We were standing in the church parking lot Figs were falling from the sky, splatting on the asphalt, and you were heaving with laughter, I had never seen you so swollen with joy, your head thrown back, baring your throat to the weak winter sun as the sound burst from you like a geyser We both were wearing mittens You were gazing at me in a way that I wanted to bottle up and keep forever in a mason jar and for a second I thought, this is it So I took out all my ribs and tried to hand them over but you wouldn't take them, you couldn't make up your mind about me and it was too late by then to put them back I laid them on the ground-- a streak of white bone floating in an ocean of figs I looked up and you were gone I looked down and I was knee deep in a clear blue pond There were oranges and water lilies and human ribs drifting on the water I woke up from the dream and you were still making up your mind about me
Tag Archives for poetry
And Then?
A Buddhist monk once said
that life is like stepping
into a boat
that is already sinking.
Death: it’s the apples rotting in the yard.
My mother says she is not afraid of death, but of dying.
Not me. I am terrified of death,
its finality.
Lights out.
Or else, eternity.
But first, the dusty volume propped open on the welcome desk,
thick as a phonebook
The careful catalogue of my choices
to be considered:
The lies I told without blinking
All the homeless I have walked past
The mornings I left without saying I love you.
Humble, courageous, and kind:
my mother will go to heaven.
Her heart is just enormous,
like Audrey Tautou in Amélie,
dipping her hands into sacks of grain
at the market.
I might go to hell:
I don't save birthday cards
or love letters.
I hoard unread novels
and believe I am what I wear.
I am bad
at listening
even as the Buddhist Zen says gently
until death there is nothing
enough.
Falling Out of the Sky
You didn’t understand: I wanted freedom; well didn’t I have it? You demanded to know: Why all this beating of wings? Not in words, but the way you stared at the floor and nestled the cat to show that you were capable of affection but withheld it from me. To you this was a question of loyalty. Meanwhile, I was trapped in the slow-clicking memory of my childhood, like an old video tape: the tick of a clock, the sound of late afternoon. At this time of year, there is no sunset, just the deep carve of light that slowly melts away. I told you I was leaving, which was easier than allowing you to love me. At first, it felt as if the sky had been ripped off the earth, but then I finally sensed my own existence and I was ravenous for the world, driven outward like a bursting sap. For weeks, I opened all the windows before I went to bed. How glorious: the fragments of moon, blue air and honey sun. All that light on my face in the morning. When the summer edged out, I shut the windows and left. The drive was long and the sky was filled with rain like thick strokes of ink I hurried down the freeway, as if someone would be there waiting for me. And the next thing I knew: Wisconsin. I dashed from the car, pretending to run for cover, but secretly praying for more and more rain.
After You
The summer slipped away again, washed away in heavy rain, turning itself over to a burnt October The pear trees slowly slumped beneath the balmy weight of southern sky and finally they bore their swollen fruit Now the mild autumn days roll by calmly, slow as summer thunder. This house is very quiet. Outside the world keeps blooming into auburn color, flooding through the kitchen windows where I am baking bread or reading novels Even the bees drift lazily among the fallen pears fermenting in the sun. I watch them start to fly then float back down to the sugar-bruised fruit Surely nothing is more silent than steam escaping hot bread broken alone, than black tea going cold.
Stoplights
When I was little, I thought I had the power to change them. When you got cancer, I bargained with God: He could take away my power if you could live. You didn’t die and I can’t change stoplights.
Thrifting
Cloth hangs thick as curtains: floral dresses
and saris with their oriental prints.
Patterns from the tropics.
Fabric from the moon.
My own clothes now
are navy and dull from so many cleanings.
These are the pants I wear to work.
The sweater I wear to meetings,
to my lectures, with no comment
or complaints to my supervisor
or his supervisor.
I know myself well,
it is a lifeless body draped
without vegetable dyes or the soak
of the earth, raw hands to knead
the knots and stitches. I am clearly not
of this same earth
as I see my face distorted
in the curve of the shining rods
on the racks.
These clothes are almost free,
relinquished by those who once owned them, by those
who first imagined them, holding the design
in their mind and finally
made them, stitch by stitch.
There is sadness in such a tender craft.
For now they belong to themselves, aging
in the light as it streams through windowpanes;
they are safely apart from the world,
yet part of the world, made of the world
as it flashes by the bars of my body
and does not peek inside.
Look at me, I’m begging
these bones to open, to open! and yet
I am trapped
in this box of glass:
every speck of dust is illuminated.
Cataclysm
I’m told this is a paradise
of snow and sea and starlight.
The mountains burst out from the loam
then tumble to the charcoal water
like a silent white explosion,
splitting through the citrus sky.
But its sound is swallowed in the vastness
like a whisper or a violent kiss.
I’ve heard there’s beauty in the bareness,
in the sparkling glacial graves.
The sun melts across the hills like nectar,
as dusk starts seeping through the trees.
But something holds me by the water,
underneath the lights in the sky that are stars,
stuck between fearing cataclysm
and wishing for it. Working towards it.
