yahtzee

It could be anything I type

I could be having conversations you’d never approve

of; inside I found you with your headphones on and

the light came between each pane of glass with a warmth.

I could type anything instead

I could say something about your cock

or I could pretend some other reality

I could litigate my own intentions

against the binding and salving of a wound,

forced tight, complexion bare like foggy night

the light between each cloud indiscernible

like a plane of three points, like the sound of clicks and clacks

like a count of Indians, or piggies, or anything

all the way home

any nursery rhyme to make up for your own lack of being

there, the way you abandoned everything

even self,

to go, away, to find

nothing. To find out that the things

you always knew were true really were: Love is a thing

you make, and of what you make is your own

shortcoming, and how much you hold

the outside in will tell your fortune every time; needing no

tea leaves or chicken bones or palms or horse ribs.

Converse, opposite side: You make something real.

You make it last

you make it even when you wonder why you’ve made it,

are these your sheets? would you buy that cotton count?

is that even your picture, on the wall?

But you know you type,

and this is your type; you know

black skirts and tops that slope at the shoulders;

you know yourself the way

you know to yell YAHTZEE when you see five

of a kind.

06.13.2011

Reruns

I came home and sewed my funeral dress

on; basketballs thudding in the street,

bringing me next

to you, an oasis, underneath

nothing and adjacent to the breeze.

You must have been a sitcom, you could have played

some scene I’d forgotten.

Encountered late night, on a cable channel,

face grainy but restored,

a slight tilt to your head,

voice unmistakable,

hollowed and buried deep

below the wrought-iron tree grate at my core.

In this there is nothing I know

and I am nothing but this vessel

There is never a moment when the things I think and remember

coincide

like today

like pictures on a wall of little girls I never knew

thrust through all reverie, pausing

next to the sarcophagus

I never saw

next to your coffin, the one

that bruised my hip,

The edge, hidden by bunting.

You could have been a passage in a book,

one I kept on my shelf, spined,

one I visited, sometimes,

again and again,

the same pages telling me the same story

the plot missed in repetition, grayed and retold.

If we could pair up,

if we could make diagrams,

dissect the empty night full of hoops and sneakers and dresses

I wish I never wore

There still won’t be

an ending

There still will be

a faded lullaby

the color of the cloth they wrapped you in

the color of the dirt scattered across your grave

the color of my sister’s hands

an episode

I never saw.

04.04.2011

Wouldn’t it be nice

if you were Hansel and I were Gretel

and we could follow a trail

Only without all the brother sister stuff

If you could lead me to me

and I could lead you to you

and there would be a great rejoicing and the

light, it would come; streaming through a pillar of soft

sound, crowded and cramped into a room

like too many people looking for a sunrise on a beach

you and I would struggle to keep

cool, and there would be a kind of plea-bargaining

a negotiation

Heads would roll and hearts would soar, there

would somehow be a gathered perception

an inclination of what should happen next

If I were your wife

we would settle without question

and linger in the notion of yours and his and hers and mine

But there is not a witch pressing a finger against a cage

and you have enough to eat

and I have enough to ponder

without wondering what spells

you might cast

without wondering

what stops and starts

might derail

the surety of your heart against mine.

11.21.2010

Instructions

This is how you stay together:

tap your fingers against something

inane and ambiguous, something

inanimate

Linger in your memory

and let it whisper

against your skin like the silhouette

of a man in a photograph, a shadow

dark and drab and compromised

Pry out your language

shovel, pick-axe, bothersome hatchet-

any tool will do.

Just levy that stick and raise the roof

you are up on top of,

gleaming.

Some days will not be easy.

Some days won’t even be right.

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is how you stay together, this is how it stays so long:

don’t depend on the fragile

vocabulary built from silence

Don’t break out the bricks until

the cavity lets loose the gizzards:

heart, liver, anus and other visceral

organs

Rough, tough, tangled firm

Lay down against your lions, contrary

Let the drift outlast, lie fallow

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is the record you make:

of an event, of a smolder, of any simple

stilted sweep of the hip to a beat

Solid, unsanctioned

in tiny rooms with little sounds rasping against shrunk-up stones.

Your heart cannot get bigger, only

it does.

You bet you would

You bet he would

You bet the sky won’t be blue

He bets it will, he bets

he won’t, he bets

you would

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

He does it,

you do it,

loudmouthed,

in spite of each

other.

09.24.2009

from then

Your eyes live for splashes of light sinking

into wave, for

that instant when the water boils

so you know to throw the lure

to cast your arm

against the wind.

I'm flailing.

No good poems come from me.

I am not emptied.

I am not a vessel of light

just a husk of who we were.

In smaller moments I find

you on me, a finger here

slight touch there. I take it.

Legs like tree trunks rooted

firmly into your ground

never toppling, only undulating.

Sturdy arms never meant to row,

only cradle.

And yet they are too often

left circled

but vacant

like a lot on a street where weeds

grow over and smells of anise bloom against

the grit and grime of a city littered.

Those two blue storms, so grave in the recess of your brown

and set to narrow, they

trace the contours of a horizon, the impression 

of wind, the crevice between stacked rocks--

but never the stalled breath of a lover

the contrast of skin to skin to skin.

Still, there is comfort

in knowing the phases of the moon

which coincide with the tide

which shift to bait

your glance

this way.

05.19.2006