i will stay so close

that my prayers
are a whisper

in His ear

i will stay so still
that i hear

when your
breath changes

i'll watch the sheet
on the line tremble

as if in wind
and know

your lungs
are full of air

again

Surfeit, Respite

You think you're such a creature of habit, but now that you've stocked up on the hand soap
you loved so much, don't you feel a little bit trapped? A little bit like you didn't mean it when
you said "love"?

Perhaps it's better to let some things die on the vine. That way, they don't become hangovers.

Lying on the bathroom floor and then throwing up three times the next day, that was all just a metaphor.

There's something about clean sheets and lying in them alone that you can't quite give up, not yet, no matter how much you "love" the hand soap, or his jaw line, or the way his skin smells after hours
of working your body.

My Friend Throws Caution to the Wind

She said, the last time we spoke in person, drunk on twelve dollar scotch that she didn’t like but kept drinking because she liked the idea of it, that talking about it would be like rebuilding a house on the San Andreas fault line after the big one before the biggest one, hit. She is sure this will happen in our lifetime if we do not first drown in melted icecaps.

“I am so sorry I’m late.”  She doesn’t offer an explanation. When we hug I can feel her shoulder blades and I am jealous of how skinny she’s getting. She sort of glows through her skin.

“I love your dress.”

She says thank you and carefully tucks it under her legs as she sits. When our waitress comes, she orders a glass of water and a cup of coffee.
   
My friend is concerned about the plastic from warm water bottles and the microparticles in makeup going deep into her body. But, this does not stop her from drinking from warm water bottles, and I can see the powder of makeup on her cheek this morning as we sit on the patio of our favorite cafe. We have come here to catch up. We have only had a few chances to catch up since the diagnosis.

“The sun is out.”

“Yes, the sun is out.”

“Seems high for 11:00 a.m., but then, I’m not outside very often anymore” she says, like very hot water that feels cold for a second.

There is a streak of gray in her hair that has been there since she was 21. The way she has her hair cut now makes it easier to see. She doesn’t dye it anymore.

What is on my friend’s mind these days is lip compatibility. My friend says there is an algorithm that determines sexual attraction, beyond scent, and it is the size of two people’s lips.

“Because, they can’t both be pillowy and puffed or it feels like kissing two big slimy warm noodles.”

My friend hates spaghetti, noodles, shells, pasta of any kind. She has only known one man who could cook any sort of pasta in a way she liked, and so she loved him for a little while.

“All the smacking, and, if it’s too wet,” she doesn’t finish her sentence but she shivers and makes a face like she is watching half of California crack off into the Pacific. I wonder if she makes this face when she kisses someone with lip incompatibility.

“The thing is, really the very nice lips, the ones you would think you’d like to kiss, they’re the worst ones! If a person has relatively thin lips, then it’s fine.”

I press my lips together. We had kissed once, in college at a party, our faces numb with alcohol, and she said our compatibility was fine. I nod and put on lip-gloss.

She cocks her head to the side and looks very hard at a dragonfly that hovers over the ornamental grass to the right of our table.

“I used to believe that dragonflies could sew your mouth shut. I was very quiet when they came by. They look like fairies if you only look with the corner of your eye. Think of that, to have your mouth sewn shut! The pain of the needle through your lips, but also the pressure of all those words you could never again say. Remember when they used to cut people’s tongues out?”

“No” I say. “I don’t think I was around then.”

“Anyway, the thing I’m afraid of” - she looks again into the grass. It moves to the wind from cars going by – “is that, when I do get engaged, if I ever do, my hands won’t do justice to the ring. All those pictures people take right after they do it, what if my fingernails are dirty?”
 
We watch a baby pass in a blue stroller. The baby is fat and loud. My friend does not want children.

“I think, maybe, I want children someday.” She sifts the dirt and mulch packed around the ornamental grass through her fingers and wipes her hand clean on her skirt.

The sun seems to pop and I wonder if there are particularly extreme solar flares today.

"I always thought though, about death, that familiarity becomes important." I'm not sure what conversation she is finishing, so I listen. I think maybe it is one she is having with herself, so I check the sun for more solar flares.

"You know, you wouldn't want it to be foreign. That's why everyone wants the world to end in a big way. Fire and brimstone. We are mostly sensationalists of course, and so, the big stuff is what is familiar. Watch the world end, again, in this summer’s box office hit. You know? Because it would be disappointing if it just sort of went out like a candle. I mean, if the sun stopped working, and everyone was walking around like idiots for those eight minutes, grocery shopping, yelling at their kids to stop hitting each other, gossiping at the water cooler, how terrible would that be? I want it to be big enough for me to see.”

My friend doesn’t clean the pieces of earth from under her fingernails.

“Your fingernails have dirt under them; what if someone proposed RIGHT NOW???” I say, like a raft floating in cold water on a hot day. I giggle and I can look her in the eye for a minute.

She is smiling like a grownup. She looks down at her hands, flexes her thin fingers out before her, twists the ring that is not there. I imagine it catching the sun.

“I am trying to become familiar with dirt”, she says like someone squinting across a great distance to see home.

Morning
But! how we learn to take care
of ourselves! moving slowly
under covers, opening and closing
the hand of the arm we slept on
to urge the blood to flow again.

Not everything is about you, of course, but that's just it. This was. You went to the Starbucks bathroom and when you came out you saw yourself on his sketchbook and you realized he HAD been watching you. You looked at yourself on his page, you looked past him to him and you realized you were not invisible although that is how you had lived and felt for the many years you walked by his side. It was, if you'll allow it, a kind of rebirth. To be seen.

And a few years before that you had had this vision of your body, your grown outlandish adult woman body, wet and sleek with afterbirth, your long dark hair darker from the slime, curled like a comma in a hand that must have been His, against a pulsing black backdrop. This was your first second birth. And many many years before that in a peach-colored dining room you had had a similar image, only this one was you in your flannel strawberry pajamas, a smaller thing, undeveloped yet and flat, in the same hand. Not reborn, just held.

Now, as you shed your doubt and bitterness in pounds of flesh, you again are reborn and revealed anew. All of this is just uncovering. We uncover down to our pith until maybe our teeth are left and maybe our bone pieces file down other bones pieces as they are all gravelled into the world. If we are lucky we may see the thing happen in moments, like a trick of the eye, like the hour hand's Pleiadean  twitch to the new hour.

To be blessed is to know it is happening, the uncovering, the birthing, and to allow silence and space and sometimes a song to stitch the two ends together.

My life is a quilt I will lie beneath when all the pieces have been gathered.

Letters to Someone I've Yet to Meet


The other day when you noticed the way the pine trees gently inclined towards each other
and said something about how mutual benefit is not the same as love I wanted you in a way
that was mutually assured destruction. I knew I would love you down to the dust we'll both
become, and I how like a pine I was then, sure, strong, ever-green, and burning hot. 


I cannot imagine your eyes but I know you will stare steadily when I describe how I am not afraid to hurt, to break, to go. You will already be doing these things and your hands will be cracked and rough from the work. You will have built and rebuilt cities and I will come with a bucket of cool water and offer you a drink.


We will meet when I am naked of all the fears from before. It will be when I have hollowed
out my belly of expectations and when love has become more than a silhouette against a horizon I keep very far away. It will be when disappointment is but a path I've walked, when solitude keeps a chair by to my bed and sings me songs. You will not begrudge him his place because you will have your own paths, your own singers of songs. 


You will pour coffee with a strength in your fingers that makes me want to break over you
like a wave, and you will notice the egg-white matte of the predawn sky and say how like a canvas it is, waiting to be painted.

The Computer Lab And Other Rooms of The Mind

You looked very hard at them and said: have you ever felt your ribs? Your cheek bones? touching each place as you said its name, slipping over the curve of bone. 

Some of them are looking up somatization and others the money that isn't there when disaster strikes the third world. Mostly though, they stare at shoes, their lips moving towards the screen to taste the rubber. 

I heard your steps, so I hid, he says, now returned to the classroom by the escort of his conscience and rebellion - it being too simple to run away when you don't want to sit in the yawning chairs nor stare into the mouth of your teacher, which is moving like V's going south. He would rather present himself the reformed Raskolnikov and practice his eyelashes on you. He wants retired petulance, not a fugitive life in the hallway. He wants open arms and doting forgiveness. You feel like God entering Eden. I already know what you did; why do you hide? You say to him in the silences between your words. 

Some are researching the metastasization of desire and you feel the breast over your heart skittishly as you assume your love has spun itself into strings of death that weave through your flesh. But you are all too sensitive and you taste the illness when you stare into the screen, and so you look that up too, the depth of our desire for the knowledge of  our own end. Everything is a mirror you say and Narcissus did drown. Be careful my ducklings. 

There are other higher things in the room with you that you don't know how to describe, but you see a woman with long hair and sad eyes standing on a cliff. She is not sad for herself. Her hair blows back, all this way to you, and sometimes, it catches in your mouth and you know what it is to break. A sentence fragment they said to themselves to better understand, to turn over the idea in their hands, is something broken. A piece of something. 

You are all fragments of a greater whole that was planned and as you are swept together by the great hand that cleans all, you hear the drag against stones. Some of you are clay, some glass. You clink and chime. There is music in the breaking, the gathering. 

And you have spoken now of the bones and the singing, and you have learned both from many hands and also that you should no longer say what has been said since language broke into being, but love is an old thing and no less buoyant for the cracks. Who are you to say when words die? Who are you to bury them?