dear,
i wanted to tell you
something, and it couldn’t wait, but i’ve forgotten what it was.
when i say i’ve forgotten,
what i mean is the thing that’s most important is that the door is wedged open.
i mean, i’m peeling my way through your sentences, looking for the brilliant
pit. waiting for you.
the moon, when it’s out, is
crooked. i’d rather us not be seeing the same one, but it’s the nature of the
moon to be always the same and different. there must be a word for this. i
think the word is library. i think
the word is fissure or snow, which means falling in light or sometimes means a mass of flickering white spots caused by interference of. it
means cocaine, or dessert (vanilla snow)
or a frozen gas resembling. if we use it as a verb it makes a bit more sense
for us, i think? as in to mislead or
charm (someone) with elaborate or insincere words. when it’s
flickering-white and falling by honeyed streetlamp, though—my god—it’s beautiful.
it’s raining. it’s january. in april, i hope you’ll have come to your senses
and stopped believing everything i say.
what i’m trying to say is we’re all starving.
we’re all walking chambers for buried gems, is what i’m trying to say.
subterranean and dumb.
we’re all being haunted by our memories, and hunted by each
other’s.
which reminds me:
i looked up your birth-day
in my book today. the page was blank, except for a splattered drip of someone’s
dark something, stained the paper. on the opposite page, it said,
he’d
be invisible if it weren’t for his blue sneakers.
i looked up mine in yours
before i left—i never told you that. the page was hypercolor, kaleidoscopic, it
glowed in the dark like those enchanted plastic stars people stick to the
ceilings of their kids’ cluttered, canoe-sized bedrooms so they can sail their
giant, winged dreams at night like galactic birds.
whatever
it is that wants to be written can use you to write it, it said.
i just thought you should
know that it said that.
love, ali
dear,
this
is a list of everything i’m going to need you to be.
last was never the place to meet. but what should
you do? yank open your winter coat,
sending the buttons sailing across the room as a series of pops into the fluffy
asparagus fern? put your nose to my neck? okay, no, don’t do that. movement is
always beautiful, but—still—don’t.
you can read this letter as you would any other
letter. it’s been said that struggle
changes an ordinary human into a spiritually awake person. (no, you can’t read this
letter like that, can you.) read it like this:
a herd of elephants eating
cashew leaves and singing.
or this:
your mother had a
dream when you were buried in her belly. deep
well, brilliant sunlight.
the dream may have had three heads, like that
terrible dog of the ancient underworld (you know the one!) and they all had
eyes for only you. i’m going on a picnic and i’m bringing a deep well,
brilliant sunlight, and a flat rose trellis painted up the wall of our meeting.
if i write you a letter, you’ll have to meet me here, because your conception
was the letter your mother wrote you and you responded.
forgive me for being forward, but tides do turn,
sir.
you have to start sometime, you said. i’m almost
certain you said this.
i’m standing here with my little stick, attempting
to draw a line in the mud for the sake of you.
love, ali
dear /
dear
1.
use your
neurons efficiently. i've been saying it for years. dad is like a crazy person.
he gets this health report. i like to do one thing at a time. your uncle says
hello and goodbye. just when things are looking great, a mess shows up. this
ink will not dry on this paper. i need to sit with a cup of tea in the sunroom,
get out my dictionary, if it weren't for that floppy dog i never would have
known. let me know when you get these socks.
your
avocado pit is in its paper bag in the cupboard.
the leaves
are starting to fall today. i'm not ready for winter yet. too many windows. too
many flowers to put in the ground. "dance your way to december," your
grandma always said, it's always about dancing. i could have stayed in the
museum longer, rockefeller center, empire state building, the staten island
ferry. sometimes i miss the old brownstones, but the air is crisp, and apples
are delicious. i saw a huge deer in the back field yesterday. right out at our
tree line by the Miles' side. the goldfinches are everywhere, are such a bright
yellow.
here is a
blanket with a picture of a house on it. i couldn't resist.
2.
somewhere
faraway, a dog drinks out of a birdbath with the blue jays. mosquitoes. the fat
round tops of apple trees. do you still haul your wounded apples to the woods
for the deer? here's the list i compiled for your recipe:
1. a rainy-day toad in the grass who pees on you
when you pick him up.
2. a finger pointing like an arrow. smudgeprint. the
postman's "ack!" a
return-to-sender stamp.
3. a dog drinking out of a birdbath.
is
this how history perpetuates itself? i put wheatgerm or black pepper. i put
cinnamon, lemon, "teabags for bruises!", i put it on everything.
everything you said. i am a girl with a teacup on my head. my poison oak and
love handles healing. the problem of bittersweet and jetty, glittery
snowdrifts, the kitchen window. here, it's a problem of can't see the lunar
eclipse through the streetlights, or snazzy hairdo dogs eating garbage in the
park. here, where bus drivers keep running everyone over. i want to play in the
blueberries instead, or storm an abandoned castle.
want to? i bet good birds live there. and gnomes, for dad, with pointy hats.
it's just that those double-consonant words are tricky and always
trip me up, and the whole thing is like that. which thing goes where?
the apples, the trees. the mistakes that planes make, pretending
to be the moon. my musical feminist hero having tendonitis and a baby, i don't
know what the world is coming to.
i'm starting to sound like you.
here is a picture of me, cut out of the picture. i took it by
mistake.
box of rain
i need a word to start. a
word to roll around on the tongue, tasting each letter and sound there in the
dark.
in the dark of words, ideas
are buried like fossils. rain skims in rivulets. who wrote all that? rain skims
in rivulets, like fossils.
like fossils, we petrify on
the couch. or the couch petrifies us. or we petrify each other, one exhausted
from finding and the other exhausted from losing. one tired of talking and the
other tired of. one a box of sand, the other a box of rain. the other a box of
other. the other a box of air.
a box of air is sent
priority mail to my doorstoop. i keep a rock-stop shaped like a penguin.
sometimes we can’t warm up. the mailman hands me the box and the dog is
barking. the mailman looks at me like he’s waiting for me to answer a question
he didn’t ask. his eyes are brown like the floor of my closet. i only say mine
because i put all my things inside. piles of dust-crusted mismatched shoes that
never get paired. my eyes are a set of sparrow nests. they build homes in the
eaves of a little garden shed Somewhere Else where it’s warm and dry and smells
like a memory of chickens and cherry tomatoes and every summer i’ve ever had or
wanted to. summer in the country is something else. here in town, the mailman
has to slosh through a concrete rainpuddle to get to my door. something has
been unwrapped and its wrapper is floating in our puddle like an abandoned
boat. when i do nothing but look back with all this in my eyes, he carries the box
away carefully, winding around the impossible potholes like a postage-stamp
ribbon in the wind.
like a ribbon in the wind, i
am homeless and nameless and i can’t tell what color i am until someone points
at me. i can tell by the look on the face if i am pink or if i am blue.
if i am blue, i am the sea.
if i am the sea, i am the beginning. if i am the beginning, i am the ending. if
i am the ending, if i am the ending, if i am the ending.
if i am the ending when he
leaves, there is a sparkling egg crouched in the light of my eye. there is a
wind of flowers in his wake. flowers or weeds. i wonder when it will be ready
to hatch. i wonder what i am growing. sometimes i long to find out, and
sometimes i long not to.
“not to be a wet blanket,”
she says, “but your face is on backwards.”
“what do you mean, my face
is on backwards?”
“you’re wearing it
backwards.” she says.
a pigeon swoops in an arc of
iridescence, the morning air pirhouetting around her like a ballerina
performing a solo show to nobody. i catch them in a net of the corner of my
eye. i turn to watch them sail away, but all i can see are my feet, planted
like fenceposts in the dirt.
in the dirt of the heart, a
rotten egg.
egg-white whites of the
eyes, i don’t want to see you this close. when you don’t move aside you look
like a mountain i didn’t intend to climb. i guess i grew you with my clumsy
wishing. i guess i accidentally wished you into a cloud that blots the sun out.
i guess the sun shines down on everyone the same. i never really thought that
until now. in my eyes a starburst, a flower-weed takeover, a mistake. in my
eyes a mess nobody knows how to clean up. too many birds. too many mess. maybe
i’ll only walk backwards now. maybe i’ll only know how to walk away.
how to walk away: unchange
everything, which is changing everything, but isn’t.
isn’t it / heart egg / dirt
splatter / flower weed / still life / garden bed / sad sap / heart sick / leaf
eaten / moon trod / spell bound / bee breath / sting ray / blue bell / light
year / love less / sea change / aftertthought
after, thought i’d never
have to feel lonely again, but i was wrong. i find a family inside of my family
that isn’t mine.
“this isn’t mine,” i keep
saying. he keeps making a face.
“what isn’t mine?”
what isn’t mine inside is
bubbling up to the outside. it’s a bad scene. all our excitement swelled me up
like a balloon. in the basket, love swung. looked down over the hillsides and
winding paths leading everywhere. looked down the sun-licked canopy and saw the
bright dapple from which birds plunge, where trees make their warm berried
moon-leaves. looked down and saw a very long drop. it’s a long drop, i said. i only said it once or twice. love winked
at me like a bandit. i might have even seen a skull and crossbones on his hat. i know, love said, leaning the edge,
looking out over the tiny world that fanned itself open further and further
beneath us. i know, love said, but isn’t it something?
something someone maybe i’m
choking, choking on my choices. this one like smoke. this like sugar. are you
having difficulty breathing? swallow it. let it fester in your belly like a
sour dream. wake up.
up to nothing, i take my
days off, one at a time. i brush my lips against the hours, needing each minute
to kiss me, each moment, evey lost inch of the day to breathe me in as i, in
turn, breathe. my dry leaves of breath, all these yellows falling. i’m an
umbrella opening and closing like a mouth, like a tongue taut with a mystery of
wishes. across the street, a bent man piles garbage to the sky, his blue house
crumbling under a weight of rainclouds. in
autumn, the river mumbles, its mouth filled with stones. a black snake with
a yellow stripe. a rust of leaves crowding the banks in a papery surrender. the
bent man tips his head back to look up, sputters and coughs, chokes on the sky
like an engine that can’t catch. begin
again, says the river. then again.
then again, the paint chips
aren’t chips at all, but little colored rectangles of hard paper. they have
names like magnolia spray and picking daisies. underneath, it will be
dirty. underneath, there are holes in the walls, the floor, our shoes, the
rain. underneath. the windows will be dirty where no clouds have holes in.
underneath, all the sad, sad words hiding, underneath where there’s nothing to
know. maybe the sun only hides behind the weather. we are going to paint over
everything.
maybe we can paint over everything.
reasons
for reaching
instead,
i'm declaring my love for weather: i am a
window, look through me. i meant to be a meteorologist. my foot got tangled
somewhere in an uabridgement, a sharp turn of phrase near an opening to the
inside, i fell into a bookshelf like a bottomless dumpster piled with whole
planets of abandoned words and i've been trying to find my way out ever since.
it's a lonely job.
-
a
kiss sneaks in. a non-object. a non-idea. a round thing, a supple thing that
moves as if alive. a slow, sinking thing with taste and sound and infused with
meaning as if with honeysuckle, star thistle, water lily, lemon. oh, how i'd
like one. my nose wet and lonesome as a wolf, cold, my liking funneled into an
extra sense, or a non-sense, or i'm thirsty, can't you help me, as if i wanted
to drink a lake.
-
dear, i'm trying to collapse you and me
into we. i'm skimming the top of the pond for a good
reason, a relativity, a resemblance. too much underneath. my reflection
develops a tragic wrinkle when a frog leaps from the embankment to catch a
mosquito. i must stop frowning. way down in wonder where my eyeballs are connected,
contraction/expansion, where the room lights up with my best or worst idea. i'm
hunting something, but i don't know what it is.
-
i'm
very sensitive to cycles. what's the difference between a symbol and a
metaphor? i'm an answerless, a guard crow, gaudy, purring softly in a yellow
poplar, a Tulip Tree. i won't lose faith in humanity until we lose faith in
flowers. our love for beautiful, useless flowers.
-
or
catching beauty, setting a trap for it in the woods, like a brush-covered trick
to disappear, teardrop steam, papery leaves down a slant autumn light, a
rust-colored cheek gleams with sweat and salt and snot and all—
-
i'm
haunted, lopsided, trying not to scare myself away. don't let me freeze my
evolution or i'll be a sitting duck. all the choices we make are evolutionary
votes we're casting, every single day. (you feel sorry for yourself, lips all a
grumble.) harkening back to the mangle, i'm trying to know the difference
between a zygote and a lightbulb.
-
half-imagined dark things,
or bright things, or skyward things. it's possible that we know as little about
the sky as we know about the ocean. your guess is as good as mine. the world is
brimming with invisible things we won't ever see. think about that. you're
living on an island in the middle of it, your black eyes bright and glassy,
like telescopes. all your raptures and sorrows leave you wanting, circumnavigate
your self in a great circle, disassembling your ideas to more resemble
saplings, wind, water. the way you want your lips to work but they won't.
-
"don't bluff
your way out of your heart," you said, "but deliver the thing
itself."
trying
to fit it into the postal-blue dropbox was another story entirely. when a
sugary lump of it squished out of the corner of its recycled paper packaging
and smeared genuine red against the open door, when most of the heart is hard,
but middles are soft as fresh bread or butter, churned in the endless project
of adjusting to the weather. it hardens from the outside in. there's hope for
it. if nothing else, you can make breadcrumbs when it gets there.
.
