i
remember as a child, soft and new,
clean and brighter than light,
and when we tangle together, there's
a storm of dust sentences, stories waiting
to be unravelled, peeling away from our
splendid skin like secrets hiding in
stardust,
and when we explode, the glitter
glows deep in your eyes, and i try
to count each story, try to carry each
delicate dot on the tips of my fingers,
carry them to our bethlehem
107
there is a summer seed
you have planted in my heart,
a seed with hopeful roots,
a flower waiting to spread
its fingers over your mouth,
show its colors to the sky
in your eyes,
feed itself with the muses that
hide in your throat—
where the thrushes hide all
their morning songs,
where i have planted all
my poems,
all my wishes
108
she moves slowly, cutting through
the tender air around her with that
sharp, slender curve of her body,
and when she's moving toward me,
i still hear whispers rising up inside,
a nervous murmuring that starts in the
gut, rises to the chest like some hot lump
of anxious love and lands near the mouth
like a cool kiss cracking open over all her
almost words,
but when she is silent and still, her hands
—idyllically made hands, innate archetypes
of hands—cup my face, feeling for fissures
to hide her kisses in with full, fluttering
flirtations of lips and fingers.
109
something still stirs inside me when i
think of your smile—that long ago image
of you(growing cloudy with age and scarred
by the lens flares of time's camera)—sitting
in the spring sunlight, lost in our joy and arrested
development, where we spoke in couplets,
plucked kisses like pastel blooms, and prayed
to the muses for the rain so that we could laugh
at our dumb happiness, swim in the great absence
of life's weight, float above the floral floor of forever
startles of love
110
the map of your belly is full of memories,
a scar where my hand noticed a heartbreaking
smoothness, a mole where i hovered to examine
its beautiful color, its perfect circle,
and your hips, where every time i touch, we dance,
and your knees, which i try to reach for during moments
where my heart sings for you,
and your lips, so pink—so soft—like sunset water, are
places to explore every line, every sweet puddle,
and when i place my finger on the city of your face, i'll
press my breath—softly now— on my home in this world
111
the birds are a breeze of song on
summer mornings, moving the water
with their lilts like little laughters,
and the sunshine is hovering behind
a strand of clouds—wisps that whisper
like softest breath in the spaces the birds
leave behind,
and the water, when it moves, curves
ever so much with the light like a thousand
heartbreaks corrupting the once still water,
and there is something vaguely feminine
in those curves, like a woman were being
built from the bird's breath that bends the
clouds, making room in the morning for
her to shine ever brighter, to build daydreams
on the screen of the sky
112
she flies into the room with a feminine fire
that follows her like a curve of comet's tail,
and all the men turn, sense her loveliness
from all quarters of the room,
she brushes her heaps of hair over her
shoulders, combs through it with her long
wispy fingers,
and a breeze moves through the place,
a breeze that smells like purest memory,
like some maternal archetype shaking
the room to fade into dream, hypnotized
by the curves of her body,
and her hands slide down her hips, and
she holds every miracle, carefully cracks
open each poem's reason
113
you are a shock to the secrets in my heart,
a vibration that shakes the soul,
you are the sound autumn makes when it
calms a tree, convinces it with winds of
whispers to lay its leaves down,
and those leafy hands, those pretty poems,
fall, word by wobbly word, to the ground
beneath my feet, rising me up above the
dust and the delirium, into the gravity where
spring's kisses deliver their ghosts
114
my dreams are held in her hair—
a trickling rush of wet remembers—
and, like the birds with their songs,
it is where sweetness hides, in
these sultry morning voices that fly
over the winter,
and, until i lie under the curtain of those
strands of silken whimsy again,
living on a loop of harps strumming
out some fantastic flashback of her lips
parting over my lips, her hair whispering
watersheds over perfect oblivions
115
poetry is a possibility that floats outside
the veil of the mind, an elusive bird that
sometimes sings indecipherable words,
waiting for the poet to translate its songs,
or sometimes it is a memory painted
across the screen of the mind, moving
and pouring paint on the heart, waiting
to find the words to match its colors,
and sometimes it is simply a girl you
used to love, and that you keep alive
by remembering, trying to write what
you hope you'll never forget
116
you are a dream inside a memory,
an echo of a recollection,
your name is strung about
in codes and patterns,
and there are pieces of you
scattered across all my old pages,
and i remember laughing with you,
poetry pouring from our mouths—
abundant like the sunshine in summer
and when i decipher all the codes,
reveal all the patterns,
you are the electricity that pours
through me,
keeps me chasing the buzz that still
hums inside
117
she's got hills of hips, dives of thighs, and
her ankles are elegantly etched by careful
hands, not divine tools,
but her eyes—full of oceans—are calls to
divinity, waves that bounce around her angelic
light of a face
and when she breathes, an echo passes by,
like the sound you might think god made when
he passed his hands over the small of her back,
pushed her from the heavens, mixing
the wisps of the most delicate
cloud dust
into her hair
118
i dug deep into the ground of truth
when i found you—your roots dug
deep in my earth—and yet my sun
has never found you,
the scent of you was muddled
in a memory i couldn't grasp,
the taste of your kiss was an
indecipherable fruit lost in the
shuffle of rememberings—
your touch was an electricity i'd
been nostalgic for, but could never
quite reach,
but your voice, that wonderful,
sure lilting—like spring birds prying
open the morning(lifting the sun from
the winter)—once called me home,
still calls me home, breathless and
waiting for more of your deep
down and buried air
119
golden dipped and disheveled as the sun
on a cloudy day,
stern mouth stretched on an indifferent face,
finely tuned by artist's fingers—
those eyes, dots of paint on milky glass,
staring through the sky or at some secret
meaning in the clouds—
pressing my heart,
holding it in the cups of those small hands,
beatingbeating like the rain in an
e.e. cummings poem
120
i can hardly make out the shape of her
in this fog of years, her obscured silhouette
fades more with each day,
hazy reminders of her face, her fingers—like
a picture touched too much—are disappearing
into the past,
but illuminations of her face are stowed in the
night sky like a secret waiting for the lightning
to shake her awake again, wash her back to me
in an endless wave of wet electricity,
but her words are distant waters in my ears,
oceans of want flowing away from me, draining
into a horizon where sleep holds all those old
flashes of love, like heat lightning igniting
glimpses into dreams from a world away
121
i can't hide from your hands,
they are pretty push-me's when i'm stagnant,
they roll through my hair when i'm discomforted,
they make the shapes of birds when i've lost
my whimsy,
they draw lines of lovers in my sleep—
tenderly tangling (fingers tripping over fingers),
dropping flimsy filaments of love-me-nots,
counting all the reasons to forget,
holding all the reasons to remember
122
you are softly trembling
near my fingers
as they approach your face
and like an echo of a voice you've
been hungry to hear again,
the sound shakes your insides
like love's hum lying on the heart,
poundingpounding as lips
anticipate a kiss,
you catch your breath,
calm the internal rush of bells
that vibrate the cages within,
releasing oceans of birds,
on your face,
plants new sounds,
new birds,
on those lily flavored lips,
listeninglistening for that
rush of bells
123
you left a clue for me to carry,
a fragment of that lilt you laid
on my heart, and it brightens and
sings when spring opens its newborn
fingers,
and a tiny piece of memory we're
yet to make is planted in its tired
petals,
and when it breathes, the distant
sound of that song rushes through
the body,
the mind exhales and the lungs blow
out the dust from winter's—long and
brilliant blue—built-up desire
and our snowy secrets pour from
the soul, unchained, like a voice
breaking open
and the birds swim out with the music
of that first morning, lilting with the
memory of your lips pressing onto
the hum that hovers over my heart
124
you are pink and perfect, light as a floating
feather dancing on the weight of the wind,
when you speak, your voice is a yellow song
stretching over the skin of my dreams, lighting
up the nights with your smile,
and when you reach to me, the world hushes
from white to orange, and a fire comes alive
inside my heart and burns until you feed me
your cool splash of water, press the clouds of
your kiss onto my mouth, feed me the succinct
story of existence.
125
you filled me full of dreams, overwhelming
my sleep with silent movies to play with at
night,
and there is faraway music and words on
all your pages—dripdrops of somewhere
poems—searching for our song,
but only the sleepy silence is left, running
on a grainy loop of a sideward glance, a touch
on your arm—just below the shoulder where
softness was first defined—
and the film is scratched and scarred and tired,
and your face has obscured, run cloudy,
and our song is as distant as that look in your
eyes—
a starlet without a song,
full of a life's worth of desire,
a melody desperate for meaning
126
when i catch glimpses of you in other girls,
hope rises up in me like heady steam from
the heart,
and when the haze clears, and i learn that she is
not you and that your hands are distant things,
your touch starts to feel so long ago that simple
memory holds none of its old sensory delights,
but i climb toward the drunkenness, weak
as it may be, and look for you in a world where
hope rises and falls in delusions of faintly stars,
and i push through these poems—count the
flowers and smell the rain, put my hands in
the clouds and imagine sitting atop your star,
where you are the light and the reason for
its shine
127
her shy, white face is quiet in the fake twilight
of the cafe, the rain outside the window casts
a sadness on her skin, and the melancholy
violin— a french feast of sound—gives that
soft light a romantic shine,
and a memory grows from this fertile soil, a
fiction of a moment, where my hand traces
her cheek to the edge of that face, and my
thumb finds her cheekbone, and she starts
to cry, and my heart breaks as she grabs my
hand, holds it against her flesh, kisses the
heart of my palm, closes her eyes and counts
the poem of my pulse
128
you are a soft sensation that rests round my heart,
a cushion from the blows of the world,
you are a warm memory that cracks open in the
winter to wrap round my shivers on days of snow
and ice,
you are a cool slithering water th
at dances over
the body like a softest breathing on the hottest,
most graceless days,
you are the reason for poems, the art in my eyes,
you are the words i wished i'd said
129
i scribble love notes to you in my sleep,
i pull petals from your flowers in my dreams,
make art on your flesh with paints of fingers,
i sing with your kisses and speak your name
to the rain—tell it our wishes,
i listen to the rhythm of your sleep-breathing
for secrets, watch for the patterns of your chest
(risingfalling, risingfalling)
i memorize the sound of your air, the weight of
your hair in these remembering hands
130
her body was painted without worry,
her colors were curved with the speed
of inspiration,
her skin was wrapped elegantly around
bones with puddles of knowing fingers,
stretched just enough to make softness a
priority and a virtue—
a song to the clouds verging on rain—
measure of some divine method, a perfection
of such sublime godbreath that there are no
songs, no poems, no words to meander around
her heights
131
there is a feminine line that bends
around her body,
it spins and curls,
it jumps and dives,
and it sends butterflies through my body
every time she dances to move,
and each time she breathes a song
that line wraps around me,
dizzies me up with its softest certainty,
its drunken curves—
so elegant
that artists spend lifetimes
failing to recreate its quiet qualities,
its perfection of melody and rhyme,
its singing,
its symmetry of shape and song
132
she is a curl across my mind,
a twisting shape that travels
across my thoughts
with kisses and hair and fingers,
flashes in dreams of knees together
—pulling slowly apart—
and her smile sneaks across my sleep
like smoke rising to kiss me
with startles of morning sunshine,
a waterfall of light washing down my body
like golden fingers, long and feminine,
chasing my dreams into deeper places,
guiding me toward her extraordinary air,
so thin, i gasp
and bite her lip
133
this love grew and grew inside me like some
winding vine, clinging and twisting around my
heart,
and flowers grew, lost petals,
and then grew again,
and i remembered, and then forgot—this looking
in her eyes, or this thing she did with her hair
or her fingers,
and where will i find new flowers to forget?
how will i remember the delicacy of her body
against mine while i breathe in the dirt?
134
spring moved gracefully into summer,
handed over its memories in its cupped
hands—a buttercup floating on fallen rain—
and the summer clumsily walked in the
heart, drinking all of those words we
spoke, looked too long into our old
pictures, smudged the portraits with
its hot, hot hands
and when fall arrived, i stood on a wisp
of a cloud, and dropped all of your hopes
—all of our kisses—onto the world, shook
all of our poems from the trees,
and now the october rain has come, and
all that's left is a streak of slightest yellow
that the sun has left in your hair
135
her pale, soft hand is pressed against the
porcelain of her warm face, a wing of
feathers collapsing over the rosy flesh of
her cheeks,
and she stretches those full fingers toward
her ear, and plays with the skin, listens to the
echo of old whispers:
him saying her name,
his breath hot on her neck,
the sound of the air as he breathes
her hair.
and her other hand pushes a new whisper that starts
to show on her face, spreads like fireworks across
her squirming body, a thousand electric shivers rolling-
rolling, and she is flush with the blood of purest
passion, awash across her thighs—spreading into
flight
136
she's a wobbled ride through the past,
an uncertain vessel of memory like an
old film squeezed through modern effects,
a soundtrack added to cover the loss
of the original ambient noise.
but her smile is the same,
her eyes still sparkle when she speaks to me,
but the distance i have to travel to find her
lengthens over time,
and my fingers can't remember her face,
i can't know the sweet smell of her hair
or the heat on my hands as they press
her hips when we kiss,
but the song in the heart, that old music
still plays, just beneath the surface,
in a world free of the noise of forgetting
137
she's my soft landing when i can't
find the words, when the hope is
gone and all is lost,
i collide with some remarkable
conjuring of her fingers, or the sound
of her laugh, and everything falls back
into place again,
she's my true north while i'm caught
sailing at sirens, when i'm lost in the
torpor of the world's cruel logic—
her hands tracing my jawline,
her lips finding my lips—
a home in a ship of fools
138
i've traced the shape of your face in puddles,
watched the ripples move you away from me
again and again, tiny