Water Poems About a Girl

Number 22
One of Four

It was not the moment of goodbye
But the moments
Upon moments
Which followed

Those endless moments
That made me wish
I could build levees round my heart

For long after you left
I found traces of you
An earring, a camisole
A pillow still bearing your scent

Each finding, a moment
To make the time drip by
A leaky faucet
To keep me awake
Against the quiet of the night

Stretching seconds


Into minutes



A stop motion flood











An Invitation
Two of Four

Why don't you come back down to where
My heart vacations

When the days are long and hot,

Where the gentle smell of salt
Is stronger than the carnage outside,

Where my unspoken cravings pulse,
Surge, tighten, release forever

It's not always quiet there

But you'll find a forest, a river,
A cavern that goes to the center of the Earth

So perhaps you come down
To this, my locus,

And perhaps this time you stay









Number 38
Three of Four

The thought of your smile
Takes me far from today, far from the mountains
And all the ways we failed ourselves

I plant my heels and with my back taut
I steel against the current of memories

And I can't forgive you this ocean
Nor the way the clinking coffee cups
And running baths became a refrain
And my screams, our swan song

I feel my knees begin to bend

And I can taste how easy it would be
To slide into where someone else
Has already begun to pool photographs of you

So I try to remember that when I cry for you
The dirt on my hands turns to mud

And nothing will ever be as cool and clear
As the last time I saw you smile








Water Poems About A Girl
Four of Four

Here is what I have learned:

Do not fall in love in a hurricane.

Hurricanes serve too well for itchy poets
Grasping for love metaphors
Pain metaphors, loss metaphors, power metaphors
But mostly: love metaphors

Poet eyes scour the news
Hungry for imagery
The wind and the bullets of rain
The lists of casualties and the understanding
That hurricane season comes every year

Poet molars grind, and it’s almost kitschy
How love, my love and her love,
Was a hurricane

Heat and wet and rising air
Wake of broken china and snapped plant stems
The easy, easy way out
Nonetheless, I’ve written a small set of
Inexcusable water poems about a girl