All in Poetry
Through the mornings when the sun brightened your house with moments full of my youthful laughs
Perhaps in the evenings between the passing of the cars and the long walks of our synchronized slow steps
Maybe when I open the window, I’ll hear the comforting echo of your voice
When the darkness envelops me
The fear of loneliness invades me
Yet, you shine your presence silently in a billion ways
Your eyes are the night sky I always seek out – but they consume me like black holes without restrain, trepidation or warning.
Bits and pieces cracked off my body
A carefully crafted structure, falling apart in front of their eyes
But how would they ever know?
It was the end, but it was also far from it
A crow drops silver rings in birch’s hollow
where bark peels off like parchment.
I use the bark for spells lately
Still I didn’t sense anything,
feel alert then alarm
like when I dream of snakes,
find an owl on the window sill,
see rat droppings under the sink.
When all the men died
I asked for more.
More men until I’m happy
again. I myself am half-hell
and half-morning.
A fat catfish glides through the living room like a dirigible
past the cracked mantel where photographs were once displayed.
Curtains wave with the current through broken window glass.
You’ll never swim in the ocean
again, Harbor Master, Shark Shooter,
Heir of Polyamorous Meats. I’ll get back
to you in partial remains, partially
Even the universe lets me down. I’m drunk, awake.
Is this how to feel? Next morning’s sunk in my rib cage.
There’s something romantic about a building condemned.
All that space. All the never-smashed ribs in my rib cage.
I’m afraid that if I don’t hang on every word he says
nod approvingly at all the right moments in his ramblings about cars and work
and the driving conditions to and from work
that he’ll decide I’m also not very interesting
wonder why he’s sitting next to me at all.
There, the good girls sew poodle skirts
and pad their bras. The boys balance
on the cusp of manhood, not sure
if they wish to fight or to evade the draft.
The red distance
of radio towers above us.
My days a rat king.
The ocean without sleep.
I was Chana once,
on the verge of choking
and devotion for the locusts
in my mouth.
And now my son is screaming in the backseat, near-impact,
while all I can hear are tires slipping on gravel and how,
in some twisted way, that father didn’t want his child to
be afraid, and how Styrofoam can feel cold as a knife
A woman at the store: I’ve had two,
I wear Spanx with jeans. I am Spanx,
holding myself in shape against the world.
Maybe we never figure out how to figure.
his ears picking up on the announcement of
corn chowder from twelve to two
but also hearing the thin, white-mist howl of wolves
pushed past wet muzzles and blue-dotted tongues
(they go in caves, Danny, where it’s warm)
Wallabies stop; sniff the air, bound off up the hills and away.
Snakes take to their hollows. Something has changed but
the sun stays the same and the heat and not even a cloud
in the sky when the mullock heaps stir. Hands sifting for gold
emerge from the piles, push back stones from the dirt.
I get caught in the headlights
of our love, and moon about intersections
like a lost traffic cone, orange and useless.
Nothing was ever just the wind or the house settling or probably nothing ever again would be afterwards. Our wait for silence was actually a vigil for the noise we had so missed.