makeshift whimsy

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2012-01-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

"everything is something trembling on the brink of something else, thus to be clutched and cherished..." ~Spring in Fialta, Vladimir Nabokov
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hunger

2011-11-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

sometimes it takes a week to rip off a band-aid. sometimes more, because you ripped it off so fast, because you were trying not to rip someone else off, and you ripped your self off in the process. now there’s this raw-red welt where fawn-brown skin was, sticky and bitter as a bruised apple. now you have a bellyache, but you never took a bite. here’s the scabbed-over bite / mark in your heart to prove it. see?

2011-11-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

vanishing point

2011-10-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

we finish our dreams, slippery, push each one into each other’s mouths like warm berries. there are only two stories, he says. a small, wet knot holds him together. someone new shows up, or someone goes on a journey. it’s the same thing, i think. our blueblood hearts, the horizon berry-colored. he squeezes it, and a dream drops out. there’s only one story, he says, and looks right at me, which is like looking away. someone loses something.

"One writes out of one thing only...

2011-10-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

...one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art." -James Baldwin

gloss

2011-09-30T18:26:00.000-07:00

might be made of maple sugar. golden autumn belly of the trees, sweetblood of a forest turned inside-out in its linger. lilac, daffodil, maple, wait. i'm looking for something in the tall grass. arched-back swan dive into what i'm looking for, wings balanced behind me like a back-up plan. i want to land in the book and make hardly a splash. lost library in the heart of the heart of. everything to imagine me at my most beautiful.

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2011-02-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

18 when i saw him, my heart lurched, but he just walked right past us both.

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2011-02-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

13 the bar has all these different stained glass lamps that hang from the ceiling. sepia-colored gold-rush photos of san francisco that hang on the walls. a torn painting of the old cliff house, which hangs over the sea. it looked like a castle before it got old and crumbled. a fireplace crackles by a dart board. beams. couches. wooden tables and chairs and mismatched furniture that looks as if it’s been crumpled by generations of bodies, sinking down with a whiskey into heartache, or break, or warming, burn, felt words. you know. i love best the big lamp hanging directly over the long chestnut bar, fat glass flowers with round petals, all glowing reds and deep oranges and yellows and greens, lit from the inside. overturned-trough shaped. beneath it, an old man with a smoke-colored horsehair moustache pours beers from a spicket and smiles into the dark. behind him, glossy rows of bottles, asleep on their shadowed shelves. i just finished explaining how three different young men wanted me to marry them. the first two are drug addicts now (downers and uppers, respectively), and the third was a joke.

“look what you did to them!” D said.

“were they always drug addicts?” L said.

“no,” i said, “but they always had the potential.”

it’s L’s birthday. she keeps calling herself old. we toast. “when i look in the mirror,” she says, “i don’t see the person i think of myself as. i’m stuck somewhere around twenty-eight. but that’s another story.” she is forty-two, beautiful, laughs with her whole body, and looks you right in the eye.

my heart is stuck in my body like a broken record. it skips and skips. i’m not wearing my wires because i wore them all morning at work. it was cold and sunny after days of pouring rain and everybody wanted hot chocolate. outside, in the bluish dark lit by yellow streetlamps and red tail lights, people bury their chests under layers and layers of clothing, and take most things for granted. they gesture to each other, slap-happy, laughing, and their voices make steam out of their words, which push out against each other and coalesce, then disappear completely. from inside, they look like a silent movie. i name it february, getting older. it dropped down to the low thirties last night, and early this morning B said he saw frost in the park, frozen grass holding its breath for the sun to come up over all of our cold rooftops. the light from the stained-glass flower-lantern falls on us like something holy. i am thirty-one. i’m not wearing the wires, but i’ll put them back on tomorrow. the tear in the cliff-house painting looks like a weird cloud, flesh-colored, like someone ripped a hole in the sky on accident, and discovered there was skin behind it. i look up at all of it, trying to know something i’m too young to remember.

“when i look in the mirror i don’t know what i’m looking for,” i say.

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2011-02-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

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2011-02-15T17:57:00.001-08:00

7 finally, it’s raining. i come down with a faint case of vertigo. keep tilting to the right. heart side, other side. maybe i’m trying to get some distance. hard to win a stare-off with your failings. “if you get wet,” she says, “couldn’t you be electrocuted?” cherry blossoms gather in plastered pink on the sidewalks. everything smells like blossoms and rain. my valentine won’t stop throwing up. i’m trying not to fall over.

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2011-02-15T17:51:00.001-08:00

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2011-02-15T08:39:00.000-08:00

3 it looks like a giant manta ray. swimming through my small insides like they’re the open ocean. that manta ray has a big mouth. Breathe in, he said, listening, Again...Again... “the imagination,” says the novelist, “is like a muscle: the more you use it, the better it performs and the quicker you get ideas of higher caliber.” bright metal snaps where soft brown skin should be. maybe i’m stable where everyone else is electric. my heart is like a muscle. my heart is like a muscle. my heart is a muscle.
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2011-02-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

back there in that november crisp

2010-11-05T09:59:00.001-07:00

of leaf-pile, back where on your tall wooden deck you outlined a life, drew a frame in the night filled with stars moving, i still hold the feeling of having come unmoored, of having arrived, suddenly, at the end of my tether. later, pretending to sleep, curled with you like an egg in a nest while you snored your music of autumnal dreaming, i talked myself down from my barren treetop. life left dissolving on the dry ground. i gave flesh to our fancy, my evergreen hair, leafy eyes, moon pupils, but you fell asleep alone wrapped around me, another woman tied to your finger with a dusty string. something vanished from my middle. i was an opposite egg, empty, a clean, slender branch, stretching from everywhere into winter. i let go a last leaf, felt it drop at my most naked. i carefully kept breathing. outside, the night sky was rearranging. cold stars divided, trickling down the sky, glint of a faraway fire on a dark window. the chickens were asleep in their quiet coop, each one tucked into herself like a secret wish.

2009-12-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

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i'm trying to burrow inside of something. i would like to flip back and forth between worlds, and i do, and my plane goes down, or my raft pops a leak, or my starship hasn't been dreamed yet, and i'm wallflowering around like a bluebell grows through a crack in the corner of a roomful of windows, i've built myself a home here. at the edge of things. twigs and cattails and feathers. lengths of string i've gathered from so many different cliffs or ditches, crawling inside looking for something with which to tie my ends together. being a seasoned old sailor of dreams, i'm wavelength, starboard watch, i'm a maven in the art of knotting.

when did i become wallflower of the sea and everything in it?
wallflower |ˈwôlˌflou(-ə)r| noun 1 a southern European plant of the cabbage family, with fragrant yellow, orange-red, dark red, or brown flowers, cultivated for its early spring blooming. • Cheiranthus cheiri, family Brassicaceae. 2 [informal] a person who has no one to dance with or who feels shy, awkward, or excluded at a party. the truth is, i'm at the party because i wanted to be here. the truth is that nobody knows what's at the bottom. maybe there isn't a bottom. sea lilies and feather stars, sea urchins and starfish who don't have brains, or eyes, or hearts. the heart urchin comes sailing from the sand when disturbed, lands in the same water, and burrows back under the floor of the world. we are some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet, hiding. moveable spine, suction-footed. sand to rubble to coral to cold. the resulting locomotion is generally slow.

some of us can regenerate missing limbs, arms, spines. some of us (bat star, blue star, pincushion) can reproduce by breaking an arm or by deliberately splitting our bodies in half. each half becomes a whole new animal. well.

our upper surface is often very colorful, but our underside is mostly a lighter, a guessing, an aurora. don't see the sky except through water. if you're still wondering what's at the bottom- this is it, swarming with stars. basket star, beaded star, sugar star, brittle. cup-shaped feather-star with an ocean inside. you crawl, roll, walk, swim, cling, quick. loop your arms around something. slip-knot, anchor. cryptic, we hide in the crevice. situated in the middle. in especially strong currents, looped arms are liable to break. so who were you before, who are you now? this is all i wanted to say: look at how many one can become

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starlight

2009-11-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

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all things parallel or seemingly symmetrical in the natural world, these of which i have a few. a handful of rain, a handful of sand. i put a period where one doesn't belong.

in a rush of hopefulness, i keep a flimsy whisper going. i keep a goldfish finching its bowl in my mind, swimming laps flush with the edge of the bowl in my eye, i fray the edges of everything with my fingers, knowing nothing all at once.

at someone else’s celebration, i sat at a full table with an empty chair beside me. i pushed a bit of lemon around a plate, i pushed a pat of butter, parsley, bitter green. mostly i imagined myself a little boat of bread, i sailed a crumb of my crust into that solitary sky with champagne bubbles leaping like stars.

empty belly full, my delicate lips parted, filled to empty with a wind like milkweed, all these accidental seeds i've scattered, a smattering of all i want across a moonlit field. i have something to tell someone. i want you to be spellbound, to make a bold gesture, give me something to write about. i want you to know this like i do: sunlight is starlight. sunlight is starlight! do you get that?

(i know he’s blind because supposedly there’s no use for sight down there, but i swear i saw him see me.)

i'm barred and latched, i'm golden. i'm being a birdcage. empty with such full, swinging, winged things inside. safe with my belly full of birds, but awkward, ready to be overwhelmed, like the air before the wind switchbacks and its clouds collapse in thunder.

i'm being a bug, a firefly in a mason jar. i hear with my fingers and taste with my feet. i don't know what i'm wanting. my glassy vantage, i can see you through the walls. tap a thin wing at the window between us. i'm thinking you, i'm trying to light you up like a room. can you see it?

nobody really knows what's at the bottom of the ocean, except there's for sure this blind prehistoric shark who lives there and haunts my dreams. first, he was in a pool, he came out of nowhere twice trying to swallow everything i loved most.

i've lost something. i'm hoping you can help me with something. i found something i want to show someone. i have something someone might be looking for but i don't know what it is.

so full of giant heart-things, so full of flimsy flowers to wish on, loves me / loves me not. loves me / loves me not. said i was concerned with light and i meant it. see my bright blood blue-belling this soft outer skin, you can see a petaled tilt in the streamline of it, not much further. okay i'll tell you, but don't breathe a word to anyone:

--second, he raced at me from the other side of a well-lit room with his mouth stretched, predatory, black like a hole to fall straight through the earth. i tricked him into swallowing a puzzle of space shaped like me, i left a little warmth in my wake, bathwater, hiding in the shadow of a doorframe.

promise? my heart is not a dark tangle of vessels and threads. it's a subterranean creature, undiscovered species. it’s glowing like a lantern with the moon inside. i swear. look: your eyelashes are so long, so dark and unreachable. don't let me get carried away. mio caro bello, i'm having trouble breathing. brighter and brighter in there, look ali, remember about starlight! you'll tap against the glass, holding your breath. i’m here. i see you! i remember.

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2009-11-28T07:58:00.000-08:00

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damned, doomed, boneless. i'm a fish out of water. i mean, i'm a goldfish in the bathtub. have you seen my family? dreaming fish-dreams of glittery shoals, swooping the sea like a net of jewels, you're a gem. this one said. your tail all a glimmer, angling an arrow, pointing half of you in different directions at the same time. but it's not like that. there are too many of us. moving. we bump up against each other and off our edges like moths trapped inside of a lampshade. wolfing at artificial light, when the moon is high in the sky, hidden by shadowing buildings, windows to everyone else's inside. i'm trying to stop seeing. i'm trying to howl in private. i'm trying a dream to leap canyons back, back to the rain where i came from. wearing the open sky for a hat, what with stars and clouds and wings and all.

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my favorite documentaries are about animals or big-hearted farmers. this means that. one day, i'll be envoy extraordinary of my own living document. milkweed and bolted, dandelion stuck in the staples, between the nibbling teeth of the pages. here's the picture: slice of land nestled in a hillside. apples to everywhere. tin buckets bent, strapped, sweet on their trees, mutually enamored. one pig, one cow, one chicken. we'll farm apples and maple sugar. i'll name the pig Henry and give him all my sweet scraps of pepper-stem and rhubarb. apple core galore. he'll snort, blush, wild rose-petals pressed, stuck as a scented mosaic for his snout. for the others, the grass in this place is glistered with chlorophyll, quiet worms working, happy and blind, dirt-nibble, what comes from the ground there, clean and sweet, what's buried there is old. i come from that ground, i'm sure of it, twisted from its tree trunks and the winding roots of bittersweet. cumulous, bluejay, milky way, where. the rain is soft and holds the sky up.

what sort of name will you give your chicken? if you were a chicken, which would you choose?
Princess Pansy Lavender
Gooseberry Woods
Gertrude Stein. Venus De Milo. Queen Elizabeth?
Lulu!
|ˈloōˌloō| noun
1. an outstanding example of a particular type of person or thing, a person or thing remarkable or wonderful. 2. a Samoan barn owl.

is a chicken a person or a thing? if a chicken is a thing, a person is a thing. or if a chicken is not a thing, a chicken will have to be a person. we'll wear spectacles and read from the dictionary. we'll make pancakes on sundays, and eat them in our pajamas. we'll go out dancing and come home late and laughing. lightening bugs will speckle the base of the tree line, at the edge of the pasture, miming a million stars. the cow will be asleep standing up, giant orb-eyed like dreaming planets, long eyelashes like an antique fringe frames a wet window. i'll smooth his velveteen ears and tell him a secret, the rain will start barely, bounce off the barn roof like a snow of stardust, i'll name him Sweet William, after a wildflower.

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the gap

2009-08-24T12:13:00.001-07:00

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as if we were walking down an autumn path, dead leaves curling their toes under the flat of our feet, legs that make a slow scissor along a scrappy turning, a falling-of-things, a green to rust to falling. "as if the boats in your eyes were preparing to winter," you'd say. i'd say in a whisper, peeking treetops for waking owls, "as if a lilypad through the floorboard, green surrenders to yellow and falls." i can't find the cloth i use to clean the surface.

shining my small blue light in the gap, a crack of finding, a treasure hidden in the linted limbo of sleeping furniture dragged in off the street some time back. bent paperclip, an earring, a miniature stack of paper, a sharpened pencil. further in, or down, or under, a bent intention, a scribble, a paper apology, a songbird sleeping. "how long has she been there?" you'd ask, your brow snagged with worry, your lips pulled together like a cinch-sack with a song inside.

i sigh, standing up from a crouch to linger in the doorway. "she's always been there." you look back at the darkened gully where again there's nothing, where all that's been lost becomes invisible, translucent against the backdrop of the dust and clutter that envelops the surface of our voices like snow. i can't find it. sealed in with sharp crystals of ice, delicate, each is shaped like its own friend, its own country, you shake your head, i stop looking. i lace up my eyes like skates, sail off toward some other edge, a sunk ship rinsed in blue.

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open the dream to Eden, Conversation 5

2009-04-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

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memory, faulty mechanics.

i haven't decided whether i'm confused or unconcerned.
a character you've never met in a book you've never read
spooks me a note from you.
i think you're pretty.
i'm disarranged. i'm sure of it.
the long-sharp edge between us, collapsing in a ruffle.

i'm saying something out loud. do you hear me?

i don't know which dream-He you are. hiding-He or growling-He growling. i want to
know that in my ear. we could step into an image of what we have lost.

i chalk a map of the continent into the street between our houses.
pinks and browns and lavenders.
butter-pat yellow. seagreen.

your face is just an idea. or,
my face is just an idea. or,
our faces are golden, wet, wanting, displaced.
do you remember me?

don't let your lips lilt, or wilt, or wander my way. i miss you.

even a bold garden / is already wistful.
what?
nothing, i never
said that.

let me check my notebook. that last one. the eleventh letter at the hour with the feather hidden between those last two pages. the edges matted. stucktogether.

the note in the margin reads unreachable, left of the left margin. a moment suspended. as if it didn't apply, didn't invite to bite the apple.

let me check. i'm checking. i move each page i ever read as if a sail, as if a veil, as if in amber, as if.

haven't you? haven't you always.

you've always been a ghost.

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spoonerism |ˈspoōnəˌrizəm|

2009-03-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

noun
a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, as in "you have hissed the mystery lectures," accidentally spoken instead of the intended "you have missed the history lectures."

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: named after the Rev. W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), an English scholar who reputedly made such errors in speaking.

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2009-03-06T21:19:00.001-08:00

you peel an orange in one, long skin. reassemble it minus its belly. leave a pennybank slot in the top to drop a treasure.

an orange tabby, the color of a cantaloupe: fruit is one of the plates i'm spinning. plates are one of the places i spin from. i hate being dependent on food and water. i don't want to be dependent on anything. i leave my last saucer of milk on the back step, trying. my Declaration of Independence. later, when i'm hungry, i start nibbling my lower lip. way down in thought, i can't decide, my vertical dive, near the bottom where those toothy glow-fish live.

leave me be, i'm eating a submarine sandwich.
i'm designed to operate completely submerged in the see for long periods.
i'll sea you in the morning.

i can't think straight when i'm wet, or hungry, or chasing a glowing worm-lure around the ocean. i got a bowl of plankton for my brother for christmas, but i've decided to keep it: the lighting in my ship is all wrong. i'm trying to get it right. a little less incandescence, a little more lighthouse, starboard, bioluminescence. about ninety percent of the organisms who live in the ocean have the capability to produce light.

fireflies, the lights / flights of my life.

bioluminescence is the only source of light in the deep ocean where sunlight does not penetrate. the earth is swarming with animals.

i had to fill out this form, and sign my name. are you ready? not really. a little lightheaded. nekton verses plankton. one can swim on her own, independently of water currents, the other must drift in the directions of the tides, her Bigger Picture. the mutual enrapture of the moon and the sun. do i really have to choose? can i not be both.

sea what i mien.

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just at the edge, where solid and liquid mix to make mud

2009-03-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

i was probably eight years old, but does this have to be about me? i ate a frog-egg. and i mean i really ate it. i didn't just lick it or put it on my tongue and spit it out, i actually ate it. i was in a pond. i was covered in muck. it was so lord-of-the-flies or something. i didn't have a lilypad in my eye. the ground didn't crack open like a speckled brown egg with a yellow yolky duckling inside. instead, it was slimy and slippery and slipped down my throat and nothing happened. julie rolph was sitting next to me in the pond, lakeblue eyes big like globes, wet with reflected pondwater. swimming minnows. something. i think we were naked. i think we were tired of kissing captured (terrified, peeing) frogs and toads and were going for something more consequential. we were waiting for some magic to happen. to rise up from out of the muck and prove itself, like it does. does it?

there was a church on that island. bear island, it was called. in the summertime we paddled a canoe across the lake to the island. once we brought a whole garbage bag full of barbie and her friends and their endless pink and white artillery. it sat on the bottom of the canoe all the way to the island. sloshy. i don't think we ever even played with it. there was always a more interesting Very Important mission to take on. like that church, for example. there was something spooked about it, something always-autumn, something like a bucket to catch a leak that has a long way to fall. that hollow plunk or thump. julie rolph and i would take these Very Important pilgrimages to the church, which was on some other edge of the island, just to spook ourselves. the titillation of some old-fangled danger. shades of brown. stain-colored, iodine. abandoned birds' nests. colonial ghosts. witch-dust. in the winter when we couldn't canoe we cross-country skied across the lake. all winter long, back and forth. walking on water.

in my memory of that island, there's something very salem witch-trialy about it. something tutuba, scarlet letter, something rustling the autumn underbrush. some kind of trap we never got caught in, but that danger was so delicately infused into everything. sun through birches, sun sinking into water, long afternoon lakeshadows shaped like mysterious creatures, like intrigue, dangerous ideas. all of it you could walk right through, the light and dark moving, falling across your eyes in ancient patterns like water seems to. we were a maple-people. a lake-people. a canoe-people with some sunwarmed water splashing the bottom around our sneakers. it's how lorine says fish / fowl / flood / water lily mud / my life, that makes me love her.

what's a giant bird that starts with a vowel? it's not a riddle. the church was in the forest, and so was the frogpond because everything on the island was. it was a cut-out chunk of new england forest floating belly-side-up and all by itself in the middle of that giant lake. is there a shadow under an island? i was never really afraid of the dark, but i was afraid of the shadow of our little sailboat. treading water in my smudgy tangerine life-jacket, i'd imagine that the shadow was a whale and it was looming just under my feet, waiting for it's chance to gobble me. the lake-whale became an almost mythological creature, showing up every time i swam from the boat. i never told anybody. nobody knows about the lake-whale but you and me.

so but that bird- that bird lived in the forest with everything else, on the way to the church. it's nest was high up in this tree. was it birch? maple? something. a lot of birch out there. skinny white trunks you could bend like licorice. dug-up bone-colored. the nest was enormous. at the edge of my mind, it's as big as a treehouse. five stories high in its licorice branches. if the nest was that big, julie rolph reasoned, how big was the bird? it wasn't egret or osprey, definitely not ostrich- that bird could fly. i never saw it. i imagined its wingspan as big as a rooftop. a bird who could drape itself over a crumbling church. a bird who casts a shadow big as a boat. i recently discovered the largest flying bird who ever lived. its name was (is) Argentavis Magnificens, which means "magnificent argentine bird". six-million years ago, Magnificens wandered the andes mountains and the treeless plains of argentina with a wingspan of 19 to 26 feet, a height of 6.5 feet, and a weight of 140 to 180 pounds. feather-size for this bird is estimated to have been about 5 feet long. though it may have needed a downhill running-start into a headwind to get off the ground, it is said that Magnificens was an excellent glider, like a sail plane.

how much do you think a five-foot-long feather would weigh?

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critical analysis

2009-01-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

limp critic of my own measly projects, prospects, predisposed to running in place i watch the scenery change but not the shape of my feet. all this running is making my feet skinnier. muscle and bone cling to each other under my thin membrane of skin, the arches rising up and pushing against gravity like a woman arches under a silk sheet, a bent-over in a long robe, in a dream i took a staircase out that i didn't take in, running in place my mind wanders like a viny plant, an albatross: there's always more than one way out of a place

helpmeet-less days, nights are less meet-less, my dreams are infused with characters real and imagined. when i am wedded to the Sentence. when i am waiting to find out what i'm bad at. when i am fiddling with the dial on the radio, fine-tuning my reception to the land of the ground that surrounds me and my flimsy wishes. i stir the concoction in the latest pot. nothing sticks or melts, Simmer-Things that i do best. i do my best work when the moon is about to drop out of the sky. the blackened silhouette of trees, charred in shadow as if in dream where nothing leaves the ground. my premonition stands to be corrected. i am the judge and the jury and the girl on the bench, lying on the bible to worm around testifying myself. a testament to my insensibilities, secrets of predictability, i fidget my toes under the witness stand, dreaming my skin to run, to Find something, to Mean something, to staircase-out my dream-feet

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the last six things

2008-12-01T23:12:00.000-08:00

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one i tie a garbage bag around my finger to remind me what we have, to remind me what we had not, cuts off the circulation, bloodrise plum-colored, bejeweled, glimmering in sunrise see-all, sunset scavenger garbage trucks wink me in malfragrant collaboration as they zoom down the block toward the sea.

two turns me into a monster, little easy-does-it, little glitch of pretending second-guess our dream-people, our concocted bedtime cocktails, our slivers, incisions, the angle to the arch in our feet. feet are for touching together, for asking, for come with me, don't you want to go where i go. run. brake squeak, a baby terydactile. a street before time. a cloud-shaped dinosaur batting her long eyelashes at the crows who howl at the traffic from treetops and telephone wires. looking for lost things.

three banging pots and pans around in an elevator shaft, my digestion sounds like a chorus of machinery. sloppy gulp, i swallow a flower, oops. empty, ouch, we're going up when we were supposed to be going down. things are growing from every direction. i end up somewhere i never thought of, never even made up, and you know me, i make up everything. you miss that, don't you. are you or aren't you. what, dying? i forget your name when the adjective follows the noun. lost. looked-for. liar pretend. i'm growing your name like a forced bulb, my sweet saliva keeps you alive where you are, buried in my cheek, keep you like a miniature garden with my tongue. shhh. if i open my mouth, a bird flies out.

four i is for me is the girl is a character in a book is the way to be is to be like her is like taking nothing for granted is difficult but not impossible is the skylight in your cheekbone is a nutmeg brown is a nice color is integral to survival is tough in the city is made of rock is wedged in a the doorframe is the way to get in is the way to get out is to flee is flight is limited to a bug or a bird is.

five in the middle of me lives a hurricane, hurricane ali. it's nice to meet you. i'm looking for a lamp, i'm looking for an emergency candle, a knitted-blanket-and-beach-towel fort in the den. i'm looking for a bear in the pear tree. withstanding the wind, i cup my hand to my forehead and look out over the ocean. in the distance, a lighthouse with a dumb dragon inside. drenched. sneezing little smoke-bombs, allergic. in the other distance, a scrappy moon. pierces the purplish drape of sky. holds together our two sides of horizon. a frankenstein-stitch. a lilypad. an anchor.

six all arrows are pointed down. i hide myself for you in the hole of a tree, a broken curb, under a rock with wildflowers or weeds. purple, yellow, some are edible. some are both. "which is which?" you whisper. you can't tell the difference. only i can. from the ruins of my box of shipwreck tricks, i have one left. i play the cards like each is my last, and it is. i stroll like a porcelain pony, chinadoll in a white frock and bonnet. threaded with pocket roses, i bat my plastic eyelashes. i lie to your face every time.

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when you call

2008-12-01T23:08:00.000-08:00

when you call, i'll be knitting a hat for an elephant. droopy, gray. gigantic.

when you call, i'll be making lasagna in a quiet kitchen listening to my voice in my head. i'll be just beginning my fall pledge-drive, trying to raise the vibe, or the roof, or the stakes. someone sad will call in and pledge their thirst or their art or their love, and i'll accept.

when you call, i'll be in the bathtub filled with ice. i run so much my legs are like lamp-posts. because i can't keep my feet still. because someone is always around threatening a game of tag. because i want to be faster than everyone, just in case.

when you call, i'll be writing a jacob-poem. a poem like jacob would write. or i'll write a matthew-poem. a leaf-poem. a dave or vaughan or tully poem. the only one who writes poetry i think is actually jacob. it's nice poetry, too. about sweat and love and loneliness. all these women.

when you call, i'll be sleeping.

when you call, i'll be eating a peach in silence. i mean slices.

when you call, i'll be trying, lying, spying on the doctorman in green scrubs who lives in the building next to mine. his bonsai needs water. he sets it on a paper towel and gives it a bath. looks at me funny.

when you call, i'll be peeing in the tiny bathroom, investigating my fun-house facial reflection in the silver faucet. my eyes are so goddamned big sometimes. no wonder.

when you call, i'll be banging out something on the typewriter. it'll say "when you call, i'll be angry. when you call, i'll be trying to be so angry," and it won't work.

when you call, i'll be a pacifist.
when you call, i'll be a buddhist.
when you call, i'll be a waitress. thanks very much. hope you enjoyed yourself. come back soon.

.

solar systems

2008-10-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

"the whole point of kicking it with someone is to feel good," i say. this week i said that. next week, who knows. i rarely take my own advice. never say never (never say never in a poem). it's the moon, harvest-time, something. we need to sit on some straw. we need herbs. Monogamy is also zoological term. we need sleep. we need tea. we need stairs or ladders or welcome-mats. we need to not have to climb in through the window. we need to get spooned, or laid, or Left Alone. we don't know what we need. we need a way to get from Me to You. all the women i know are freaking out. i can only gamble. i can only speculate. i can only know what i know.

gertrude stein was an aquarius. frank sinatra's moon was in pisces. i was born in november, which is the month for bare branches and tones of orange into brown. i live where i was not born, in this pacific city, in this toppled landscape of dollhouse and palm, and november (the month i was born) is the month of picnic-blanket bookreading and cheery green flea-grass. miles in between, weather systems, mountain ranges. what i'm interested in is something not-so-different. something bigger. i know i said that last time, but listen. all those in-betweens. dark matter only makes sense to astronauts. those poofy space-suits. that giant fishbowl you have to wear over your head, even when you're sleeping. is your head swimming? you're upside-down, dreaming. you're missing something. the mutual attraction of everything in the universe for everything else. gravity, the glue that holds us together.

it's been one, two, three-four-five, six days. since Someone came to my house but snuck around outside, downstairs, without ringing the doorbell. something small through the mail slot. some things are left to be mysteries forever (never say forever in a poem.) never put the period inside the parenthesis. never try to use the plural of a thing you don't know the plural form for. i was one, Someone was two, the weird concoctions we put together are three. the Lady upstairs moves furniture at three A.M. when her guy goes home. stompy. i think she's on drugs. weird concoctions, everybody's on it. we're all trying to work it out with the moon, the stars, mythologies real or imagined, all that dark energy beyond our galaxy. our interpersonal trajectories. does everything really revolve around one sun or another? is that where the saying came from? stars collect themselves into galaxies. our Sun is an average star in an average galaxy called the Milky Way. the Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars. do you see where i'm going with this.

dear,
there are people about to be silly with, and there are others about being above it. way up there where you can't read out loud to, can't (wouldn't, didn't) sing with, don't laugh at my jokes. even when i explain how funny they are. blocked me in my orbit. e-brake on a spaceship. a downed tree on venus. timber, got a splinter. Caught A Light Sneeze. looking down too much / tried to stop / stepped in a mushy thing. our multiplicities of mush in between. lost my footing. you sucked the mystery out of a flower. glower. jerk.

down on the ground, in the life of the plants i keep, oftentimes one plant pluralizes of its own volition. (medieval latin volito, from volo, "i wish".) there are spider plants everywhere. in every room, they stretch and droop their striped legs from a central spine. they propagate themselves profusely. sending little shoots out, go and make more of us. can't ever just be one. the root system of the spider plant isn't very complex. most everything (all those multiplicities of a plant-self) stems from a single fat, white knobby root that looks a little like a creamy carrot, an albino slug. a giant white worm with a weight problem. swollen. but what do i know? according to the some particular astronaut in some orbit somewhere, "most of the stuff in clusters of galaxies is invisible and, since these are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, scientists then conclude that most of the matter in the entire Universe is invisible," (His capitals, not mine). where's that weird piece i wrote about picasso? pablo picasso was born in spain with the sun in scorpio. was a good kisser. his women shaped like windows. people are bridges, that's what i think. we make bridges with our bodies from one to another. defining space with matter, matter with space. expanding, collapsing. mostly living to make sense of those electric places where gravity collapses us. we send shoots. we send starships. we make bridges with our hands, our feet, our fingers, with how hard we try.

.

cardboard cut-out of how to Be

2008-09-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

what did i say? you said it's who you are. then, later, when the wall had cracked spiderstyle down the one corner you said it's who you have been. where are you trying to go? your high place, happening place where nothing and everything happens or doesn't. what does it mean to not have expectations? i expect the sun to come up swinging, then i get hooked like a fish in the lip with the moon in my eye. milk-moon blanket over all of it and you have nothing to say. headinyourhands. your irises like lilypads with dark things underneath, growing lungs and legs.

i said i was water and i am. what are you? a book on the shelf pressed with the others, somebody burrowed a hole through the inside of. i had my binoculars, magnifying glass, i was starting a fire. i just wanted to know what you kept in there. i speculated: A Dead Mouse. A Family Of Dead Mouses. A Falcon Feather. A Paper Mask With Dried Leaves. A Bodiless Stretch Of Skin. an extra. a glass fruit. A Handful Of Seeds. a book like a ground, like a room, like a you-sized hole in the universe. a place where so much can stay but no much can grow. a place where trees start from their sweet-seed and stem, but never fruit. aren't you getting hungry?

so our bellies met and the moon tilted and flung itself across the frame of window to the rest of the world. in bed with your book open. two doors away from escape and you stayed, sifted the sand with me for all the little sharp things chiseled smooth with water and time. then two days too late and i turn up in this photo where i remember the play but not the players. the rules to the game that seem ridiculous tinted yellow in place of blue, orange in place of lavender. our half-lit production was the color of a bruise, a star-speckled-garden, the inside of a box. in the glint of sun on saltwater it all seems to be made of paper, plastic, tempera pain mixed on cardboard palettes and watered down. i mixed a runny blue glitter glue to water the paper flowers. a paper-mache moon strung up in the rafters or hanging on a wire from a lamp post, a porous eggshell crust with shallow plaster craters, a new foreign terrain mapped with sticky fingers and some necessary abandon.

on your way out this morning you stepped on a paper bird, the one i liked best in fact, and ran off with one eye and part of a wing smashed to the bottom of your shoe. because i wanted you to notice, and you never even noticed, i looked straight at the sun to temporarily blind myself and said nothing. your plan backfired, made that sharpquick popping sound that terrifies the warmhearted birds in the plum trees, that shakes the neighborhood for a moment, the birds and the girls with our heads in the trees, snapping us out of it. the sun had nothing to say of my performance. one little branch fell, under the weight of some miniature winged thing i never even saw, and you were gone.

.

homesick

2008-08-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

back home i have tiny lights strung all twinkle-flip around the edges of the planet- i live on a planet with the makings of an urban bird's-nest, of books with colored bindings, spraypaint blackchip bookshelf, pokerface moon poking lightfingers at sidewalk couchcushions. jelly-jar flower stolen at moonlight bicycle. spell your name in the rain between trees, sharpen a pencil with your teeth. i only invited you because here you are, finding yourself tongue-tied, halloween cat-tailed, flutterspent at the edgey curb between this and that. rat-a-tat-tat. tapping your own lip with your own finger. blurring yourself in the mirror.

back home i have a dresser drawer with exactly 2 condoms and 2 plastic tests. oops. an invisible picture i took of us. bent heart rocky: missing. hankercheif crumpled with salt, snot, sweat where you draw a map of the bed. flowerbox wound yellow with years; bear-colored clump of hair; silken steel string; a thimble. memory of floating compass. memory of grain formation; rice castle. memory made of water and fallen leaves. memory bald, empty, layers of paint as thick as the crust of the earth. sometimes when the earth is a pie and you are slit at the center, steam-seeping your inside heart out. children make beautiful music when they dream. the picture of them. the curl of them like birds, bent, sip the air up like a sugar-cloud.

i am falling out in another place.

i miss everything at once.

spin birds up in my twinkled web of sleep.

breathe.

.

spanish for bird

2008-08-21T22:55:00.000-07:00

i want to meet a man who keeps a clean, old paintbrush in his pocket. you know, horse-hair. featherdown. a man who keeps a pocketfull of feathers. the tips of my fingers have gone missing, numbed by a certain empathy for pending weather, autumn and all that comes after, a certain picking-up-of-habits, nailbiting as a sign of solitude, sorrying, emotional wandering, taking out your worry and wonder on yourself.

i meet a man with a pink plastic-bag full of bones. a man collects birds. reads me winged words in the way their feet are flung. once i found a green bird, the color of a perfect lime in a picture of a lime. flavor-color that sweet pucker on one's tongue. a man leaves his window open all night. the pattering heart of a sweet-lime bird is flung into the sky and bursts into a star i get to name. i want to meet a man who lets me name a star. when i name the star i bite my lip and name it pajaro, spanish for bird.

i meet a man who worries that it's too late for chickens.
"it's never too late for chickens," i tell him. the moon is in my eyes.

i meet a man in the dark. we sit on a green parkbench, breathing giant quiet tree-air. a pirouette of fog lifts the sky away from us, just a little. lets the edge of a secret in, under a crack in our grass doorframe. i meet a man who holds his cards close to his chest. a man who is sleepy. a man who keeps looking at nothing in the distance. who puts his head on my shoulder under the streetlamp and sighs, as if we were lovers instead of strangers.

i want to meet a leaf-eyed man who whistles like flying, like slicing the clouds to nibbles, pictures, brush the blue away from my secret expanse of stars. exposition:

i want to meet a moon-flavored man who will kiss me on the lips.

.

2008-07-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

"dreaming" :: kyle m. stone

wanderlust home

2008-03-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

a dress made of poems, i thought, a paper dress for a paper girl. you're no paper girl she said. who am i. you're a little blue egg with a bird inside. i'm a bird. you're that blurry star the sun makes for the camera. i'm a star? you're a camera. you make faces. i am trying to see the big picture through you. you're a road atlas with scribbles all over it. really. yes. you're the pages torn out. you're someone's imaginary friend. really i said. it goes both ways. well pleased to meet you, i never did figure that out. plunk. lakewater me looks over grass-stained me's shoulder. my grass-stains are shaped like knees. knees are shaped like scabs shaped like band-aids. the clouds are shaped like clouds. plunk. the clouds are shaped like broken airplanes.

some people sneak around on the internet looking at porn. girls eating poo from a cup. some guy jerking off into his wife's shoes. stuff like that. i sneak around looking at this new hampshire real estate website. it's called Bean Group. what the hell does that mean. maybe someone named Bean started it. maybe it's like jack and the bean, how he started out all tiny in his crumby hole in the ground then whoosh up he went on his magical bean to the clouds. is that how it goes. so close to the stars you could singe your eyelashes. maybe that's what this group is all about. i don't know who they are but i love them. back yard abuts conservation land, Bean says. easy commute to boston. mature fruit trees. peek-a-boo. sometimes my mom's in on the game. that yellow one is so cute i can't stand it, let's buy dad a castle. sale pending. eleven extra photos. longing fills me like liquid. it's easier to breathe. sitting up in bed glassy-eyed at pictures of wooden kitchens with millions of baskets hanging. captivated by the made-up prospect of owning magic beans. backdrop of bus doors folding and unfolding down the block, plexiglas wings on a clumsy bird. open, close. open, close. cabs shoot by in the night.

my mother always hung baskets from the beams. josh used to hang upside-down on them like a giant sloth. maybe i was sucking my thumb or eating grapes maybe i thought i was at the zoo. either way looking up. i was always looking. oh my look, would you look at those big eyes. grown-ups would ask me a question and i would just look at them. look out from behind the corner of my curled fist. little pointer finger snailed around my nose. oh it's okay. she never takes her thumb out of her mouth. josh would talk for me. her name is ali. she's four. she's pleased to meet you.

my name is ali. i'm twenty-eight. i live in san francisco. you've never met me. that's all you really need to know.

the noontime announcer on public radio says later there will be a guy on the show who was eight years old when he watched his mother slit her wrists and write his name in blood on the wall. i think about my mother drinking coffee in the sun leaning against the kitchen counter. balancing the phone on her shoulder. watching my dad knock the icicles down and fill the birdfeeders for the blue jays and purple finches. sun on bare grey branches. maybe the cardinals were my favorite. bright red against white. chickadees are mom's favorite i think. look at the chickadees. look. little birdfeet make arrows all discombobulated in the snow. that's her word. it's chinaberry i tell her. blooming. that's why my block smells so sweet. ack. but it's february. balancing the phone on my shoulder. come visit later for the lilacs she says, and we'll plant you a cantaloupe.

i can't remember what happened to jack. the houses all have something green somewhere around them. they have the sky behind them like toy houses in a sky theater. that clean blue that means north. that means birds who have never seen a sidewalk. for a while when i was in maybe the third grade, i probably wanted to build sceneries for theaters. when i am twenty-eight i want them again and also a messy playwright lover. if i built theater sceneries i would paint them all blue. fee fi fo fum. when you see pictures of jesus, like in your grandmother's florida bedroom on a little wooden plaque near the lightswitch, his eyes are the color of the sky. do they do that on purpose. my mother grows bright green beans and basil. clean cucumber and mint. puts it in her water and drinks it. my mother believes in birds and doesn't believe in god.

Dear Mom,

I'll take this one. It's even older than our house. Look at the garden. You guys can come over and help me plant it. We can plant lots of watermelons and cherry tomatoes and eggplant. Jake and Elwood can come over and play with Olive while we're gardening.
I like that it's blue with red trim. How adorable.
I would like to buy and move in to it immediately.

Love,
Premenstrual Syndrome In The City

new hampshire thinks the west coast is hula hoops. a coast of flimsy flower-people. new hampshire drives its truck out onto the middle of the lake and sits with its pole in the snow. steaming black coffee hot from a thermos. slurp. light a cigarette. slurp. sun coming up like a grapefruit. lights another one. little nosehairs frozen. comparing the sun to various fruits, new hampshire thinks i'm worldly. how 'bowt that cyurious one, new hampshire says. that theya little one from the treefaam up theya by Miles' place, go on off to be somebody. yup. new hampshire i love you. new hampshire wait for me. new hampshire. wanderlust is overrated. new hampshire the west coast is bright mango slime is flowers all year and nothing dies you're right. new hampshire plant me a pumpkin. new hampshire sit down with my heart. stuffed the last of my maps in a picnic basket and buried in the garden. roll out your carpet of mudsalt and snow to tug me home.

my mom said the last storm brought so much snow, the plow guy had to come with a backhoe. a whole new layer to the earth. you should come in the spring. when the first tulips shoot up through the ice. the grass in hibernation down there. under the world with the worms. under that old foundation, which is like the ground, laid down in 1775. it says so on the chimney. but not everyone signed the Declaration of Independence she said. in the spring. the birds make such a racket. everything's new.

when my friend leaf was a kid his family had no money. he desperately wanted this remote-controlled airplane for christmas. maybe he was seven. his parents couldn't afford it. no way we can't afford that. on christmas morning the three kids sat in the living room by the tinsel tree and opened their presents. tore off the paper and there it was. the airplane. holy crap. the airplane! could hardly contain himself. ran outside little barefoot. los angeles christmas morning it's 68 degrees and mostly clear. some of the smog melted off. got the plane up in the sky. the plane is flying. he's flying it. he's a pilot. he's sailing over the neighborhood. he's flying flying, higher and higher until the plane is just a spec. flying off toward the world. ahh. o.k. turn around now. turn. he doesn't know how to turn. come back, plane. come back. take me with you. turn. it won't turn. he doesn't know how. he wants to go with it, wants it to come back. he doesn't know. so off it goes without him. no. he never sees it again. merry christmas.

when i leave it's summer, the middle. like the part where you're thirteen and have bug bites all over, even on your butt from sitting in shorts in the grass sneaking cigarettes behind the barn watching the sun go down past the pine trees. here's a picture: i have two braids in my hair. i'm sitting at the wheel of my brother's station wagon, both of which are dropping me off in my new state of oregon. i am to cruise down the driveway to the road that goes to another and another for three thousand and fifty-three miles. i am twenty. i'm grinning. yeah i'm doing it and i don't care get me outta here. manifest destiny, man. i have maps. i have sunglasses and coffee. i have my brother who hates both cat stevens and cigarettes so i have to wait until he's asleep in the passenger seat for all that. here's my mom off to the side with the birds. just be careful. who probably have tears in their eyes. bird-tears. put on your seatbelt says my dad. and don't sleep at truckstops. live free or die says new hampshire. be careful. keep your eyes on the road. don't forget new hampshire.

josh had this, his favorite hat. if it's not on his head he put it on the dashboard. it's too hot for hats. somewhere in one of those vowel states, iowa, ohio, illinois, indiana, something, we are in a nasty yelling car-fight and i roll down my window and his hat flies off the dashboard and is sucked into outer space. he is so mad i think he will give himself an aneurism. i am laughing like crazy because i'm nervous he might kill me and i really need a cigarette and i also know that the next exit is in like five million miles because i saw a sign. i think i won the fight by default. over the next six years he will keep trying to move away from new england and won't. i will live in permanently moveable places, tents and vans and various couches coast-to-coast. for a while i even lived in a cave which is not moveable on some beach on this island but it did fill up with the ocean when it was autumn and the tide comes up. we had to evacuate. what was out came in. our stolen plastic salt and pepper shakers floating. get the guitar. has anyone seen my other shoe. did you even have another shoe. ali get your shell collection. some people got stung by manowar. they had to pee on the stings because that's the cure for it. and there was a giant sea turtle, i saw him.

my name is ali. i have a van with expired plates from north carolina, whose state motto is "a better place to be". up until 1893 they were the only one of the original thirteen states without a motto. i have an oregon driver's license, which has a hologram of evergreen trees. i graduated from the evergreen state college in washington state. i have one brother who is 13 months older who has a fiancé and a dog and a house in colorado. my best friend is colleen searcy who has pumpkin-colored hair and lives in ohio. i am twenty-eight and my address is 1892 grove street san francisco california 94117. my phone number is 781-9277. the area code is (603) which is new hampshire, which everybody thinks is weird.

fireflies actually don't bite. evidently they are capable of biting, but they choose not to. i just made that up. i don't actually know if they have teeth or not. i kind of doubt it. they have light-emitting organs in their bellies. for christsake. female fireflies glow 1. to attract mates and 2. to lure other bugs in to eat them. maybe at one point new hampshire seriously considered making its state-insect a firefly, but the legislature never put the measure to a vote. i'm not telling you this so you'll go there. i don't actually want you to go there. when i go there i want everything to be exactly how i left it.

.

rain behavior (or) trapped like this in parentheses

2008-03-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

i can barely see the city through the fog but there you are, somewhere.
rinsing in my negative space.

or sneaking off to hide out in the pantry with your paper calculator, prime numbers missing, your faded hollow pink plastic phone. call me up collect at the dream to say, "yo quiero un beso," or "get me out of the pantry" or "let's not talk on plastic phones". or i step in a puddle and get my only dry socks wet when i want you to say.
one time you'll say "i called god to ask him about you and the line was busy," wrapping the cord around your fingers, and i'll say, "you're lying." and you'll say "i know."

i'll press my ear to the wall and listen to dust collecting in the spanish rice, dustmites asleep in pinwheels of semonlina, fiori like giant flowers hovering over their dreaming. our grandmothers' flowered porcelain bowls of history cross-pollinating on the top shelf where nobody notices. pressing my lips press the return of my rainy-day cheeks to the paint-chipped molding, listening, whispering my reinvented recipes for disaster into the wall. "spill something behind me," i'd say, or "let's play this one again," or "i'll slip a pinch of sugar into hiding, hide my little for you in a book".

this echo incessant, steeps us like tea. the tree of us chopped into a live mossy stump, growing sad and wild things. pulling up the rules to loop them in the bittersweet. squeezing this weird math out of me.

sit here by your yellow lamp with the fog slipping past the window and read me.
turn me over like damp paper, like leaves. look.
i have all this room to pretend us into. i pretend us into small spaces. a smooth bone box, or more shell than bone. to fit there together with our baby-teeth, one apiece. safe-keeping.

a prime number is a number that can only be divided by itself and one.
the taint of magic that goes into an otherwise scientific discussion.
this is the mystical aspect of mathematics.

somehow i'm always covering my eyes and counting, waiting.

.

love-affair in green

2008-03-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

dear,
come back tomorrow, won't you? they're almost finished turning me under again. tunneling through my stomach for their water-lines, a little lavender tractor idle, stained with spray-paint and rain. my crows collecting wasted papers, tall grey owl steps back and forth in cypress, the eucalyptus makes a small mess everywhere he is. i want you to gather my pigeon feathers and fill your pockets, i need your noticing where my trunks are stump. you're the only one to remember me rightly in my totality, unruly ecology— our secret rabble of wings; our trimmed things.

*

dear,
i've been slumped up book-piled indoors, white windowsill dusty, but the color of snow in the sun. it's been summer. are some of your winter-trees tossing cherry petals yet? with you last, i thought, "i want you like a dish of sweet-cream for a kitten." like needing your even green gullies, tunneled tummy. your pinprick tips of mistletoe, little hard red blood-berries, apple-tint ink-blots in green. where and what were you before this? this morning in my "i smell purple!" i thought you heard me. tomorrow will be some other thing. all curtseying, cypress, your wing-shadow, soap-flower. when i finally find that dappled owl again.
see you then.
love ali.

.

untitled in the city, number three

2008-02-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

yesterday all rain was tilted at diamond-shaped angles to the street and i hid out in a rainy day bookstore with wet wood and old books with broken bindings and gesture-drawn portraits of old poets on the covers. oppen, olson, ferlinghetti. i drew a wet gesture, drawing of my face in the rain on a fogged up window i drew little red-ruffled, surrender, umbrellas collapsed in my eyes. little blue diamonds of displacement under. the staircases were damp, were old honey-colored in the back of a cupboard. i clomped various stacks of books up and down them that said things like "bird feeder's snow cap sliding off", or "a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Kiss me." or "cross of sponge and good will through the center of the eye", or "Favorite body of water: Arctic Ocean." i held them until i made them be quiet against my body. we each started to dry out a little, one by one. that took a while. the books were heavy and held my heart up.

today the clouds look like underexposed eggplants. today the clouds are ambling in like soft sleepy soldiers. today the clouds are making pockets to see through, today the city is a submarine and everybody's riding in it, underwater weighted down with our weird dreams and our broken things and our puddley streets and alleys and our hiding, and the clouds will make little round windows for us to see through to the surface of the sky, where the light is.

.

i only say four things and the fifth i keep to myself.

2008-01-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

1 with the sun coming against brick buildings and slabs of grass, wrapping our legs around the city. around all our absences, our missing crickets and chances and keys. around all the old books curling the curb with abandoned words. lovers drinking paper teacups in windows, lined up in cobbley rows, talk about being waist-deep in water, walking against the river, a harvest of lilypads in the bathtub. everybody rubbing dreams, crusted from the corners of our eyes. our collection of pigeons and crows. all the quiet sharks of our imaginations hungry, circling, weightless, searching for the ocean.

2 all my important papers are shifting between boxes or mouths. i'm signing my name in the back of a red tinted book with a leg on the cover. the leg on the cover does not look like my leg. my leg is muscled and soft with a thin felt of hair. i am a mammal and the book doesn't reflect that. heart like a hummingbird the book doesn't reflect that. my feet like freight-train hobos the book doesn't reflect that. make-shift whimsical tinted my underwater blues and greens the book doesn't reflect that. this, my salty yellow breeze in the window tickling the houseplants. the purple bruises and sandbox bags of sad hidden under the bed. the faded black letters of the streetsigns that keep me. the world atlas blown open in the gutter with its rain-pages, torn-out continents, curious pink countries, the book doesn't reflect that.
i am stuffing my hand-drawn map of the city in my mouth for people to make sense of what i say. my legs are stronger than everybody's, i wrap them around the skyline and tilt it to my liking. my feet are sneaky. second-hand knee-high spy-socks, hiding under my pants. the dreamtime compass built in to sneakers, my heart. my fingers that reach under the table, not over, trying to touch. the book doesn't reflect that.

3 "dear san francisco, warm up. your pigeons' lavender talons are stuck to the wires. i am looking for a rotary phone, i am looking to time-travel. i want to dip my body down into the seaside renaissance of your concrete belly. love ali. your fog is building pictures of pelicans in my hair. your faulty edges snapping off like cypress, or like eucalyptus skins peel away in winter strips. dear san francisco. tumble our corners down, surrender us in your crumble, tip us into the sea."

4 if it was watermelon sugar that would be a good thing. being alive living in an apple tree makes me tired. i started sprinkling cinnamon on everything. i am only thirty percent better than i was before. parts of me are worse. one part of me wants to find an avalanche to build a snow-cave in. one part of me wants to sit in a shallow tidepool sifting the sand for starfish. one part wants to put myself on witch-trial and find out what the november village really thinks of my slapdash ways. part of me misses the mountains, surrounding, sharp-capped with circling snowbirds and ice. the same part misses rivers, clumping sneakered feet from one rock to the next, the mud of being born into flower, the balance on fallen logs left for crossing. that part of me muggy, doe-nibbled, vegetable garden, fireflies to float my irises. that part grounded, a blanket of pumpkin-colored leaves falling. all parts of me are swollen with longing, this i build my self on the inside of. all parts of me for cycles, to be better; loneliness, to be worse. all parts in disagreement. all parts rusted, oiled, standby, sugar, chugging that old sour heart along. the path home will be lined with wild strawberries, no bigger than a thimble. if you look closely. if it rains and the birds and you listen

5

.

storm systems

2008-01-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

my word for today is hard-hearted.

the rain and the wind are hard-washing the neighborhood. one window started leaking, i let the rain in okay but the wind comes with it. they are wedded to one another. marriage has always been bullshit. the soggy book on the shelf used as a barrier for obdurate weather. i use up all the words i can find in the dry spine of the dictionary, poke around in there with my compass and my flashlight until the backdoor blows open and i have to get up to nail it shut again.

there are at least two words for everything. i guess i'm bent on the weather, storm-watch gusting to ninety miles per hour, coming in from the coast through the side door, knocking people over, headed for the rockies. bent on my refusal to bend over, i roll up a threadbare beach-towel and sponge the rain from the cracks in the window. i procrastinate curtains. i taste the ocean in the bucket i catch it in. my tough skin soft and salty and untugged.

every morning i think, "maybe i'll build a bridge today." i think, "that tree that keeps me is going to snap in half," or "my word for today is hard-hearted". i file my round things to straight and sharp. i chisel myself to a point, my body hard, just a tool. i ache somewhere hot in the middle and press cool chamomile words against it. water piles itself against concrete with nowhere to go.

i am writing this as an unmarked letter i'll send down the stormdrain.
i am about to get very wet. i am about to get salt in my eyes. i am about to never be dry again. i am married to this, imposter winter, all my best trees snap in half, fling their birds across the sky.

tomorrow i will build the bridge.

.

weather forcast

2008-01-19T14:46:00.000-08:00

i read your weather forcast every week after my own.
our storms that chase each other.
the sticky link.
your eyes like streetlamps that go out.

i sit in a pile with richard. i try to
remember the flowerburgers. his
ladies who wear plastic
fruit on their hats.

my ripe edges start to mush.
swatted by fruit flies.
birds wait at the window
for someone to notice me.

everyone’s hungry
for something.

.

the language of three-way mirrors

2008-01-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

"let's dive in and turn up green in search of our roots," oh. bob dylan on the record player. contrast in diction, Spanish Boots. a bumbling mumbo jumbo extravaganza. i feel it coming on.
i'm slurping my soup alone, saving my radish for the horses, not knowing how to read you this time. hesitating. orange and gray. pulling my hood up.

"look up Make-Believe in the dictionary, it's there. mark it." page four-twelve. put your feather in the crack. the receding hairline fracture between obscurity and exposition. your make-shift whimsy. your fanciful fits of sleep. so many tongues loosened, sidewinded toungue twister, naked on the board, red plastic pointer spinning. "gotcha. you're out." the brilliance of all your bulbs burning up. a light show.

use your plain brain to imagine my fancy cortex. do i look red to you? redder than normal? no, i haven't been in the sun. i've been underground, i have dirt between my teeth. see?

how am i supposed to read you, you riddle me with running to the books. everything keeps falling off the shelf, the spanish-english translator fell on my head again. pull me apart to see the mechanisms that move you. don't be shy. i don't feel like playing right now. cool september sun to close our wounds over. i am trying to promise.

hulking the oxford off the living-room-lectern to wear it, to defend my papery grace. get it? all these people with no voices, what difference does it make? he wants to know if i am happy here and have i eaten any apples yet. i have, and i'm not, and i'm hungry, and there are no apples left. my lips are red like the letter. sweet-blood swarming with fruit flies. apple-juice sloshing my tear ducts. how many fingers are you holding up? while i'm un-pinning un-sent envelopes from my chest, the elephants are stomping the un-book to shambles. i'm hiding in the laundromat or the library, i forget which. i want your favorite books to be trees like me. i want to let you live in my house like a sleepy cat. leave it at that. beautiful & awful & ridiculous like

being alone, like "Stranded in Peru?!" like pennsylvania in the station wagon, the suns go down like apricots, like running with crutches, like your mother eats blue-green algae, like taking your pants off in the parking lot, like "what's another word for Faithlessness?" like falling cauliflower coral, yellow apples with brown leaves, like Danger in love with your imaginary friend, like timelessness, endlessnesss, everything that won't stop in multiplicity. fluffy bunnies scrambling the warm cobblestone hearth on their big, dumb feet. like noses rubbing for luck. fluffy gray kissing. like Make-Believe in the dictionary, spelled-out, hyphenated: soft blue guts exposed.

spell it out. there is no game. i believe in it.

.

birds who eat flowers

2008-01-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

concrete noun proper noun me to pieces / out the window past halfway shades birds circle where megan says “avenues of doom / spirit of she isolated in time” / form is the form is the form is how it sits on the page / sick with the furniture / spicer waiting in the parlor without dinner for days / levels of texture / textured birds on the wind / close to the ocean you can feel it in the fog / i lift things because how can i not / what to do watching the birds want to cross things off the list / add another new at the bottom: “i love a red window” / poems as petals that fall off / i want to be delayed / i want to eat paragraphs / i want to be eaten by birds

.

untitled (snow poem #5)

2008-01-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

dear,

i'm here in bed in the room i grew up in. i didn't grow up in the room, the room grew in around me. elbows into the windows and fell out onto the roof slope, tumbled myself in lilac and birdcall, tulip squash to run to the forest, sneak to the highway slip, that long yellow line, long spiderweb road that spattered me onto the atlas like paint, like spark, like rain.

you said "a raindrop on the highway", then "fuck the floor away from", you know i want to, you know that. i'm on my belly in the bed in the room that grew in like dandelion roots and sputtered me out the window like milkweed, somewhere later i stumbled into you in words and we tied our tongues together to make meaning, pushed our breath together for drawing pictures on all the old bedroom doors leaning on the hallway, shadowy and unhinged.

you said bricks and hammers and what are you building? you said earthquake and "you're biting your lip—" and then the city trembles when i tell it. you said "red. red." you said home not in your mouth you said. i start to know your back where it curves and your voice when you're reading. i start to know how to fog you and press my fingers against your glass, pressing pictures. i taste paper in my mouth. sharp breath of catching letters on our tongues. i know what you look like with your mouth open.

home is a place full of whimsy and nightmare and snow-persons and plate boundaries and none of it means me. home is birds flying into the wind. the walls. home is a constellation i want someone to show me the parts of and the history of home is holes in the sky.

do you miss me?

my body is fidgety, whining for it. full of empty to breaking. i want a sex of words. i want lips that can breathe me can speak my round places like they mean it. can press wet poems into me like leaves, press me like a leaf in a book, pick me up and hide me away from where i fall.

i fell off the city like a carousel.

the horizon here filled with silhouettes of places i probably miss.

out in the center of the pond i made an angel in the snow and thought of you.

.

the woolgatherer's house

2008-01-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

1.)

"Carrion crows and humans line up patiently, waiting for the traffic to halt. When the lights change, the birds hop in front of the cars and place walnuts, which they picked from the adjoining trees, on the road. After the lights turn green again, the birds fly away and vehicles drive over the nuts, cracking them open. Finally, when it’s time to cross again, the crows join the pedestrians and pick up their meal.

If the cars miss the nuts, the birds sometimes hop back and put them somewhere else on the road. Or they sit on electricity wires and drop them in front of vehicles."

2.)---------------------------------------------------------------------

i love that donkey. hell, i love everybody.
the heart of a fin whale weighs 842 pounds.

why do i have such a strange house?
because i have collected these things to protect us:

1. apricots in whose golden pulp lies the core of long afternoons
2. deer tracks in the freshly-fallen snow
3. a recipe for onion marmalade
4. octopuses, tortoises, and enormous crabs, to hang from the rafters in place of chandeliers
5. an aorta big enough for a woman to crawl through
6. a ribcage that opens and releases a flock of glowing fish, a swim through dim algae and silt
7. a wooden chest filled with weightless music plunking muffled
8. a night of somebody please listen, open a book
9. loose plumbing
10. toys, play-pretties, or something to stash away
11. something molasses, stretched with honey
12. a tablespoon of ground ginger
13. the plump, glowing belly of a toad who has swallowed a firefly
14. pairs of gibbon apes, termites, black vultures, gray wolves, angelfish, coyotes and pigeons who promise to mate for life
15. a wet, folded map of the ocean; a crinkled, fallen map of the forest; a woven-and-patched-together with dry leaves

i can show you how to be a magpie. under an old quilt, one chapter at a time.

the hummingbird's heart is 4 times bigger than the whale’s, relative to the their respective body sizes.

nothing needs mending.

.

why it is important to behave more like a book

2008-01-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

i believe in letters. at the moment, i believe in the v, for vixen, vantage, and volatile. reading is a virus, plagues me in my sleep. all my books grow lips in the night and whisper from the shelf. they have all fallen in love with me and with each other. they paint my dreams in underwater maps, rearrangements of lines, squishy stolen internal organs, wispying trees. they move me on a paper sailboat, or sail me through the forest on a red-flyer wagon. they banish me to a makeshift igloo on the roof or to clutching my talons to the tail of a kite, sailing over the city. they arrange themselves according to hue and binding.

all the vintage books of poetry are hunkered together like antique architecture, all their lovely invisible cobwebs strung from one to the next like old clotheslines between buildings. on this one hangs an empty nightgown, between these two a pair of gnats, wound. this one has a rust-colored maple leaf suspended in mid-air, time-stopped between creased covers, speckled in gold, all of it. backbones balanced upright in history to make meaning between. these books are patient doorframes. i spin their pages like a map of the world. i am the woman of myths and bullshit. these books are my piled lovers, pulling me, limbering me, breathing me, believing me, teaching me the papery secrets to dreaming.

.

why metaphor can't hold me up

2008-01-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

i have drawn falling girls down the margins, their triangular party-dresses slant, tilted with wind. i have drawn dismantled windows, or windows with splintery frames and glasses that don't match, perforated in endless ellipses, mapping trails to mystery places off the page.

i have been reading and writing you with all my attention, intention, intoning you to frame your newness. your unknown book-ness. your blank spine that tells nothing.

i build a dangling gate, to slip through in the night, to access the curious crooked space you populate. the latch is rust-colored and squeaks and flakes and was never taught to catch. A and B doesn't equal anything. all letters spill up like sparks. the subtle scent of sweat that collects between words. the entire alphabet splashed up like a crystal film of slippery possibilities, pulsing, palpable, liquid friction, glistened over the sky.

nice try.

.

why they should make a statue out of me and put it in the museum garden

2008-01-19T09:53:00.001-08:00

drifting day, breeze from the wrong direction, movement through stillness, palm trees and green oxidizing you. growing all your extra arms. windy mythical half-hearted, evasive, snapping the stretched rubber band of your intention back, slapping your heart against your palm as a threat, or a proposition, or to warm it.

weathered like this in grass, slip-up under these wooden benches, your asleep-with-crickets heart, thievery-reach for it down night-lit gopher holes. your dangled-from-a-broomstick heart, zag it, sailing it through stormclouds like a paper airplane. your french-press sleeping-bag getaway-car heart, nap it in flight, lunar, bronze-dipped, antiquated, albatross.

cracked-back from rearranging the weather, your knotty shoestrings, your mangle, record to calamity, scratching your bad maps in the outside walls. you say, "this way", you say "apocalypse my apples", or "believe in me". hunkered over your mossy toadstool dog-table, stolen records and typewriter skipping.

you wrap yourself up in butcher's paper, where the road forks and begins.

you stuff yourself into the broom closet, hide in your accumulated clutter and dust.

you build yourself into a fort with ragholes, mopheads, crashing tools down, wearing an antique copper bucket on your wrist to collect the silt, attempt at catching all your underwatered moments that leak.

imaginary momenting, emergency exit spark and sputtering out. made-up fairystory swells, poking your fancy abscess to bursting, to push through the cracks in your fingers, pool on your shoes.

the wrong direction is not the way the wind blows. chop your tincture garden down before the flood starts.

you grow things to interrupt them.

.

animals

2008-01-17T09:54:00.001-08:00

“let's loll on a sunny rock, lick our wounds,” you said. you were tilted toward me, you were reaching away like cypress. i am pretending to listen but the pelicans—"You And I,” you said, escaped with my family, i played with bits of string as a kid. birds joining forces, scooping up schools of fish, spitting them in the air, makes me want to shake my elbows out like a chicken. a barnyard bird, i crooked my arms and sprout barn-owl wings out: owls fly silently, prey to nothing. “pray to Him, He’s testing you,” you said. “prey to nothing,” i say, without looking up. or i looked up, but not at you. i look all the way up. i am looking for the california condor with his Bald Head and his Endangered Species and his Mates For Life. his weirdness among other birds, his impossibility. they are tracking him.

i write my name and cross it out, the leaves turn orange for no reason in july / in cahoots or sympathy with southern wildfires / iris patches that re-name me. i cross myself out with the straggly branches. the starlight mints. buttercream cala lilies lopped over, top-heavy, tired of living so close to the ocean. you are not the ocean like saltwater taffy, like red or yellow plastic buckets full of sand. you are the ocean like salty flowers, like all sorrowful things that crust up in disappointment, your careful draw-bridge drawn, all stone lion statues who lose their pledge-paw to the weather. their noses corroded in the jetstream of history. sharp things. i am pliable, i have edges that bend. you are the favorite wrinkled poem that gives me papercuts. i keep you under my pillow. you Invader of Dreams: you are unexpected.

”stop startling me like that,” you say, “I forgot, I...got distracted...” i pour the teabag on the floor because you’re too close and i can feel your breath breathing me, the chamomile, the jasmine, the peppermint. the jasmine is a seed-pod that sprouts up a starry white-pink forest when it hits the linoleum. green flecks pepper my sneakers. a moment, yes. i forget you. i stand there quietly, thinking to breathe, biting my lip, then parting the leaves again, remembering. it smells like dusty storybook elf-love or trees that come alive when i cluck my tongue. “smells like someone’s grandma’s house,” you say, muffled, your mouth full of flowers.

.

the accumulation of dreams

2008-01-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

1 this is the boat i dive, electrified, that i crash nosedown in the mud between years, i stick there like gum on your shoe, stuck like god is stuck like gum to your shoe, this is involuntary mythology, this is the ugly stuff our beautiful imaginations are built of, this is the mortar that holds my hand-drawn legs up, my recipe for a cherry-jar filled with sand, for non-nourishment, for drinks that taste like holding everything back behind your lips.

2 this is the rift that encircles me, this is me circled like a broken bird. this is the us of me, marked. this is the postscript to insistence. my pebbled fists clenching empty. my knuckles scraped against stacked paper. this is the us of you confabulated, doomed, surrounded. this is a turn. this is my turn, or yours. this is the us of me salting your sores. circling your delicate wounds with my clumsy twigs and crayons, my endless collections of alphabet sugar.

3 this is applause. this is a girl drummer. this is memory, splashed like everybody dancing drinks across the ballroom. this is fable or prequel or pattering your palms against mine, uncreating a mess, rewinding our eyes to the first time when the feathers in my pockets were just feathers in my pockets. this is how you look at me like that. this is to forget me how i bat my lashes, laced with starry things. this is the sand dollar in your wallet, waiting, this is the emptying of your magic hat. this is birds don't fly out. it's all made up.

4 this is watery sleep-gesture. this is your body how i imagine it. this is me and you in a basket, left on the doorstep of an abandoned house. this is where an owl lives. this is where i balance my secrets with creations. this is full. this is a color without a name. this is a picture of you i colored on the back of a box. this is the color of your decisions. your organs rearranging, your heart and your lungs disagreeing, this is the knot i keep tying. your eyes are the attic window. this is the way to escape.

5 these are my guts.
this is the gut-boat i drive, this is the leak in my good intention. this is when i lose the last oar. this is me staring at myself in a gutter-puddle. this is cupping water to my lips. this is standing up as straight as i can. this is me sleepy. this is me bewildered. this is me full of shit. this is me looking at you. this is the trapdoor to our dreams: these are my hands: these are my bruises. this is me a liar. this is me in love. this is what the blue sky smells like.
i'm telling you because i know.

today is my birthday.

.

nose to the ground

2008-01-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

back between your cobbled trees rubbing your toes in clover trying not to steal anything from anyone.

stuffed my beloved. autumn in a box.

that's the thing about a magpie, about clanking the rackety dial around, turning in a quarter, everybody wins.

shiny things we leave in dark places to remember where we came from, to move away or move back accordingly.

shadow puppets canoodled on tree trunks. riding buses in the rain. a charlie chaplin yellow umbrella tattooed on my wrist.

this week the paperbox tells me the same thing pressed in newsprinted piles, stacks of hollow advice weather-rusted like a stump.

apples to apples, dust to dust.

trust yourself kid, trust yourself or you'll fuck it all up.

i don't know who these planets think they are, deciding my weeks like this, contorting the stars just so, just so i can't find my way back if my mind changes.

as it turns out, a day without wind is maddening.

or, a windless afternoon is better for juggling.

but those dead leaves just hang on the tree, not falling, having to wear the mask of indian summer, breathing strained, shallow

little caterpillar eye-holes poked, covered.
one copper penny apiece.

.

how to conjure rainclouds by candlelight

2008-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

our voices are wedded to our eyesight. i sense you and that you are somewhere in the city. your brown eyes wide, or soft, watery. looking at a thing or at a person. my eyes think of you. losing a thought, or toasting it, or making a toast to it, or burying it up to its neck in cut grass. there was always so much glass in the way. when i take off my glasses i can see you more clearly.

i keep straightening you, smearing you in a line through my eye, stretching you to a median, to the place that separates me from the ground. a desert in bloom. circling language like an animal feeling in the dark for the right place. being sure meant nothing. our focused negative space. my first-person present-tense that is exhausting. my ears that are stuffed with tissue and damp, windblown umbrellas.

our negotiations and contradictions, our pre-orchestrated derailment. our veer. our dreary short with fuzzy, underexposed photographs of the neighborhood we took place in. i wanted us to extend past the outline of our bodies. of our fitful rhythms, our accidental alchemy. of all of our things, which were never ours, which were only mine or yours, or mine and yours, or nobody's, everybody's, but never ours.

our delusions, obsessions, the poetry of our deconstructing a story that was never constructed to begin with. our fictions, our fictionalized flight and fancy. the illegal inhabitation of our world. it was as though there were sheets of glass between us, between all the parts of us, disallowing us from confusing our bodies into one. but still, even now, my own smell seems to remind me of you.

i am eating this poem with a splintered wooden spoon, like cold soup, or warm milk, or dishwater. grazing my fingers along our rusty iron railing. peeking over the edge into the sea.

i conjure your image, or your laughter, to keep me company. your thick, gray promise of rain on the horizon that keeps me. i keep the perforated specimen bag that contains our glass heart. there would have been a great deal of rain at the beginning of the story

.

john ashbery's hat

2008-01-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

how musey, how the leaves don't fall. how that tree with the flower outside your wrought-iron window tells time. it starts out blood-orange, peach-fuzz, shaving-hair down the drain, goes red like a plastic fire truck in a fire. pollute the sidewalk with spaghetti petals, angel-hair, how the rosemary blooms all year long, look how you drop it down your shirt. your fingers smell like spice and earth. do you understand what i'm telling you?

it sounds like autumn, the sun being busy and leisurely at the same time, to be stung by the sun's bees and have it not matter, the world-bridging, the pumpkin-yellow light through cypress, the children won't sit still, rummaging through their brand-new pencil boxes. can't that child be made to stop practicing? personal pronouns expand, long sun swells the moment. clarify the spelling of your name. last name first, you know who you are.

ankles to handlebar, places round themselves out of the photograph, time unspooling somewhere along the way, almost a half a mile late, in the middle reaching in both directions with one arm. one was Dreamland but somehow it's all dreamy, the brown tweed brim of your floppy-cap, brass butterfly wings, copper shoes worn by someone's baby father made into a keepsake plaque for the fainting room. your mother's hand-wrung apron string, patterned with poppies and rotted docks.
you're not quite out of the water yet

floating your transparent bones

Dreamland has other pastures

rappelez-vous que l'oms vous sont

.

quietly from these volumes

2008-01-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

1 "if one leaves things alone they get less clear by themselves," you said. i was watching lonely things turn circles in the snow. a winter-bird with one bad foot. the owls keep swooping down from the rafters and stealing bits of yarn from our hats. the weight of intimation heavy and cold on our shoulders.

2 i can't do this quietly, our hodge-podge piles that don't get divided, the crumbled chapters of the test, soft flaky flesh-toned erasers of our bodies worn down to smudging. i needed a good pair of winter glasses to slide down my nose, to wipe your eyes clean, to cancel us out.

3 "we should be arranged on the road and treated as outlaws of probability," you said. i am trying to step out of my shoes, and they keep filling up with snowflakes. your insistence to frostbite my feet. past-tense of you to follow me around like a glittery ghost, kicking my snowdrifts, my toppling promise of forfeit. you wear your history like a fur hat. but what does your hair look lke in the morning? or in the layered mirror of an icy puddle, the wind whistling your disonant ear?

4 the lines are so long. you string me up on the clothesline with bits of torn underwear and crooked clothespins. you arrange me in the yard with the pine cones, looking for clues. a cat on the banister. an abandoned granite bird-bath. a half-eaten apple hanging frozen, candied on the branch. i forget how to fill up the spaces between things.

5 the borders of our desires melt and reconstruct us and move through time like foreign countries. two women wash up and you implicate my shady arrangements of weather. the weight of missing words sinking your footprints in front of me. the graceful precarious fault-lines of our tongues and fingers, jagged jelly-jar crack through the bottom of our shifty alliance.

6 strung along witih all the wrong words. "our lacking sentences," you said, "would be terrifying with vagueness- if we stopped making pictures." i am one woman, two lips, two big pupils that you keep in your chest like charms against kidney stones or a day without birds. like our waterlogged use of the word "home", how i keep uncrumpling it, to float it like a paper boat in the corners of your eyes.

7 "i thought you wanted to contain everything," you said. the clamoring noises of the morning that slip dreams from our fingers like sand. the container doesn't fit. i tiptoe the edges, faulted, silent.

8 the special debacle of language plays us like a word puzzle. a book-full. like hopscotch, scratched into wet cement, breaking the rules with the board, the soft things that crust up to accidental permanence; my mistakes are like this. my skirting between the lines, the compulsive script that runs down the legnth of my body, proving my inadequacy as an actress, mapping me backwards like tracks in the snow.

9 you press your lips, looking away. take one breath at me with pursed eyes, as if headed underwater for the final time. "as if this search for a pace were useful," you said, "like sanding the handrail or wearing raincoats." our conversations are swallowed by the same dusty stories, told over again and again, every other page torn out, graying in the gutter with the bean-pods and pigeon bones.

10 you were mocking me from the back of a mirror. the silver glimmer of multiplication. wind picks up from the sea, songbirds stutter and grow cold. it's never been our fault: a mouth has meaning built into it.

.

UNTITLED (NOTHING-SACRED-TO-SAY-BALLET), 1979

2008-01-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the shoebox. Stitchy inventory of an urban fairy-tale: messy marmalade bedsheet stitched into a curtain; dusty luck-tree with snailed leaves; lopsided reading chair under a burnt-out bulb; a four-inch plastic doll with striped stockings and no shirt; a folded triptych of trees with two panels dangling. A dried seahorse afloat midair. A leaf-rubbing. A starlit teacup dreaming of tea.

The crystal of a kaleidoscope, crushed. A penny in a pill-bottle. A single pigeon feather fastened to your hat. A bazaar of torn paper-corners shouting the corkboard. All houseplants tilted. Everything exists inside of this box; your sky is a box-top. Scrapped-up theater in the wet memory of your eyes. An old blue book bound with allusion.

There's a boxfull of nouns to punctuate the window, they crowd the sill like raggedy orphans around a fallen bird's nest, all their soft little ears sticking out. There's nothing to hear. Quiet trappings with their toes poked over the edge of your crowded shelf. The ground is just below the surface here, piled with nouns to break other places open. Nothing is a forbidden thing to see through. These are the parameters.

Tapping the tacks with a toy hammer, pinning the floor to the wall, all your bumbling efforts at grace make art. A painted drawer filled with imagined mothballs and smooth antique cameos of forgotten women. "Anything imagined or remembered can twist off into something else," they say, "Beauty is about the improbable coming true suddenly." Director exit stage-left like a villain, her cape of crickets vanishing behind her. Your silent conductor slips through the cardboard trapdoor. A curtain goes up and there you are.

.

the squander

2008-01-12T10:08:00.000-08:00

pocketing our hands and walking away, sleepwalking, moon-pulled. such wild and lonesome things that we've become. buried in the heavy snow that holds the house up, i won't be seen again until the fence melts.

all our trembling bridges made of eyelashes & braille, milkweed & mustard, wild carrot & clover. my heart is an enthusiastic, old sinner. your scruples are shameless, oozing with god. lobbed with contradiction. snatching up all of my only moments.

you climb my giant chestnuts like kudzu. you come undone like loose buttons on old pajamas, a pile of brown and yellow leaves kicked over. erecting sparkled mausoleums of our doomed chance, snow isn't overrated.

my magnificent attempts to throw myself out the window. your big round marbley sea-lion eyes, watered down with indecision, looking after me, flooding my gills with your honeyed breath. i bet my last piggybank quarters and you bet the lint from my pockets, calling my bluff that is impossible to prove, winning the pot by default.

all your careful drinks taste like medicine. cooking your heart on a wrought-iron spit. your hands move like sparrows.

i keep coaxing the pirates. backing you onto the plank. i keep walking out into the trap.

we can scrub and rinse and rinse me and i'll never come clean.

sit still and i'll show you.

.

ASTRONOMY

2007-10-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

you are trying to consider the power of your loom. your vague first appearance at the bow of the boat, your wet fingers curled around the rudder. astronomy is science and mythology. spliced. taped to the sky. is you in the cutout and stucktogether of this room, sugar-breath laced with miniature lemon, the steam of breathing out in the rain. wine-colored leaves kidnapped, pasted to the walls, their nimbled veins reaching like roots. a whale's skeleton suspended overhead, wax paper baggies full of blue-jay feathers. recreating astronomy is only difficult if you leave the room.

all your sharks that circle the puddles downstairs, through windows dashed with rain, are waiting for you to back yourself down the plank. the mailman brings stacks of books, writing magic spells of mail in the margins. your letters never intended to send. your letters are perforated in the folds from rubbing against themselves in your jacket pocket. "just think of giraffes," the mailman said once, through the mail-slot, "whose hearts are over two feet long!" you nibbled leaf-eater biscuits for weeks after that, orphaned, relearning how to swallow. the things are what make the place.

you and you and you and you are talking to yourself again.

admitting that you are a wax apple, a spool collection, a stammer, a time-stop photograph of a woman running. literalizing your metaphors. wagering all you've got for a couple of gretel-crumbs of dreams, so pointed in your project, watching goldfish water fall from the sky, balancing sugared lemon-blossoms between your clean white teeth. reading all your letters over and over, in the dream where all things are relics, where you yourself are an astronomy, your quiet lungs expanding and collapsing like bellows, breathing the uneven pictures of your heart

into your hands

pressing your pulsing letters to the window

.