Anemone

Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--

but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.

Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.





****************
this is a second draft.

ode (to gabrielle)

O poor soul! Soon,
I must make a choice to explore
either your soft face, to delve
into the ultimate meaningfulness of our love, or
I may jettison myself far
out among the stars to try and grasp something larger
than ourselves and our often-petty
circular loving.
Which shall I choose?

Do I care to explore that bond
which once held us close like refugees, that union
against the common enemy that was ourselves,
against the greying New York City
streets that birthed us?
Shall I return to myself, childlike, curled
on the bathroom floor, sobbing at your holy feet
as I professed my desire, singular and dawning:
to become
like you
to be
merged in some greater entity than my lonely self
and to probe the darkest recesses of your lovely flesh.
I cried, drugged and bewildered on the bathmat
and grasped your cold knees,
terrified by the immediacy of my nothingness.

You were all I knew,
brilliant orange,
taurean mistress, keeper
of my heart and of all the wisdom in this
damn world of plastic, gutter
trash and the sighs of the lonely.
I felt for you, blindly
begging in the darkness to be born,
knowing that myself would only be consummated
if I could consume you with kisses.
I loved the moon because I orbited you, o earth
grounding of my adolescent childhood
dictator of my self
mother of my desire to be alone,
but not lonely.
It was your pain that made me-
it was the pangs of your heart that forced me into being.

And now I choose, returning:
do I explore my motherland once more?
Or do I use that chemical otherness to dance
in realms known, but not felt
the paradox:
felt but not known.
When I rise, will it be to greet the dawn of myself
or of us? How can
I reconcile you with my vision of the cosmos, how can
I both love you and that which appears
to frighten you most?
You shy away from causality,
from the consequence of you,
while I go running, furiously in search of life,
poignantly striving for meaning.
I often find it in myself
and once I found it in your breath,
your breasts,
but now I no longer see you as that fractaling spiral
as that exploding pattern, that flower--

I see you grey-faced from 2 am
I see you digging inside yourself
hiding from the luminescent spheres that guide us all
blocking them out with fistfuls
of dank self-reproach,
covering your face with fear
that seeps under your fingernails like moist, black earth.
I want to tell you all of this, but I am afraid
of your seal-brown eyes-- I am terrified
that they will look at me with confusion
and an intense not-knowing.

I realize now that although you birthed me,
you are not my mother -- I am.
This makes me realize that I do not know you
and my stomach aches as I remember you
crying to me, in fear of my rejection.

(Sometimes)

I do not want you to love me because you never used to
and I would rather not know your soul.
If I did, my heart would be torn open,
a whirling galaxy of lust and pain,
a frightened and awful miasma of otherness.
I would have to realize that I have been lying
to you, to myself
to the entire world.

(Sometimes)

I wish that I still loved you as I had loved you-
now I see that you are broken, not holy
and I feel seismic, waves of fear.
You emanate an uncertainty I can hardly fathom, and I feel you
like a black hole, like the center of a galaxy.

Perhaps you are the singularity
and I, the world.

sad poem

As I trace these swirling lines
out of the elegiac palms of my black hands
I feel myself being lifted
out of the ground by my roots, plucked
bare and writhing from the shivering soil
to twist gray-faced and wizened like a breach birth
hanging from the palms of your blank,
white hands. And as my
poisoned roots swell around my heart
I twist and curl tighter
trying to avoid your murderous hands
trying to enshrine myself
nymphlike in a cave of bark
squinting my eyes against the the needle rays
of the eclipse that is rolling across your
beautiful eyes, and slowly hiding
your once-beautiful gaze.

And from this height you drop me
a wan and helpless teardrop
an acorn from the mighty oak
of your barren hostility. I know
this is not you, o towering
one, o sterile mask. You look
at me like I am a dead thing
(and maybe I am)
and I cling to you with my poisoned roots,
crying for fear
that both of us will die.

Paradoxically, I will always remember you as you now
hold me: a small child
wrapped in bark, trying
desperately to protect against the harsh
winds that blow outside the boundaries of love, a selfmade
papoose, raising hands to protect against the harsh
blinding sliver, the eclipse's knife edge,
that pale sickle that acts
as a solitary and pathetic tribute,
the surrendering flag of all we used to know
and now still hold, dear.

gardening

Let go, let go! Let
go each petal tightly curled around your hammering
heart. Unfold them
tenderly, softly pry at their
tearfully moistened cocoon
with your clumsy, eager fingers.

Dirty your hands in the soil of your open chest
as you gently harvest the fruits of eighteen years
of watching and waiting
fearful, hoping that someday this small thing inside you
would nod up from the till.

Let go, let go, quieter now but still
diligent- do not forget what those early moments felt like.
Remember what that first petal looked like in your hand,
softly translucent and wrinkled,
remember how delicate it was to hold.

together

I'm sitting in my room with the national playing and
feeling good for once. Maybe
I'm finally figuring out how to be around people
and not arm myself too heavily, to shed
my meshy links at the door
and dance happily
among the friendly spirits,
the wavering egos who desire happiness and
that's it.

I'm learning that wanting to be happy isn't such a bad thing
and that closeness is a truer form of knowledge than anything that can be written.

While I sit here alone I feel surrounded by a pulsing
yellow-radiant sphere, like the small gleams
that the sun makes on the hills over Portland. At night
when I look at the moon it tells me
that I am no longer alone
and that I never deserved to be.

hamster

My heart is racingpumping madly.
I am a small thing, true
but this is beyond the norm
for my mammalian frame.

Rather, I feel like I've been quietly fed
into a new pushbutton universe, where
everything whirrs and clickhums
mechanically. I feel my clumsy flesh straining
to replicate the metal ballet, feel
its grossness, its lumpy and imperfect solidarity,
and know that if i tried once more to
compete with the machines I would be reduced
to a sliver, a ghost, a spark
to be consumed quickly in the circuits, by the need
intense and white
for human power.

So instead I become what my heart says I am
I am the hamster on the wheel,
I am the small warm thing trapped
and helpless by the powers that be
running swiftly
never knowing where I'm going
realizing slowly that it doesn't matter

and nursing small memories, childlike
of how it felt to run on grass.

knowing

There was a time I used to know
things in my inward heart, things
that only those you read know.

I don't know how I figured them out
but I had a few good years in which the world
revealed itself to me, cracked open like a clamshell.

I knew what gods know and
it all made sense, somehow.
I guess I was alone back then, so things were
simple; I was a quiet, lonely country.

When I started to know people better,
and love, I stopped understanding many things
or at least, I forgot thinking about them so much.

An intrepid messenger in me needed
to know about the warm craftings of others, and although
much of me revolted, scared
of how our serenity might be troubled,
he was determined and brave, so eventually
I readied my ships and we set out.

I live on a massive, shifting continent now. No longer
is my home a small crystalline bubble
suspended in bright space. There is color here and
such life! But still, often

I want to return to that place of knowing
that I still reach sometimes, only at the most
heady moments of conversation with a new
friend, one whose eyes show me they knew things too,
once, and perhaps still might.

O, once
I lived in a place unlike any; it was populated
by only myself
and my great thoughts.