and a morning filled with birdsong,
windows open to a drizzly rainy day
wrapping me in a blanket of cool humidity
my garden is happy,
half clean and half beautiful mess
and this is progress
and just outside my window
i’ve planted
kiss me over the garden gate
right next to
love lies bleeding
which makes me smile
because i know which one
grows taller
.
.
.
.
here, there, and everywhere
stretched too thin
and running in circles
.
i may be here less
or, as often happens when i need a refuge,
i may be here more
.
i hope to be sitting
out there
as often as possible
.
listening
wondering
dreaming
.
there’s always
a pencil
in my pocket
.
.
.
.
You find yourself sitting in a chair at midnight, the tail end of a fire glowing in the woodstove, and you can’t remember how you got there. There was beer and a shot of tequila, toasted to an imaginary clink, and music: Neil Young and the Indigo Girls and then Cowboy Junkies. And tears, there were lots of tears, your head still feels like a lazy balloon, one whose skin has grown too thick for popping.
A throb in your left heel reminds you of the broken teapot, the one that belonged to your grandmother, the tiny shard you’d stepped on despite sweeping the floor three times, the blood, the cursing of a loss you hadn’t known you’d feel, the lack of band-aids in a medicine cabinet that never seemed to hold anything but regret.
The window is open to one of those nights with just the right amount of breeze sliding in through your dirty lace curtains at exactly the perfect temperature, and the only sound is the triple-layered cacophony of frogs having a party down at the swamp. The word raucous keeps pinging through your mind.
You don’t move. Because you know that as soon as you move, something else will go wrong, and then your heart will slide too far to the right and the weeping will begin again. So you sit there, rigid, silent, and let the night air feather your skin. You think about nothing and everything, and after awhile, you can’t tell which is which. The darkness gets darker and you wrap yourself in folds of ink. Words tattoo your skin, news of floods and murder, corruption and deceit, who wore what dress to a party no one’s ever invited to.
And then, you dream. There’s a forest and a radio playing softly, somewhere in the distance of the room you’re still in. The trees disappear, or rather, dissolve into bars. The window shrinks, and moves up the wall before you have time to grab on, and then you can no longer reach the ledge, or see anything but a tiny square of sky.
There’s one star there, peeking in at you, but without companions, you can’t name it. This makes you laugh to yourself. A giggle bubbles up from your belly and you know that if you open your mouth, you will roar.
And then there you are, back in your living room and it’s late enough that the sky is beginning to lighten. You know you should go to bed, but somehow, this night was meant for chair sleeping. Window dreaming. Sob releasing. You shift, slightly, to give the foot you’ve crossed beneath your hips some blood. That tingle, the one that lets you know you’re still alive, rises up through your ankle.
Somewhere far off you hear a robin, pecking at the edges of the sun, trying hard to hurry dawn into dressing. Another day. There’s always one more.
The floor is clean this morning. You think maybe you should scrub it with your tears more often. You love the way it feels beneath your feet.
.
.
.
.
Haley picked ten white daffodils because they were Billy’s favorite. Ten months, that’s how long he’d been lying in that bed, machines beeping with the persistent music of forced life. Some days, the rhythm of his breathing matched the pulse of her heart. Other times, she couldn’t find him anywhere, even as she sat there, holding tight to his hand.
When she walked into the lobby of the hospital, a wall came up around her. She stood near the door, flowers in hand, until she knew it was over.
She bent down then and placed the bouquet gently on the floor. And then she crushed each blossom, just the way she’d seen her mother extinguish a cigarette.
Outside, the sky refused to stop screaming blue.
.
.
.
.
Julie opened the door of her Odyssey and was hit with a wall of musky, sweat sock stench. “Jason!” she yelled back through the still-open kitchen door, “get down here and get your lacrosse stuff, I’m already late for work!”
She could still smell it, five miles up the road, even after she’d rolled down all but her own window, hoping to avoid ruining the hairdo she’d so carefully sprayed into place. She should have known better, she did know better, and it took about thirty seconds for those thirty minutes spent drying and curling and combing to become a complete waste of time.
She closed the windows, ignored the mess swirling around her ears, and turned on the radio, hoping she wasn’t too late to catch the Business Report. “Okay, deep breaths,” she reminded herself, and in an almost involuntary reflex, reached for the mug of coffee that was not in its holder.
“Oh, so it’s going to be one of THOSE kind of days.”
She said this aloud as she reached for her bag, the giant vermillion designer tote Bill had given her last Christmas, so happy with his purchase that she didn’t have the heart to tell him how much she hated red. I mean, had he ever, once, in 26 years of marriage seen her wear that color? But she had simply smiled and thanked him, too exhausted after all the holiday prep to do much else. And it was just a bag, right? Her co-workers had ooh’d and aah’d when she had carried it in on January 2nd, and joked that she must have been a very good girl for Santa to put something so expensive beneath the tree.
After a while, it became a badge of sorts, she carried it with her everywhere she went, and though she still didn’t care for the color, she had to smile when she thought about why Bill had picked it. He had asked once how she liked it, and during the course of the conversation mentioned that he had stood in the store trying to decide between black and red for 15 minutes, and then chose the color of love.
But the bag, sitting on the passenger side floor, was now six inches out of reach. She really wanted to tell Jason to dump her coffee in the sink before he left, so the cat wouldn’t knock it off the counter and stain the new carpet. She stretched an inch farther, and then another, and another, until her fingers caught the metal logo tag dangling from the handle. “Success!” she grunted as she straightened back up, just in time to see that she was veering straight for the guardrail. She had managed to pull the bag up onto her lap, but the thing was so big it got caught underneath the steering wheel, and by the time she got it free and cranked to the left, it was too late to stop the collision.
She felt the van start to tip and for one split second thought how it was a good thing she’d forgotten her coffee, because she would have been scalded. Then glass started breaking and tires started screeching and when it all stopped, it didn’t matter what she’d left behind.
Back at the house, Jason heard his friend Joe out front honking his horn, and he raced down the stairs to grab some breakfast on his way out the door. He saw his mom’s travel mug, filled with still-steaming coffee, sitting on the granite countertop. He pulled out his cell and dialed her number, but Julie never picked up. “Maybe she forgot her phone, too,” he muttered, and left the coffee where it sat, jogged out to the car, ripped open a strawberry Pop-Tart and laughed at Joe’s jokes all the way into school.
.
.
.
.
.
wind calm and storm weary
home calls north and a red sun sinks
in the corner of never there
your patience lifts you higher
than the slow measured progress
of orion’s glitter-faced swordbelt
the original darkness-slayer
cold hard viking laid to rest
in a calloused monument of sky
you sleep through rumble snore
and bright bear claw
goddess chair and perfect cross
as i tat patterns on a ceiling
bright with current
dancing dream and forgotten
constellation
infrastructures crumble cry and all the trees are lying
i walk through your concrete garden
stunned by lack of growth and claustrophobia becomes
my escape
there is no air here but you keep breathing
wheezing teasing freezing oxygen into clink clank cubes
lining glasses of liquid liberation
what have you done with the flowers? even the weeds
are afraid to breech
your barrier of sophisticated cement
give me your heart and i’ll plant you a memory
give me your disease and i’ll grow you a cure
give me your hope and i’ll bury the bones you cannot hide
lie
down and watch comets race a sky you cannot see
blind yourself with light and reputation
sit in your city white-noise silence
i have your bird in a cage of freedom
every morning we sing you back into existence
though you’ll never find a single luck feather
as you rest your bare head on a synthetic pillow
of down
.
.
.
.
a tulip
refuses to rage
or go gentle
blown out
blowsed up
blundering on
through
tenacity’s
funeral
no tears
no fear
all clear
silent growth
tender reach
purple hope
eating sunshine
like spun
cotton candy
harnessed
by beauty’s
last song
.
.
.
