Thu Sep 09, 2010

Why Our Apartment Should Become My Apartment Again

Because it feels like we're buying inventory now for a Radio Shack that we’ll open
        in the future
Like we're behind the argyle chainlink that separates this week from next and none
        of us can climb
Because, and let's be honest, the whole thing is really just a horseshoe we found and
        taped string to
’Cause we couldn't afford the harp 
 
It's the tragedy of timeshare: the family before us must have taken the
        Scrabble board
Because in each of your eyes there is one shred of pink confetti, and confetti
        has a life of only seconds before it’s swept off
Or dead under the couch—because sometimes, coming home to you
Is like coming home to an empty house with the fridge door left open, and the
        freezer, too, with dinner and dessert
Sliming toward the dog's mouth, only: we don't have a dog
Because you wanted to braid its hair and I wanted a greyhound
So we have candles, and every time I burn one, I open the windows and let the
        trees take the smell on their branches like scarves, because
We can't keep relying on vanilla bean to cover this

This is the decade after the Renaissance and we're a stammering fermata
We're the estrangement of a cat's expression when held before a mirror
We're spreading earthquake glue on the sidewalk in the middle of a hailstorm
We're like 24-hour banking: convenient, but . . .
Thematically, we don't go together
You're the subject-lines quarantined in my e-mail spam folder
You're the purple wall in the bathroom, and I'm the yellow one in the home office,
        or vice versa, and what's a wall to another wall?
Because I feel like we're trying to fly a flag made from saran wrap, like
We're listening to a testimony from the most verbose man ever
Who has a beard—with food in it
It's a bit like the one illuminating tile in a sod floor, or contacts for glass eyes, like
        haircuts for fur coats or fur coats just in general
 
This is pointless, this is a patch of phlox
Yearning along the frame of a black & white movie
This is changing the part in my grandfather’s hair and he’s four-fifths comb-over 
Sharing a bathroom with you is like writing an award-winning essay on what it means
        to be black and gay and underwater
Because there's a ring in the toilet and I’m trying to flush it down
’Cause your breath in the morning is like long division

Stringent open house, this is the unexplored attic of a cartographer's mansion,
        it's that point
In the night when the sky clears its throat, rubs away the black and waits for the
        pink sweat of eraser-head to bring in the morning
It’s that point in the set when the bile-green chanteuse tips off the stage corner
        toward my
Lonely table: microphone stand slicing her legs while my irrevocable fingertips
        drum, etiolate
I: fragrant bouquet of flagrant carelessnesses, no heels can ride me back to where
        I was with
You: pure as unicorns
The first time I lay at the end of the bed and saw how tall you were
Inside, where I crouch and fret, waiting for the latch to fill with key
Warm and scuffed—its nickled head punching through your back pocket all afternoon
Like a peninsula, fighting the urge to drop

Wed Sep 08, 2010

Monologue So I Can Sleep

It happens too easy, and always
with the right person: such
a marriageable creature.

My proclivity to men hangs
like a shade of pricetags, running my mind
as a sleigh over puddled ice.

Love is slick, obscuring, and mine:
the textbook case of tunnel vision.
Slowly, furtively, he’ll loose

the grommets of my liturgy, all the poems
I want to write. My brain skids back,
the clock goes. A woman on the radio

said loneliness afforded her the time
to learn quilting. Nascent
daughter— I could buy you these

barrettes, my mother tossing them
in the cart— Imagine: saffron
and navy, thumbed herringbone . . .

The importance of one thread.

Tue Sep 07, 2010

The Bloomery

A queue outside the wrought iron but I’m pushed
through because of my barrette and clasped shoes,
 
my laugh which means my sex. I sink into a pitch
of shadow, quiet as a closed drawer—what could be
 
a graveyard, an examination, the tips of a child’s fingers
pitched into prayer, each step pleading dimness.
 
A low oven straps the center of an unwalled room
and a fire split at its center, lapping the dark
 
with the sound of things passing: knives in air,
I orbit, I orbit, I repent on well-lotioned knees,
 
this bed crackling rubicund. I notice such things:
banister spindles and the paved gaping

of an empty street, a stoplight rocking dense
with the wind. Even columns of words—

they shake, rearrange themselves and I remember
your fingers, how you wanted me open, right then

then and there—how I wanted it, too: to be over,
done, once and for all—Honestly, that pale pink burden

that rode at the front of my brain every time I rolled
toward you: Show me, I said, and meant to say again

but lay lazy and drunk with someone else:
eyes to the ceiling, wondering if he left the light on

because he wanted to watch. I was a good woman.
I was drunk. I thought, This is it, as he turned a trowel

to the smelt and drug a body from the fire.
The bloom was slouched, knobbled, porous—

The hammered divorce of iron from dross
and I recall your hands: how they let everything in.


Mon Sep 06, 2010

Analogies For Ted

You found a typo in Corinthians and thought God
made a mistake, that God wasn't real, that God
was Tom Stoppard. I mean you quote yourself
as the signature to your e-mails, and when I first met you,
you said to vote in 2020 ’cause you'd be running.
You’d foam at the mouth at the mentioning
of the Rhodes Scholarships, or when I’d shower
and use your towel. So I’d air dry, so I got
really turned off at your graveyard of used gestures.
But I did like you—I liked you that night outside
the gym when I laughed at everything and you dug
your hands deeper into that Minnesotan toggle jacket, Ted
that night I would have slid my tongue over your teeth.
But telling you was impossible, even with a corkless
bottle of wine spent between us, like an echo that leaps
from a sandcastle tunnel: Nothing. How do you feel
about being the subject of this poem? And how
most of your favorite restaurants are really just
big microwaves? Dear Ted, I'm back in Springfield,
and last week I actually bought one of those candles
that smell like Christmas. Meanwhile you're eyeing
one of your students’ chests on the other side of the world.
Remember when you spent a decade criticizing
my decade learning German? And your interruption
each time I was making a point? But analogy
is the weakest form of argument, you say, you said,
you never stopped saying, even though I saw you
defend analogy at a forum in front of everyone
important—you stood up, you sat alone, you're so
independent, you tease—and praised the comparison
of a skyline to one cracked lentil. Well I want to
compare a nest of wet shoelaces to your recitation
of Chris Rock stand-up. Or the sincerity of your smile
to a bedspread hyacinth. Or our entire relationship
to the guy in the backseat who reads every road sign
aloud in a slow, sarcastic voice. Ted, I would have
written a mass e-mail about you getting cancer, too.
I would have given up giving up meat, just so
we could go to the drive-thru together. (We did, once
—I was appalled.) But you made my sisters laugh
and you paid for our airport parking and you look pretty good
in a navy blue toggle jacket. You also taught me
to listen, because your voicemails are unending, because
I've been socialized to talk only when no one else is—
Dear Ted, I'm twenty-five and my ears are tired,
my spacebar is tired, do you remember that morning
I drove by and saw you lumped against my front lawn,
arms thrown up in abandon? You were tired. You
were waiting for me, much like these lines— Three years
I've wanted to say: Dear Ted, that morning you were crying
over Katrina and Aubree and probably later, Saori:
dewy-eyed and grass-stained but never totally unraveled,
because there’s always some piece of you kept back,
a distance no one has measured, and that’s the real reason
I saw you that morning and still drove by:
because I think I know what you thought you were feeling.