We can pretend and pretend and pretend.

Tell me I am beautiful and absurd.
Tell me Plato. Tell me we are
Philosopher kings, you and I.
Tell me you and I.

A Mutt's Petition

"In darkness when all cats are equally black, I move as gracefully as anyone."
-from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

My foray into storytelling has led me to the
rather disconcerting conclusion that I have
no tradition. My father's heritage is all Sicilian,
which might have meant more more had I been raised
with a cannoli in my moth or a coppola on my head.
And my mother knows only that because of the lay
of our rears and our thighs, we must have some black ancestry
in us somewhere. I lived for seventeen years
to the east of Cajun heartland and to the
west of New Orleans, close enough to be teased
by the streaming smells of file and andouille,
but not quite close enough to change the alkalinity
of my blood. My speech, besides
being peppered with the occasional "y'all,"
is not heavily accented. I cannot
claim Brer Rabbit, any more than I can claim
Marie Leveau, any more than I can claim
zydeco, any more than I can dare someone
to go in against me when death is on the line.
These things are not mine, not in the way I want them to be.
I may learn them, but they are not native to my soul.
My petition is this: my blood does run so it
must run with something. I have bones so there
must be something in them. I hereby request permission
from my ancestors to invite any bits of
someone else's heritage to run in my veins.
Let me welcome Coyote and Loki and
Puck and Anansi. Let me make it known
that Erzulie Dantor and Sita and Nasreddin
and Sedna may always have a place in my pocket.

Don't Think About Elephants

I stare and I stare and I unfocus
my eyes, and maybe if I squint, I can
imagine being in the foreground of a painting
wherein a naked woman gazes longingly out of
her frame, and behind her is painted the life
she wants
and it’s hers

and she can have it

but she doesn’t know
how to take it so
she keeps staring.

Maybe she’s watching for elephants.

Post-Ridinghood Red

My mother will not let me catch fireflies;
I am not allowed outside past dusk.

My days have turned relentlessly predictable.
Which is not to say that I am not grateful
To the Woodsman. But what happens now?

I learned to skirt peril by sticking to the path
And not talking to strangers. I traded in the
Crushed cherry velvet cloak for burlap.

Grandmother died, but she was bound that way.
And I didn't die, despite the efforts of
Crashing teeth and stomach acid. I kicked and squirmed,
And did not die, but for what?

For a chance to die by something other than a predator?
My, what high hopes you have.

Let me tell you this: wolves are everywhere.
Behind the door of every cottage and
In all flowers there are wolves.

In the winsome smiles of chatty
Neighbors are rows of moving teeth,
The better to eat you with.

Moses

From my catechism class
I have inferred that the right way of doing things
Is to set what you most value
Adrift in a basket and hope that
It grows to several times its original consequence
And one day comes back to save you.

Bless the reeds, bless the river,
Bless the crocodiles.

And if it grows up
And doesn't thank you
Because it feels betrayed or abandoned
Instead of precious,
Or if it drowns
And never reaches the hands of sympathetic royalty,
Then you've done all you could.

Sing in the morning, sing to your daughters,
Sing for the crocodiles.

This Is Not A Poem

Ceci n'est pas un poème...

"The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.” "

My whole body breathes a thank-you.

Erinaceous

I'm swelled; don't touch me yet.
Dark burrowy underground is quieter
Than this way you have of
Picking me up by my shoestrings
So I bristle. It's natural
Someone should not want to be
Turned so upside down as you seem to turn me every
Time you speak. But quiet isn't always good
And safe doesn't always serve me well,
So here we go again
With the speaking and the flipping
And the way you make my quills
Stick out every which-a-way when you call my
Name. Tingling starts in my squishy bits
And works its way towards my spinose ends, and the surprise
Is just more than I really know what to
Do with. So don't touch me yet, or I will ball up around
The flutters (to keep them safely encapsulated) and
Thank you kindly to remember that I do bite.

Utah, Astronomically

Saltine air makes crumbs of my shallow breaths.
The words don't drip anymore,
But with skeletal jerks
They unleash feral snarls from among my ribs
And the air wraps brittle scarves over my legs
Climbing past cat-o-nine-tails ridges on my belly
To snap my head skyward
Where stars like needle pricks
Bite pictures on the black velvet
And the summer night tells and tells how
This sky goes on forever
And there is shortage of neither stars nor moon balm.
I might get it wrong again,
But there will still be stars--stars and Diana--
To sing me moon songs
Even if my outsides turn to brown paper,
And the dried up gullies over my skin
Slish when I walk, telling the story
Of arroyos down my thighs,
Even then there will still be stars aplenty.

A Plan

I'm digging a hole
Digging a hole
Digging a hole to China

To bury these bones
Bury these bones
Bury these bones forever

And then

I'm building a raft
Building a raft
Building a raft with driftwood

To float out to sea
Float out to sea
Float out to sea forever

And then

I'm humming a tune
Humming a tune
Humming a tune to myself

Until I fall asleep
I fall asleep
I fall asleep to music

Or Maybe It Will Be Fine And I Will Be Embarrassed For Having Been So Fretful

Roots descend from my
Greenery
Splitting into dreadful katakana
Little white
Hairs pushing deeper
Into dank memories of mouse bones
And worms
And beads of loam

Up grows the shoot and
Into people's view
Sprout joyful unfurling dewy
Planes of green
Verdant stars or palms
But what you
Don't
See what you never see
Is the latticework
Beneath me

You will not
Hear the grunting of
Spindly fingers as
They hold and hold
So when the
Weather arrives I
Don't wash
Away like
Promises in the sand

My open
Hand to sky
Is only
Possible because I
Grew where I was planted
And shoved
My toes in
Daring to make a home
And letting the dirt seep
Up into me

And now I am expected to
Unearth
The roots that feed me
Divorce them from
The muddy
Barons of backwards
Politics and
Trade in sweet
Tea for Gila monsters
And alabaster flats

How will I
Grow in this
Arid place?
How can
I believe in the feathers
And miles of cloud patterns
With bald sand
Beneath my feet?

When I know I cannot
Stay
And the winds whip up
Salt all around
Me how will I keep
From blowing away
With them?
Will I be thrown into
The Pacific?

And whether or drowning or
Waving you won't be
Able to tell
Until
You see those spindly
White roots
Wrong side down
Pointed towards the
Baking sun
And sinking slowly
Into the sea foam

Magdalena

Maggie, short for Magdalena,
strolls away from me with an orange in her hand,
sticky from the grub of the day.

The earth moves for Maggie.
How could it not?
Around her there must be some mystical shield,
an angel, maybe, or a protective spell.
I imagine the heavens holding a council meeting
to discuss bringing the mountain to Maggie.

And she drinks of it with ferocious thirst.
Maggie grabs the world by its scruff
but then with worshiping hands, cradles it.
And the world, it cradles her back.

She's got some umbrella against the clattering,
the jostling, the pianos that fall from the seventh story.

I, too, move for Magdalena.
I call her by her given name and will the asteroids to strike elsewhere.

Double Dactyl

Miracle thunderstruck
Fencepost a money drop
Fun with a porpoise
Is nodding my head

Ballet shoe miracle
Thunderstruck nodding is
Brontosaur crawling
Its tar-pitted bed

Orange cone Superdome
Purposeful beau soleil
Things I can dream about
One at a time

New shoes and brontosaur
Give me a moment here
Breathing hard into my
First gin and lime

From Jess' Poetry Challenge

"Write a poem that begins with the phrase 'I am a love story' "

I am a love story
My opening credits are epic and my heroine, she
Is not the definitive beauty
(She cries too often, and can be
Extraordinarily self-righteous, so for true
The audience doesn’t always root for her)
And what she falls in love with is
The horizon and what
Sings her awake is
My whisper in the morning that today
Might be different

Oh, I breath her in and at the exhale
She comes out bruised, and vehemently swears off my epilogue
But I never believe her because time
And again she delves,
Waltzing between my lines
With new hope that someone’s forever will
Coincide with hers, and
Pursues the dream with such
Vigor that it doesn’t matter
How many white crosses
She passes on the highway because
Every single time, she creates the
Most moving balcony scene you’ve ever beheld

Nobody Expects a Piano

Nobody expects a piano.

It started with a minuscule shadow on the sidewalk.
You weren't even looking for love, and then, whoosh!
There she was, charming and blonde and callipygian.

The shadow grew so much more quickly than shadows ought to grow.
We are accustomed to the evenings falling fast here.
After supper you can usually only play outside for an hour or so,
And you can watch the darkness at your feet
Lengthen from a figure of your own height into a horizontal giant.
But this was different.

She was honey-colored and melodious
(Or was that melody just the whistle,
The rush of air, falling pitch and prophetic crescendo?)
Whatever it was, you listened, transfixed.
You loved her, no reservations,
Not even three in the afternoon, and nobody expected it.

You stared at the ground
At that sliver of black, expanding like the universe
(Except that this time the bang came afterward.)
The note in your hands read,
"I am flying to Prague or driving to New Mexico.
It doesn't matter which.
Goodbye."
And that was all.

You never saw it coming; she had seemed so happy.
It came from a window on the seventh story,
And you stood as the shadow grew at your feet,
Soon over your feet and knees and then,

It happened faster than anybody could have guessed.
The piano landed squarely on your head with a great smash.
We ran towards you, tripping over b-flat minors strewn on the sidewalk,
And for half a minute thereafter, we could hear
The percussive jangling of splayed keys, hammers, and strings.

tapping toes

I seem to be slacking. Poems are humming just under my surface but I can't seem to hear them. Yet.

Have patience.

Icarus and the Timebird

When will I be magic?
I pounce, thrash, punch the air.
No refined sugar suffices.

I climb up and up,
Flaring my ire at the staircase. This is how I have to travel now.
I settle for spitting from the roof of the Shaw building.

I miss those wings. I know they were mine.
Maybe it was centuries ago, maybe it was another life.
But at some point I had them.
I have dreams of thermals and tailwinds
And always wake with knotted shoulders.

I am jealous now.
They were mine.

I glare at the clockworks, its sad, sad chiming.
At noon I was a clever prison break.
At three there was hot wax dribbling over my ribs.
I plunged into the ocean, no fins, no gills.

The irresistible sky beckons, scolds,
As though I could will my vertebrae to open into pinions by thinking,
Transform, transform.
Hollow out my bones and float backwards in time.
Believe me, I would.

Atop the Shaw building
I spy on scuttling people, haunt the rafters
And wait for the time to spring up
Into the ozone.

Masters of the Universes

So

I found a program, when I was
full-of-despairfully
prowling the interwebs

thinking about my f-word
that being
not fuck

which is a delightfully useful
and often attention-grabbing
and perfectly fitting for many situations sort of word

but the other f-word

which I suppose I'll have to say now
since I've taken
all the other
side roads
I
could think

of

stopstallingstopstalling deepbreathandokayhereitis

Future.

I found this thing
while thinking
I love women and stories. That's what I love and what I want to learn about.
Why the fuck
-see there's that puddlewonderful word again-
can't I just get an advanced sort of degree in women and stories?
Blessed be (and also cursed?) the inventor of Google.

Because now I am full steam ahead
roadtrip planning statement writing recommendation scrounging relief sighing
into

wait for it



a little little little place in the northern bit of tennessee
will spit me out in two and a half or so years
with a Masters of Storytelling.

What?

Yes.

Little Orison

"Solder two wires together, somebody else"



Little Orison

Mary, oh Mary,
They tell me you listen.
They tell me your fabric
Is the same as mine.
And though you are clouded
In gauzy blue linen
I've heard it said
That you answer in time

Mary, oh Mary,
My hems, they are fraying
And oil and mudslides
Are staining my clothes.
Blasphemous mouths,
Nights sweating and praying,
Pastel-colored Mother,
Can you relate to those?

Mary, they tell me you listen.
Mary, they tell me you listen.

Tarnished Silver

Spoons out of raspberry strata,
Puffed with shallow scoops of breath,
Are curved and burnished until
A warped face gleams back.
Now stretched at all of her seams,
With vagrant glances upward
She says, cavalier,
"My violin's been strung so many years
I am just sick of the high notes."
So she replaces her chokecherries
With wandering jews, and lets
Her starthimbles tumble downward.

Penelope, revisited

Both the first and second times I read The Odyssey , I felt a great deal of feminist scorn for Penelope, but later changed my mind.

I want to shake you, to say
What were you thinking?

This man, he came to you reeking of carnage.
He slew the suitors who, believing him dead,
Brought you flowers.

He instructed your son
(Your son.)
To slaughter the maidens,
Some of whom had been raped,
Because they, like any decent girlfriends would have,
Told you to move on.

You waited for him all those years,
And yes, I know about these high-minded
High-fisted
Notions about honor, and the glory of killing the right people.

But did anyone tell you
How long he dallied on Calypso's island?
Did anyone tell you about Circe's bastard child?

Did they tell you how he chose a path
Through the water
That guaranteed the deaths of six of his men?
He never told them.
Just offered up their lives.

Surely, surely you must have known,
Somewhere in your woman's bones
You must have felt this violence in him.

I thought, "Stupid woman."

But then I remembered the myriad things
I was willing to forgive
In exchange for the illusion of closeness.

I excused figurative violence
And literal betrayals,
Saying, "It's just part of the journey."
I was swayed by the solidity
Of a body in front of me,
Wanted it more than I wanted
To admit the truth of what had happened.

How are we different, Penelope, you and I?
Did you call yourself weak,
Lie to your friends about who you were seeing,
And curse your own heart
When he brought his sword into your bedroom?

Penelope, forgive me. We are in the same shoes.

Rêver de voler

Everybody dreams of flying, right?
It cannot be unusual
To look up at the gauzy clouds
And feel the pull to be among them.

Surely other people
Thrill to the notion of soaring,
And wired into their cells also,
Is recognition of the vault of heaven
Jarring as memory.

I cannot be the only one
Who arches to ease the ache between my shoulders
Where I know there once were wings.

"Awesome--what, like a hotdog?"

Other Countries


Well-intentioned relatives and friends ask
"How was your trip?"
As though I could possibly answer truthfully

I paste it with insufficient words,
Words that could not possibly stretch
Around the things I saw and felt

Words like:
Fun
Beautiful
Adventure

When I mean words like:
inner earthquake pinch bell pepper new smoke blossom isolate held shift emerge crumble minty salt flats tango miles tantrum lungs falter grow sweat and change

These are not the words requested,
But they are my storywords, honest as I can manage,
And pieced together properly
They explain how I came back different
And what transpired
And why I will no longer say, "God bless you!"
When somebody sneezes

"Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions."

Delicate Ecology

This evening it storms.
I am resigned to spending these maelstroms—
And for that matter, all incarnations of weather
Save for hurricanes, which, necessarily, are family affairs—
Alone;
Because, I reason, the circus in my head is still
Too graphic to inflict on another person.

But in the meantime there are recurrent storms.
So in a bed that seems too wide
And flanked by too many blankets,
I set about imagining
This pillow I'm spooning isn't a lumpy rectangle of cotton,
But a waist that tapers and then broadens into tulip bulbs
And gravity draws my lazy wrist
To the nadir of that precipitous dip.

When lightening splits the firmament,
Raspy white fingers reaching hungrily into crevices of the sky,
I shut my eyes against the instant floodlight
And conjure up a careless knot of hair
That spills maybe just shy of my nose.

It stops there, though.
Much too dangerously specific to pretend a scent,
Because every person’s fragrance is her own
And the beauty of this non-reality
Is that it lacks precision (no eyes, no hands, no scent.)

And though I haven't been afraid of thunder
For many years now,
I still feel better if someone else—
No matter how illusory—is there
Not being afraid of thunder
Right next to me.

How I List

This patchy connection we have
(at some moments electric and viable)
makes me keep hold when I should--
knowing, as I do, that you are given
to fits of caprice--
search for someone more steady;
but then I think
that flagpoles and accountants and refrigerators
seem steady
(and do I want this sort of love from a saint bernard?)
I would rather reach for cherries
from between slats of a jenga tower
and pull closer to some mercurial inamorata
from whose mouth come trinkets
and one specifically
the particular folly of whose hands I welcome.

Revenant

"I am not magic yet. But I am in bloom at the end of the world."

Revenant

She came back!
I don't know what changed, but
I was alone one minute
And the next, there she was!
She was not beautiful as I thought she might be
And she looked remarkably, well, unremarkable
Which, I have to tell you, did not disappoint me.
She said to me, "I am a journeyman."
I was glad for her company because
The road has not been so friendly,
Nor have I, on this road, been so friendly.
I spent a long time on the shoulder,
Entire years, really, envying the grass, the birds, the crickets.
But now, for some reason I cannot fathom,
She has come back from that place where I buried her
Under yards of jersey and stretch poplin
And under layers of sugar and white flour.
We walk together now, and if you see us from far away
You can't even tell who is who.

Things You Don't Want To Discover Too Late

On my stove sits a dysfunctional teapot.

It doesn't whistle.
But, then, neither do I.

Anyway, the teapot
Doesn't whistle
So I never know when the water is boiling.

It doesn't matter much
Because I can guess about the right time.
I usually end up with slightly-too-hot tea.

But it would be nice to have a warning,
A whistle to say, "Hey you!
You're overdoing it."

Not that I have a history of overdoing it.
Or denying that I overdo it.

Overdo what, anyway?
The point is, my teapot doesn't whistle,
So even though the water is boiling,
I hear perfectly clearly when

My brother in the next room
Is playing a game with his friends
And someone announces

"Things you don't want to discover too late:
That the parachute is actually a lunch box."