Poetry

To write poetry is to keep watch
over your dwelling in a dark forest:

It isn’t often that some creature
catches your eye — most nights pass
without as much as a rustling in the trees.
But when it does, it grabs you, wrestles
you to the ground, and demands something of you.
Sometimes a few pennies, sometimes a warm meal,
and sometimes, it seems, your very life.

Sometimes it is the angel, holding you
by the hip, tenderly but with a strong grip,
and it is your great privilege to hold it tightly
and whisper sharply between your teeth,
I will not let go until you bless me.
And only when this scrappy bandit
of a creature is speaking the words over you
as you hold a knife to its throat
do you realize, as the morning sun
is finding its way through the trees,
that you are staring yourself in the face.

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 turn my key in the doorknob,
surprised it still fits.
I call her name;
I haven’t said “mom” since the day I left.
Silence echoes back,
but I know where she’ll be.
I step onto the back porch
and there a cigarette floats
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 see is the cigarette.

Another child born with lungs of ash
She draws another breath.

there are some places that invite you to pour

yourself into them all sharp rock

and sand and cactus needles glittered

with drops of nectar where horses

are lean and wild and roam the way

they’re meant to whinnying blends

with wind and there’s a toughness

to everything the air tastes like

determination behind the hard

is sweetness the soft flesh of fruit

under a rind mica shining

in the black scales the lizard

sheds after basking at noon

the heat is a second-skin the sweat

turns to clay smeared by fingers

shaped by calluses the desert remembers

that you are 60% water and it will

suck every last drop

dry.

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. 

between waves woven
so tight they bury the
wreckage,

trust the current to breathe
you to the surface

& catch the breath in the split
second between breaks
before

brine heaves
let the salt sting,

a sky so swollen
asphyxiates, let the wind
out of your lungs

let it wail,
hammer against the bluffs,
the ocean has never been afraid
to rage.

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
of my own father, if he saw the 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.