Poetry

The summer before college

My mother invited me to her house for tea,

she said,

but I know she only drinks whiskey.

My tires hit the gravel,

sliding down the narrow driveway.

The whirlpool in my stomach spinning,

something more than tea is waiting,

I know

I turn my key in the doorknob,

almost surprised it still fits.

I call her name,

I haven’t said “mom” since the day I left.

No response echoes back,

but I know where she’ll be.

I step onto the back porch

and there a cigarette,

circling fumes escaping its head.

At first, I think,

nothing has changed

but my eyes travel down.

Her growing belly,

stretching out from her blouse,

contrasting the rest of her slim frame.

“She’s the size of an avocado”

I watch a ring of smoke.

“I’m due in February”

I remain frozen, entranced.

“She’ll be named after your grandmother”

Her eyes beg for some response.

All I can find is the cigarette,

Watching as she takes another puff

Another child born with lungs of ash

She draws another breath

1. Impostor’s Summer

I brought no pictures to hang on the wall.

Before I left, I cut my hair

and saw for the first time a woman whose body

I could stand to walk around in, a woman sure

of herself, so I know I’m not the girl in the pictures.

I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

Besides, I don’t need the pictures:

the woods outside my window are my father,

the moonlight my mother, the books I read my siblings.

In the sticky heat of July afternoon, caught

in a rare moment of levity, I pen a letter

and send it home — no reply.

I am no bird — wayfarer, woodland creature,

woman I am, nothing more, or less —

and no net ensnares me. But I want to float

up and out of myself and into the song

of the bluebird. Tu-a-wee.

I paint a picture for my mother, the real one,

and she hangs it in the bathroom in the house

I grew up in. Home? No, that isn’t it, at all.

1. Autumn Untethering

Thanksgiving is late this year. The trees

are nearly bare

      except for the maples

      burning a full, deep red

      like the flame of a phoenix before it turns

                  to ashes,

and the crumbling stretch highway to my parents’ house

is a tired, sweeping immensity that I can spread myself out across

with no definite shape until I reach the horizon

and then some

or disappear entirely, unraveling like the seam

      of a well-worn sweater,         

                              trailing all the places I’ve been.

At supper, I am either full or starving depending on who asks,

and we sit in rigid chairs and try to not let ourselves spill into each other.

I am searching for some semblance of settling but there are only corridors

to the spaces in between the spaces in between, pieces of myself kept in boxes

lining the hallways — for continency’s sake, in case the next rendering of myself

doesn’t pan out.

One of these days, I’ll have to take them with me when I go, pile every last one into the trunk of my car and drive back down the highway to God knows where—I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

      Everything around me is dying

            or making itself scarce,

shedding

                        the pieces that won’t make it through winter.

1. T.S. Eliot in January

If I go out bare-skinned, sleepwalking into the morning,

the bite of the air feels almost like being held, almost,

if I stand stock-still and clench my fists, cleave

to January’s shaky breath, clutching it between my fingers.

  “My whole life I’ve been lonely,”

said to no one in particular,

 and I am answered with the echoing steps

of my own feet on stone streets. I keep my eyes fixed there­—

to look another in the eyes is to admit to the vacancy

of my own gaze (to have squeezed the universe into a ball,

to roll it towards some overwhelming question).

At six years old, maybe seven, I’d walk beside the fence during recess, following it back and forth, eyes fixed before my feet, humming. Would it have been worthwhile to have kept my gaze forward, to face the weight of the eyes on me? I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

On my birthday in an empty house, I sit at the piano

and pick at a melody I thought I’d buried.

 (That corpse you planted last year in your garden, /has it begun to sprout?)

Winter has a way of smothering the bones

so that by its end they’re almost like that of a bird —

hollow and frail, brittle under pressure but apt for flight.

1. Spring — or Recurring Apocalypses

While it’s still windy, before the heavy heat comes,

I linger a while longer in the bright quiet of the morning

to knock the frost off the words I buried alive last year.

(Prayers? Confessions? No, prospective longings

waiting to take root).

                  I dreamt I was in Eden the day before the world

fell apart. Mine was the first sin, a temptation

not of taste or knowledge but of ownership,

the gripping illusion that I could claim a garden

as my own, to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

The pines are teetering, laughing and screaming

in the wind, and I wish I was one of them.

I could stay here, plant myself on the forest floor

and see what takes. But I am in the business of vagrancy.

• Incarnation

The last summer before I move away, I am watching myself

from the outside, putting all the people I’ve been into neatly packed boxes.

There are no cold, hard lines, only streams of water flowing into each other.

I pack the pictures, trade something nebulous

for the palpability of the strange tragedy of home

and the warm advent of body.

I.

I think about your name in my mouth, how it excited my being when spoken for the first thousand times, how it took shape, molded my mouth in expectation, formed a pattern.

II.

A new thing becomes rote in time, the morphing of your name morphs to that pattern, the one that is not a declaration but question, an accusation of the thing I once loved to speak; it became habit, a redundancy without thrill, how a name gave way to nicknames meant to revive the act of speaking you with joy, before any legalism attached to it, a forlorn, forgotten love in vowels and consonants, of you rolling off the tongue to the delight of its sound.

III.

I fear / know / will soon speak your name with unfamiliar boldness, speak it so loud it emerges hoarse-barked in an unseen custom font, something italicized and guttural from a depth previously unknown, knowing that call will be the first to go unanswered in a string of wailing pleas as you leave unexpected, or planned, breaking the mold cast so long ago so that it is hard to form the word as once formed, embrace its implied meaning as I did at the start.

IV.

It is the same name, emanating from the same voice, meaning the same thing but not the same thing at all. 

Suddenly the leaves change, and I am ancient and a child

all at once, grasping their fiery, brittle bodies

between my fingers too tightly until they crumble.

Everything that ever has been or ever will be

laid to waste in my hands.

Do you remember last October

(or any October, all of them),

when we sat underneath a full moon and you

(or anyone—you could have been anyone)

told me it would be like this forever?

Like a child, I believed you. Like an old saint,

I knew I would love you even if you were lying.

And so I chose to believe you, like a child.

Everything that has been or ever will be

sits incarnate on the brim of the chill of the air,

so fragile, so impenetrable—a phantom,

and yet it hangs there, eternal.

I will spend all my Octobers believing you.

My nine-year-old asks about the dark sides,

sides not easily seen, and if they cannot be seen

do they exit. I feel I am about to enter a black hole.

Before answering I imagine asking this didn’t

of my own father, if he saw other sides

of his son. If he bothered to look.

With internet help my son learns a myriagon

has 10,000 sides, a megagon has one billion,

and how an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite

number of sides. Imagine that, he says.

And I do, confirming the geometry of my youth

and numbered days as an incomplete theorem,

wholly incongruent. Then he asks what form has

the most complex or interesting sides. I know this

as if were etched into my skin: The human form.

But I say – I don’t know. It is his problem to solve

now, to look with intent for complexities in things

appearing deceivingly simple and one dimensional. 

I sit here staring at her because I am afraid to say the words that will prove to her that I am fully alive. Why must we move through life with such formalities? We are catching up over coffee, using other people’s words to talk circles around each other so that our conversation holds a kind of pathetic absurdity. I want to say I like the way the tenderness shines through your eyes and the syntax of your sentences; I like the way your frame moves when you walk so much that I wish I could fall into perfect step with it and feel it as my own. I say, “It’s good to see you,” but what I mean is that the shape and sound of her voice feel something like a weighty summer breeze, and when I’m with her I can’t help but to pay extra attention to what it means that blood is coursing through my veins. “How are you?” But what I am really wondering is if she feels this, too: does her body somehow also house an incompressible galaxy that feels all at once like an unending expanse of sky and a dark, empty room in which you can’t see your own hand in front of your face? And if it does — I want to believe that it does — why are we behaving this way? Why aren’t we planting fields of wildflowers just so we can lie in them, or holding each other constantly, or singing, loudly and without fear, because our voices and every other part of us may as well belong to each other anyway? Her hands mirror mine as we reach for our cups. Knuckles brush. “Oops,” she says.