no-more-tangles

[no-more-tangles]

BQE

This is dinner. You, rosy at the end of the year in a photo I’m only seeing now and the sign on the bridge saying life is worth living. It is orange like a hazard, tired like flying east, waning like this cycle of forget. You would hack through a continent that doesn’t want you around before asking for my help. Choose more of the known because it hears you out. But no one preserves us better than the view up here. There’s a shrine you don’t deserve and everyone gets sick coming all this way in the rain to ask you to bless them. You accidentally call me by my mother’s name and we spoil your invitations meeting our need again. Where to tonight? The vinyl-sided version of scarce and too old and in love with someone else will do when the deal we made as new friends doesn’t vest. We were foolish and fast before hard got hard. Before a movement made where we were going too bright and too wrong, and took us home.

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Someone Must Be Watching

If we belonged we would be purposeful as the couples from abroad who came here for spring. Mornings would seem like a different day than the rest of the day. We would break our bad habits forever, not for days. We would concentrate on the other’s face and see something more saturated than what we see in the mirror. Who is we? I think about you all the time in Manhattan, like your spirit is dispersed for miles around your body. Walking home needs a beat, but here, I am silent, the tourists are silent, and I will see things their way. I will think about embarrassing myself and enjoy the consequences playing out in my head. I will not wonder how many hours you’ve put in. And if I’ve set aside too many for my dreams. There must be a reason we seemed like children after the party and that I felt I had been running all night just to get back to that sweetness, which I still think about even from this higher place. Neither is food, not the way you see me nor getting to the point where I see myself that way too, as long as there is still a self obstructing what needs to be done. Someone must be watching from across the street. Must see a teenager who hasn’t known true love, or rather, hasn’t given it. It isn’t even comfortable, sitting here. And this isn’t a poem, just an old beginning. You are sick of me staring at trees but not calling them home. I’m supposed to turn into someone else. The kind of person who never goes home. There has been enough talk of this to make it real, to sound it out until it forces you to seek out yourself. If it turns out I’m fading, I’ve known it since now. If it turns out you’re about to start over, I might have prayed that way, only to have someone else who understood. If I lost us, what could I think?

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My Town

Sickness comes and goes. So it is with this. I want to clod high through the stalls again looking for jeans and loving a different subject than last week. You do what you can without getting marked up. Make me a friend and get me off the page. Walk me through the most polluted corners of town before I get to a book of this. I think you must have been with me there on the track by the Heath. That we met back when my coach would inquire of us if the pain was in our lungs or our legs, weakness, or just grief for what now is. I remember we laid down like teenagers at the top and begged off the clock a minute, unbound and tired and seeing the humor in what we could get away with not seeing. I never went fast down the mud and still don't. I take that time to mull all the leaving I do and I don't know if you come up once. But you run that town in your sleep and it's always pouring so it must be the same place. I wait to be called to brand new buildings that stand in my way and block the sound. I learned to elbow out to the front which is to say I learned not to ask permission to win. Now it just means I get home faster. It means I stay up and believe because believing makes a feast out of dust. Dry words sing their pretty nonsense and no words at all promise all the trouble I could have gotten in when it was the rage.

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what bliss to be alive

wrote about music for the first time in forever.

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In Balance

Fixie cyclists on a high wire and the chosen few stars and the urge to forget you. Between you and me now is the time I am supposed to be deceived or changed or made into a mother by a muse. And it couldn’t be that important, what you want, and what that did because when you most have me you get far away and ride alone so round enough corners when I think I’m far enough out still music plays over and over and over the shoulder of the good guy your eyes like last year wet with too much drink and too many pliés of the a-line skirt as if it was still trying to beguile while it ran away. If only you distracted from the work but you make everything but worse. Travel is magic but I smoke through it because everywhere is home and our flat goes nightly now for a song. I had to get back, to the promise of the same ungrown thing turning onto nowhere.

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Reservoir

Behind the glass wall, your hands at your heart. That was one time but it felt like every time. Come to the country I used to run, I will forgive the same old speed of the dark, the blue pall of it, and the women there that will be tricked like me, but taken, or scientists, or young, or fools. I know I’m just trying to sell you on a system. But when you get in your car I know: who knows what you look for, and when you’ll stop. I drive two hours to the latest thing. He comes out. He veers diagonally across the road to me to save time.

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Speed

I don’t want to hear the world, the water rinsing that it is. There is a loose rope of years between him and me and the truth comes and goes. I’m just no good at it. Be his woman but he’ll fall down all the places I’m from, try and try to catch a lip and hurt to understand where there is. I can’t design us so I wait, and move into myself, and do as I say. I can’t do battle with his secrets except as a double. So I stop telling him things and stop telling myself the telling is not a game. Run in the field near where he was born. That’s where I breathe. There are views. I promise that I’m standing by all his color changes there. Everyone wants to feel speed, the sudden leaving behind of what’s so clearly on the way.

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Year

what do you want? the more hidden buttons are already undone. i jump out of sleep realizing how long you’ve kept coming through for me like a river lying at the feet of a whole culture. telling you will be like coming up the rise and finding no one home. telling you will be like what i thought it would be like to tell him, summer fruit that was ready to eat, with you jumping across the window playing in the yard all year trying to get me to see myself. who let you in? i see now the fool i was before the leaves started to brown in their centers like cigarette burns. if i could only see the fool i’m being now before they gather at your feet ready to take direction. you always knows what needs fixing and look to me like i know the weather by which it should be done, or am it. things were bad, but even while maimed you carried me away from them. now if i take my hands out of my pockets, if i am less embarrassed by your significance, we are our best or a draft. we will keep seeing each other, but i don’t know what i mean by that. and when i don’t know something i search your face and you search mine and the day ends and the day begins and the day ends.

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Good Night

My life is double what it was but at home I am halved into some bettering me and the one who wants loud entertainment for my binging senses now they're not learning you where you live. Like I said everything needs to be either ugly or beautiful on my skin to get me noticed by hundreds if you can’t. There are some bad things yet to come but the worst went home. The worst died in their sleep. There are worse things than having to see a whole night go by. I learn there’s a time the stars get even brighter, the sky’s own way of blushing. And yet she never goes black. She won’t commit to it with another day so close at hand. This is ideally a time for ignorance, is perfunctory and humble sleep. But looking like that I think, does she really want to be ignored? And do I have the right to take on the silent anticipation that night does for day, and can I treat the weather changing regularly as pushy advertisements before the show? When it goes on it's for you to talk and find a place for us, but for now you just laugh a beat while stuttering down the staircase to a dream.

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Baby

I walk an inch shorter than advertised, pleased by today’s news: the humble rocker and restaurateur is writing again. He says his love plays wait and see. It’s windy this morning and I wonder is it him or his object who’s waiting. Or both, you and me both. Gratitude rests on a razor’s edge between seeing far-off ends and not noticing time. This stage fright is just how things always are, but it's made itself at home in my legs. You wouldn’t let me watch the other shore as long as I’d have liked, which was always. With you there’s always somewhere else to go, but it stays within here, within the family heart. Mine doesn’t work like that, so you took me in to stand with my back to the heat, to love as much of my city as one can without falling, to write down sounds with you over radio waves, to wait and see.

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Up

I would spend my whole life standing corrected with caramel dripping down my face and an arm of you shielding my eyes against wide smiling afternoons. When you left the mood of the music changed. The musicians saw you weren’t tipping. The ladder out your window could have taken me down when up seemed the only way. There is a lot to hate. They all can’t believe there’s nowhere I’d rather be than inland, rain in our vessel, doing as you say. So I make a show by saying how I feel. Then I keep going. We have a history. Isn’t history sometimes just too long of a wait? Accumulating anything almost always feels like an accomplishment. But to act after so long being so still has a way of cracking time up into pieces, with us between them, a dark vastness that's so accomodating that we, the dark itself, get lost.

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Wednesday

Who falls in love on a Monday? Who waits to knock against you until the crudest joke comes? Wednesday felt unusual, I had a dark afternoon in my body and nothing is as good now I’m back in your regular world. I imagined storming off from the whole clan. I imagined anything but a long aisle. I imagine that you carried me but only through your pleasure. What friend of mine, I wonder, wouldn’t advise running now? But I’m a decade down. I’m someone known.

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We Girls

There is this: if someone sang you a song your heart would come out of its hole in the sand, streaked all bright red and purple with gold eyes to see all the obstacles your world affords, palm trees and the others, the oblivious and fearless little ones and more holes, more homes. So you are what they sometimes call a halloween crab, and I ask why something so decorated to be seen is so afraid of the light. Am I Mrs. Medicine now in your world, have my arms grown strong enough to be imposing, the type that swoops down for an embrace in a dance of afraid figures all mercurial and flicking into their own orbits at the edges of this happy place, gone and silent for hours, as I have tended to be? There are so many songs, and so many women. But listening is not loving. Foraging is not even practice for loving, nor is fishing. But you sit on that red vessel like the lake is a backstage, its dark sleek floor shown by one blue light off in the east, and they, and we, are all on the shore behind the trees waiting for your show. When you’re ready I’ll raise my baton and we’ll fumble into some giggling improvisation, the song of you coming off the water, of you being curious about what we girls do, what words we fashion out of your boredom. Such words. Things staying as they are is a half-life. We want a world.

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Tired

I’ve loved many men who would rather lie down and watch television. They do it because television is easier than dreaming. They do it because the television doesn’t need answering. I won't cut my hair. And I'll never stop loving you, it’s the truth. You who took me home to my mother after ice-cream. You who appeared in the kitchen window to be put to work by my elders. You who always came to see if everything was all right. So how many chances of how many more men in my life will you ruin before you ask me if I am who I say I am? Yes I've reached me. Now I'm walking to you. Did I tell you about the farmhouse on the hill on Route 14 on the way out of town? It killed me to see it, to be inside it in my mind while in a car waiting, moving, with something you didn’t know you helped me mangle, see how far off I was from living in that place with you with our babies, making popsicles all summer, with the only noise the sound of cars who wisely took the long way. There is so much I would do in that house. I would never get tired.

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4th

I forgot they’d have to waste the earth before I’d forget you, so here in the jungle I’m thinking about coming home, the one from another page in the family tree, the one you’re stuck in, clay-footed but so helpful. That’s what we always say. Here, jeans fall right off the bone. Here I think I found the exact lyrics that disturbed your stoic order the other day on a hill in New York, here, where I have time to count and recount my money and reconstruct someone else’s star-struck night. I am my own late-night Friday programming and I’d do a lot to impress you, colonize another planet if Canada won’t have me back. I didn’t think about America once today, it’s getting to me, it’s getting to be an experiment that didn’t work. The surfers laugh like hyenas about so much, but mention the state of the motherland and they go really quiet, like blackout quiet. We'd sat for three hours under the tarp talking about water. I think you’d be good at this sport. I could have broken glass over you last time, stirred up something for the neighbors to believe. I wanted to see their faces like raccoons on the other side of the screen. Who wants to walk with you down this endless, endless dark road so silent it seems watchful of what I want to do next? I do. But instead I make a fool of myself in the workaday Pacific, call it practice.

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He Said

He said years ago he regretted the things he said when he drank. The door thumped to leave the galaxy and my questions outside, an arm of stars still over us like we were being rained on. We watched beheadings by the fire, which did not cleanse me. What were the terms then? The drugs made him a coward, but the coward in him made him do it. The coward sprung from silence, from a boy on the stairs listening as men below sorted through death. To tell him would be to make a loud sound in a place that doesn’t know them. Like the blare at the start of a race, like a killing. How do we redecorate a fear? How do we get to know a life that never happened? I listen tonight to this polished face speak so wisely about faith and going clean. His voice morphs into yours, but this page says don’t pray for my kind of ending. It’s my turn to share small news with you but I’ve got nothing, except to say I’m leaving, this time off continent, with my pet theory that the farther I go, the less of you follows. Hearing that kid say: don’t speak when the soul holds you back by the reins. But is it my soul, or my history pulling, my fear dressed up as decorum?

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Still Not Impossible

In heaven you would be sure. But right now we’re alive and I have a guest at my feet. Will you grab his elbow and bring him up, you brute, then really toss him out the threshold. You can do anything. You can make a mistake in the middle of the road and I can sell it as something that people need. Nothing happened, you just yelled sorry out the window. I see now a hospital bed is the only arena where certain heat would feel ready enough to break. You would say you realized you didn’t want to wait to be dead to say it. But maybe dead is just getting ready silently in the upstairs bedroom for a culmination, black-tie and well-lit, the lighting of having had a glass or two. Anyway I see this morning neither of us is dead. And it’s still not impossible because it’s a planet. It goes on, it is just dark to my eyes sometimes. Massive. In between your mundane updates can go some bombshell better on paper. I heard God ask in a half timezone if I was waiting for a sign from him. I said everything had to be perfect, most of all me. Not thrilled to be summoned for this, he said: but love is so easy. Wish I'd had a crisis to put out to distract me from your hair. If you don’t fix it before dinner then how can you love me. If you don’t walk me home then how. See with you I suddenly can't spell, Final Jeopardy eludes until the last possible second, so it pleases me to see you ask water to break your fall, and fall. I was startled to watch your hair go straight as your back. Who is this? I’m always asking, like if you keep self-baptizing in the cold salt and the dam you’ll never be known enough to earn what I really think.

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