Day 14
Seducted Poem
Fear anything but love, allow
it inside where the blood
divides you from angels.
Feed your heart a cherry
give it rest from nothing
make it work for its nights
and its lovers. Seduce it
into a fearless journey for love.
Put your heart (blood pumping)
on a train, not just any train,
but the one where you last let her
lay across you in possession.
Pay off the photographers
and reporters who are traveling
in the next car, writing
about you and her, laying bare
the blood you have mixed
with her. Listen to the wheels
run time out. Give your blood away
one last time before the train stops.
Day 15
Nonetheless
Change just one day, erase
secret notes passed over a desk
in an office owned by the government.
Alter the time of your meeting
him and what you were wearing
at the time he (and you) decided
to stop the other meetings,
the ones in beds, the one near the railroad
crossing, the one with the leaves
falling all night in the rain.
Change the night (or was it day?)
when he gave you the other secret.
Day 16
Tryst, From the Beginning
He held your hand like it might shatter, cloud
the place with sharp points of light
whirling like a funnel around their heads.
It had started with a simple little flirt,
a glance over your shoulder on the lift,
you going to your apartment, he to visit
a friend in the building. A simple enough visit
that turned everything you knew to ash, cloud
of smoke not sufficient to hide it. Lift
her skirt, he thought, and take her. He is Light,
you thought, and gave yourself to him. Flirt
but don’t commit, don’t think of heads
turning when you are spotted together, heads
with mouths in Os telling everyone of the visit
to your apartment at 3 AM. No more a flirt
in an elevator, or on a street corner. If you lift
the shade, you may see his wife in the street, cloud
brewing rain and thunder under the streetlight.
Lift yourself from his visit to your bed,
turn on the light and flirt a little
like the beginning, like the clouds overhead.
Tryst, at the End
You walk away in a crowd
of passengers, make a right
into the station, leaving the bed
you didn’t sleep in all night, hurt
eyes from the crying, the shift
from us to nothing but a fizz
of broken whispers. It’s a fizz
of rain you walk through, a crowd
of black birds (umbrellas) shifting
and bumping you along. No right
or justice exists in this kind of hurt,
this door you will walk through, the bed
that will hold what you did. Beds
ought to be kinder, stop the fizz
of memories they want to tell, the hurt
they insist on holding. The crowd
is laughing and making small talk right
in front of you, doesn’t see you shifting.
You shift, and the crowd goes home to bed, fizzed
in tears, wearing the necklace he gave you right
before saying, hurts too much if you know what I mean.
Day 17
Knots
There is breath in a knot you tie,
brought to the fibers by hands
that raised just last night
to the mouth, raised to the kiss
or the cry. Knots go over
and over themselves like scribbles
on the page you called a note.
I folded your note over and over
until it fit into a locket
I can wear between my breasts
where you are held long
and hard. It’s hard to see knots
in a chain without trying
to unravel, to make some sense
out of the mess we made of it.
All kinds of chains. Serpentine
or box. I favor serpentine, loving
the way snakes don’t tie themselves
in knots or get tangled up in lies.
Snakes simply don’t weave anything,
not for nests and not for love.
Day 18
For three nights
in a row, Bill Clinton showed
up at our poetry group,
considerate enough I’d say
to bring the snacks, hummus
with roasted red pepper, celery
with organic peanut butter, Kalamata olives
(the good fat), filtered mineral water.
No one noticed who he was
until he began quoting Whitman,
extolling the meter as perfect, denying
he’d had sex at all, less
a denial than a bit of poetic license.
Day 19
Broken by Bees
If there is a god, not the One
who must always be capitalized,
but a god of lesser consequence,
she might have been a beekeeper.
Her hive songs would be alto variations
on some trancing vibration of whales
who are directly related to bees,
were once hive keepers, considerably smaller
than their prodigy who absorbed
so much water and salt they bloated.
These tender orcas and blues, sperms
and whites stayed on once the queen
was in her chamber for love, beating
away angry interlopers, keeping the hive
a place of peace. They were eventually broken
by bees from another land, severed
from their work and cast into the waves.
We were broken too, cast off
from the love we were drinking
every night, from the honey we made.
This is what happens when casual gods
doubt themselves, look away.
Day 20
Air
The song I cannot sing remains
in every sinew of muscle
that makes my heart. It plays
over every other melody.
Ordinary music that slinks
under the door jamb
of the room we loved in,
ordinary rhythms of ordinary
lovers. It isn’t.
What else is there?
Years alone tower over us. Air
that floods the lungs of children
in pretty playgrounds,
laughing air and crying air, air of dogs
on leashes — our air is not like that.
Our air has double chords and rests,
has vibrato, pianissimo, staccato moves.
It holds such lonely notes
our air. It holds songs I cannot sing.
Day 21
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc*
It follows, because you used to play
dot-to-dots when you were a child
that our break-up is all me.
Therefore because of it, I must not
cry over the clichéd milk
from the pitcher you smashed
to the kitchen floor. After
a roll of paper towels sopped
up the mess I heretofore caused
for you (and the woman you are seeing)
you point that bony finger at me
and scoff at my disallowed tears.
I kept the childhood art your mother saved
for you, in a box under the bed
you brought for some potential child
we’d have in some potential year
of marriage after your potential promotion.
I have it all and let me say,
The dot-to-dots look nothing like bunnies
or cute little pandas. They look like monsters
with fangs, ready to destroy everyone
who gets in their way. They look hungry.
*Post hoc, ergo propter hoc:Latin, after, therefore because of it
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