“
I try to cradle you.
to make you contain yourself.
an avalanche of tenderness.
”
– To The Wonder
Remind Me
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
– Stanley Kunitz
The Way
The way you love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.
– Keith Miller
Unplanned
That I
am much too old
for you
or that you
are too young for me
these are all
weighty arguments
that would be decisive
in the workshops
where
more enlightened people
cut
their calculated futures
strictly to measure
Morning Chill
“If the morning is cold: begin with the scars at the bottom.”
– Jason Schwartz, John the Posthumous
Planet of the Apes
If there is a designated point at which return
becomes of no return, so far is how far
I am always beyond it.
We sit in the rain of your ancient hangover
and I tell you the story about my dead dad
who spent his sixteenth year digging a giant hole
in a field in Liverpool and never said why (perhaps)
…. I love you.
I love you in the jittering shade of a windmill.
I love you standing in the water wearing the river
like an invisible pair of shoes. I love you here
at the middle of your only life and almost gone
smoking beside your window, light drifting between us
like ghost sequins.
I’ve always never felt this way about anyone
but the way in which I’ve never felt about you
is a way of never feeling so new it’s somehow old
like a cave painting of a fax machine
or falling asleep in the attic of a spaceship.
You make me want to think of you in a sentence with me in it.
You make me want to find a collapsed mineshaft
I can call your name in while searching for you.
You make me want to tell you what you make me want
but what can I even say to you – riding a desk chair
through the afternoon like a patron saint
of remaindered office furniture.
I don’t know what it means
to walk each night into a field alone
and dig, until you are standing in a hole so deep
you cannot be seen above ground.
I don’t know what it means to fall asleep by your window
and wake, let’s say, with the illustrated guide to Planet of the Apes in my hand.
I don’t know what it means to wake each morning and love you
and say nothing, as if nothing
were honesty’s default, or maybe just a way
for me to avoid the stupid things I need to tell you like
looking at you is like looking at a beautiful person far away
through a telescope that makes you seem the size you almost are
which is something I mean but don’t understand
like the new hieroglyphs of songbrids
or how the world in which I am saying this to you
is slowly receding
that looking at you is like looking
backwards out the window of a slow-moving helicopter
into the nineteenth-century cornfield of your face
which my historical inaccuracy
has suddenly emptied of birds.
You make my life feel the size of itself.
You make my life a burning craft
on some distant and unintended hillside.
…. you are the pale green arm
of the Statue of Liberty
reaching up through miles of sand
memoryhouse 