Rededication

At lunch today I went for a burrito
and scored a table on the patio
and made my order and waited
for the hottest salsa in town.

A tremendous Spring day,
the skyscape wide with potentiality.

There was a couple on an early date,
feeling each other out with nervous smiles.
And two friends planning a camping
trip as the waiter brought more pints
and me with a rumbly belly, eyes open.

There were several loose pieces of paper
strewn on the ground where some of us
fed the boldest birds bits of chips.

It was poetry.

I mean literally.

Pages of carefully crafted, printed poetry.

Lost leaves of some manuscript,
there about our ankles.

I scooped up pages three and four,
pages ten and eleven, page seventeen too.

Deadly stuff.

I mean horrible.

Stabs at something and the usual net:
an awkward outing of loneliness,
some shrewd commentary on the trees,
lots of talk about grassy fields,
and apparently there was a broken heart.

There was one brilliant page among the
half poems. The bravest, clearest moment
he managed to compile before all the
numbered sheets, reading only:

"For Pamela"

It felt like quite a thing to hold, and I wonder
if he'd ever held her, or if she'd ever held this.
If these pieces came loose in a windstorm
as he rushed to bind them back at the apartment,
or if she had turned them loose from her front porch
after he left the last time, he loved her, he loved her not.
She finally let these petals fly as she wept,
Pamela's stringy red hair still wet from their
last long walk in the rainy woods.

Pam, sweet, homely Pamela --
I've found him, I'm holding his heart in my hands.
Samuel isn't dead, he never left for Arizona.
He misses you, though he could never say that.
Sam loves you, though you could never hear that.
His bottle washed up on my shoreline at lunch today.

He made this for you.

Nervous Spring

The chartreuse leaves, a week old on the neighbor's oak,
look fragile and exposed against the roiling slate of
late afternoon snow clouds bearing down.

Our world is turning cold for another night before the
heat and the summer, drunk on warm rain and longer days.

A fat rabbit by the split rail fence nibbles and hops,
twitches and chews,
knowing there is a family of foxes in the barn across the yard.

The barn is my shut-in neighbor's too --
everything in this scene is hers, if it is anyone's --
her son has mended the broken roof, though it's still
trying to cave and gape -- he's done the best he could.
It stands now, knowing time will have it's way and
there's no fixing here that will help.

It's all right though.

The oak will hold her baby leaves
despite the snow.

The rabbit comes from a large family --
the foxes can't eat them all.

The son patched the roof for love of his passing mother,
and there's nothing in there they need.

Diamond Dust

The snow gathered itself in the drowsy pines
and bare knuckled oaks all night, apparently.
I was asleep.
It settled in our local woods under a new moon
midnight like news about to come knocking:
cancer, in the throat.
Or like an epiphany about to break the surface
of your sea:
God has a sense of humor, too.

If you would join me at the window now,
we see the morning, very clear skies, blue and
new and alive because there is a lot of wind today
and all that snow that fell fluffy and mysterious
from heaven broke when it landed – every flake
shattered into its icy atomic pieces blowing now
in this diamond dust storm – can you see the
refractions, dazzling and uncountable? It’s just
a Thursday, it’s just light and water that froze and fell
and is raised up on the gusty breath of our February
now, but it is beautiful, worth a moment’s watching
and remembering here together at the frosty window,
our cancers gnawing, our God smiling.

Lexiconic Laceration

She was pretty enough, beautiful even,
at the table next to me in the coffee house
where the music thumps and we sip our
expensive, fairly grown bean brews
and pretend not to notice one another.

She leaned to me in a moment that halved
the haze of the place with her tongue, asked:

"How do you spell commit?"

You know, of course, she was sitting alone.

"One 't' or two?" she demanded of me.

Of all people.

"I hate that word," she said.

"I believe you," I said.

The Deja Vu Du Jour

College should have been a great place to learn
shit that would have done me some good.

Which beer should be the last beer of the night,
when to raise the bet in a good poker game,
why you shouldn't look a dangerous woman in
the eye until you know what she's after,
how to know a poem worth your time in two stanzas.

I don't know what I was thinking, taking Astronomy.

I haven't met a single woman impressed with my
one-semester knowledge of constellation names --
whether I could quote Neruda in the original Spanish
or not -- under a salty, spangled summer night,
not one impression worth remembering.

17th Century Reconstruction Literature? What a
waste compared with knowing what a mortgage
can do to your guts, how to be with someone dying slow.

I was in a great institution, hear me, blame is mine.

Looking back though, if I was writing core curriculum,
there would have been a class on cooking for one.
Single Serving Dining 304: all the skills needed for
one thick pork chop, a reasonable pile of broccoli,
a crazy (small) salad no one could duplicate,
an entire lesson on using garlic to gross excess.

I can't seem to manage the meal for one, try as I might.

I shut the grill off, finish the work on the stove, and
there's always food enough for two, at least,
and it's the deja vu du jour, again tonight:
I've had all I want, can't manage another bite of this,
and here lies so much still unfinished.
There is always the work of dealing with what's left over.

Guttering

One more poem in the last breath of the year then.
A tiny ark for all that was as the rain begins.
Here are all the nights, spent matchstick days
huddled together:

this poem is the silky ribbon to bind them.

The chopsticks I carved,
the books I bought to read in an appropriate chair
the new scar on my left palm
the letters from the boys locked up -
they are in here.

All the steps I've paced in the basement,
and every mile of sidewalk I covered these
twelve months
are in here.

My kittens, Della and Winter, are back from
their new families to rub up against this poem's legs,
and here's their own windowsill of a stanza
to nap on for as long as they want -
welcome home girls.

All my own hours waiting, nose at the window,
those great mouthfuls of silence
are in here.

The family that rented me the room,
they're all here playing cards and still
wondering about me down in the basement,
the boy living under their stairs.

Both of the weddings,
both of the break-ups,
and every shard of all the bottles,
busted now, are scraped together,
in here too, beautiful mosaic balls of glass
I won't be juggling without gloves.

My new tattoo, the two words scrawled over
my deadly romantic heart, they're in here too,
now that the bleeding has stopped and all
the letters have some new skin.

Every ounce of every laugh I made or heard
this year - you can't have a poem like this without
all the laughter you can find -
all of it is in here.

A pant cuff of beach sand,
a wineglass of rainwater from the woods,
one silver firework, two purple ones,
and every hot, midnight prayer -
yes, all of that is in here too.

The stone I scoured the city for,
the perfect one the nice short jeweler brought
out of the safe, shipped from overseas,
that brilliant rock that took the long boat ride
back to Egypt - I hated to see it go,
so I'm putting it in here too.

And as for all the moves
I should have made,
things I might have said
that would have made a difference
to a stranger or the people I know -
I've already piled and torched them,
them and their shadows.
They are the smoke you smell.
It's the only thing to do
with what we didn't.

The kisses - the good ones and
the tipsy ones the sad ones and
all the harmless little ones that led to
more good ones -
I'm leaving those out.

They are free to drift on their warmly pressed
wings, flitting around this jar full of things forever,
just to brighten the place up.

Which brings me at last to you.

You, who aren't in here either.
You who won't be bound anywhere,
especially in any poem I can order.
You who have slipped off somewhere,
gone again, breaking into next year
early perhaps, or stealing into some salty,
sweetache dream I will sit up in bed from
sometime late in the second week of June.

Grey

Gray is sometimes a sign for what's knocking
at the door, what's coming on:

some hairs at the temple:
middle age.
some low clouds in a slate sky:
snow.

It's the color for all that's forgettable too,
like the first two stanzas of this poem.

Or all the days that seem to be the same
day over again, looking back, sardined
together in our memory and our stories:
"...the two years after he left,
when I was drinking bad..."

Our brains, all those folds and coils are
grey matter, not yellow matter,
for a reason, I'm sure.

Gray is what happens to white when
it gets just a little bit dirty.
Or it's black, trying to clean itself up.

It's the light, fading up slow,
or dying a minute at a time.

Grey is the question color,
the hue of the blood for every
mystery that ever was.

It's also Indecision and Weakness,
Mystery's old imposters,
poised in trench coats
by a lampost in a thin fog,
trying to fool you.

Grey's lukewarm at best,
but usually cold.

It's ashes settling on what burned,
it's the dull nickle in your pocket,
or all the stony eggs in the river's bed,
or the cat, greeting me in her silent house.
It's waves and wet sand under a full June moon,
it's early morning prayers that rise and curl like
smoke over this table where the cue ball smacks
the far rail, kisses the 9-ball sweetly now,
sends it loping towards a side pocket,
some way out of here.