thirty-five.

There are words, perhaps
that can't be used, not until
there's experience to back them.

Or shouldn't, a normative
decision beyond the reach
of most of us. Whichever

it is, I do not write
those words, write around them
speak of sensation but

circumvent the emotion
that might inform the stretch
and pull of fingers and skin.

If I cannot be honest then
at least I can be silent. At
least I can keep that.

thirty-four.

I think maybe,
I think yes, that.
I think all my stories
are poems in hiding
and you just haven't noticed
this. Yet.

thirty-three.

You close your eyes
tasting the hot sticky
sweet smell of mulberries
gone rotten in the rain.

Open them, lose
the flash of red black
red black sunlight through
eyelids, replace it with

the green of trees pale
and leaves curled into
a threat of storms. The sun
so bright that you can't

look away, the heat
slipping across skin like
breezes over a lake you
once called home. Every

memory makes a lie
of history. Every lost
moment was given
willingly, let loose once

with a blessing. It's too late
to call this regret, too soon
to consider it nostalgia. This
is only the space before the

key change, the breath
you've been holding for
a year, five, a lifetime. The
places you will soon miss.

May 4

A day without a name.
As children, we
didn't think to question it,
didn't wonder at the solemnity,
accepted as we did all things
that defied explanation.

Now, though. Count to
thirteen, slowly. Slower still.
Feel time stutter to a stop as the
seconds stretch, as the whip-
crack of bullets streaks
through the air, as everything
and anything fails to make sense.

One summer, I was writing
and sat beneath trees
leaves rumbling in the
gray wind of a future storm.
I thought of calling home, of asking
why I should know this place,
but held my peace, knowing
that the question would bring no change.

thirty-one.

After a storm the
beach would ripple,
packed sand in the
echo of waves, blue
shadows overcast
in the trickle of
early morning sunlight.

thirty.

The things
we say
when drunk
are the
ones
we don't
mean
to admit
and yet.

And yet.

twenty-nine.

Even with the windows closed
a breeze twists
blue stone windchimes,
crookedly screwed into the ceiling,
their wooden ring askew.
They catch on each other, clicking together
and reminding of that day, rain
threatening, the familiar dusty
air of the shop we visited
each August, buying candy
and birchbark dolls and
copper beads, comic books
and lead sinkers. The gravel
snapped under the tires the year my sister
turned sixteen, that last thread
of childhood. We bought ice cream
cones, blueberry and pecan,
and sat in the
grass trying to swallow
faster than the heat. Our
licenses crackled in pockets and
we'd rarely talked before, always
just that side of too far apart,
too much friction
in one tiny room. It was
the last summer I came home
to sleep in that house,
the rooms grown too tight for
all of us, soon to shrink smaller still.
I was in love with violence, the
stories of losses and redemption.
With words. With music.
With secrets and girls in red
lipstick and fishnet stockings,
with my childhood sweetheart,
with the desire to own everything
and admit nothing.
She was in love with a boy
who played the trombone.
We agreed on being somewhat adept
at ignoring the discontinuities.
We didn't buy windchimes or matching hats,
didn't take them home
in some parody
of eternal bloodline affection, but
years later, together
again in the same place,
she chose a set
in green for her son, hung them in the
window of a rented house in a
state I drive through on my way from
where I live
to the place I'd like to call home.
They hang there
still, and I wonder if, sometimes,
they chime in the stillness.

twenty-eight.

These days, whenever the future
seems fraught
with the moments
that will go wrong and the words
I'll be unable to reel back
into myself like fishing line,
like celluloid, like
the unraveling of a knot,
I picture
zombie kittens.
It has nothing to do
with life
or love
or the universe
or the price of tea,
but since when does that matter?
I repeat the phrase
to myself, imagine
the back of a rented sedan,
lost in the streets
of downtown Philadelphia, halfway
from Jersey to Princeton again.
It's enough, maybe
to know that should I ever decide
to start again,
I'd still have that day.

twenty-seven.

Ginsberg, on the back of a photograph, writes
William Burroughs ,
answering the first question; creating the last.
Burroughs by now is
a familiar constant, an image
known even when unknown, a figure of
dreams and nightmares and the violet minutes
between waking and grief, unposed,
on roof of
apartment house East Seventh Street.
His unseen viewer, always the archivist,
the collector of moments,
instants, people, things, places.
He, more than any of them, was the one
left holding the memories, left
with the need to record it all. The one
behind the camera. Scrawled,
where I had a flat,
softening the disjunction, leaving space for
we were lovers those months,
an announcement tasting of requiem,
and then the quiet,
editing his letters into books
not published till decades later,
the broken doubt and we hardly need
(as Queer, 1985)
to clarify, nor the
Lower East Side Fall 1953.
The looming tragedy of this moment,
this impression
is locked in a box in the basement
of a museum in a city far from
its beginnings. Nothing to witness its
hovering here, the ordinary
marking the boundaries of the possible.

twenty-six.

The pens in the bottom of my
backpack are playing hide-go-seek.

Each afternoon, I reach inside, grasp,
pull out a new color. Pink, green, purple,

blue, black, the red I have grudgingly acquired
in this, my transition to responsibility.

Sometimes I achieve only a pencil. Sometimes
even less. Sometimes I find nothing but erasers.

twenty-five.

We are reading the lives
of soldier poets.

It started with a copy of
The Waste Land.
Mine is composed of
17 pages of poem,
263 pages of notes.

This does not include the index.

It does not include the preface, or
the rather disingenuously named
A Note on the Text,
full of remarks that argue there can
be no text, the text is ephemeral.

Do not look for the text,
for you shall not find it.
The text, like all texts,
is a lie.

It contains no cake.

The Note is itself
approximately 61% text, and
39% notes regarding
A Note on the Text.

I tell myself this isn't excessive.
It's a complicated poem,
a poem sung in a minor key
but even the author
would agree that some things, some
existences, are perhaps
too ridiculous to be
named properly as anything but
comedy.

I do not laugh.

It is this strangeness
that leads us to Robert Graves,
to Siegfried Sassoon,
to Wilfred Owen, to the
complicated recollection that is
every soldier who meanwhile
dreamt himself elsewhere.

To the juxtaposition
of mud and blood and rhyme.

twenty-four.

And
life is
better because
bandages are made
in the shape of crayons.

Remember being small, that summer
you fell out of the tree beyond the
clothesline. Blood welling up
along your arm building and
building until it tipped
down to drip from your
fingers and thunk
into the
dirt.

The sharp shock
of it, the stain that
never quite washed out of your
shoe.
      The pale fracture of the scar under
your fingers as you waited months later for the
second-grade school bus.

                          Such a thing, even
now, would be easier to bear if stamped
with CRAYON and colored green,
echoing with the colors that
swirled together the next
winter, melted down
the classroom
radiator
to drip in puddles
along the linoleum cracks,

                           the warm scent
of candles like a midnight vigil memory
overwhelming the sun as it watered
over the cracked sidewalk
and grimed
snow.

twenty-three.

I have forgotten the words
that I wrote this morning. I stitched
them together while
walking, using the
broken blister on
my heel as an anchor. The pieces
of sentences slid into
each other like a hymn, like
fireworks. The phrases I've
forgotten
sang quietly of
promises, and the clean good
green smell of birch leaves and
poison sumac, and the
way the sun hissed in my
ears and buzzed along
my fingers. They were the words I
wanted to offer today, and
if only I'd written them down. If
only I'd pushed them out into the world.
If only.

twenty-two.

I ask, "does that make sense?" and
her blank look
belies the faltering,
"yes, maybe." She means to say,
"no, not even a little,
this question is an inland sea
and I'm sitting
cross-legged on the shore
with a teacup,
holding all the
bits I can comprehend in my hands
and considering drowning
myself in the rest."

twenty-one.

I envy people who title a poem
"POEM". How are they so certain? What
secret surety floats between the margins,
allows them to believe that
this poem, it is a poem deserving
of no description but its existence,
a poem that will never become,
that other poem by that poet, the poem with no
title, you know the one, with
(the unicorns, the explosions, the nights
that we sat by the radio and waited
for fireflies to guide us away), no name.

twenty.

In the middle of the floor
skitters a beetle. Black, trapped
by the click of the light. I

hesitate in the doorway, close
to caught myself, unwilling
to advance, unable to retreat.

nineteen.

To wish for the weather to break
is to hope for more rain, miserable
damp sticky lightning and thunder.
It is to release the awkward desire for
sullen puddles and
wrinkled fingers, shoes that squish
and cotton colors run together
into a muddle of
Still. When the sun beats down

and the breeze shimmers with
discomfort and the burn of sweat in
mosquito bites jabs like all my
past bad decisions, that seems
a small price to pay.

That new misery seems a fair exchange on
sunburns and wrinkle-squinting
heat haze nightmares.

eighteen.

In 1861, October, Karl Marx took the
British papers to task. Their
reporting on the Rebellion in America was
shoddy, he claimed, internally inconsistent, and
missed the point almost entirely.

Marx would be that guy,
the one in the front of the class, taking
notes. He'd understand what
was going on, but whenever he explained
eyes would glaze over. He'd raise his

hand, and wonder quietly why no one
ever invited him out for coffee
after, why the mutters and shuffling of paper
followed each brave and (frankly)
reasonable request that the world realign itself.

seventeen.

Ask the color of a sonnet, describe
the blue-violet calm of longing, the whisper of pink in
the Italian for lover.

These tastes I know,
these things I wrap myself in until the edges
of the world recede.
These are the moments that are round and gold and
heavy with promises.

Names will never be a comfort. They catch
in my throat,
pinecones rolling downhill.

sixteen.

Each yard I run, each second I gain
from riding faster. Every walk up a hill,
every set of pushups or crunches or lunges,

every balancing shift
as I lift my bike into a rack
is more than I expected.

That sound, that
hum-pop-vibration-crack in my chest
That vibrating tension,

of drowning in my own body,
I'd not wish on anyone.
I grew up with it, hovering.

No wonder I turned out awkward. Try
spending most of your childhood
waiting for your lungs to shutter

and leave you gasping on the ground.
See how adventurous you are a decade later.
There were the years I was better,

almost normal,
the fear tamped down.
There were years I wasn't.

fifteen.

The things they don't know
frighten me. Make me wonder how
I ever managed to survive
before I knew the truths
that I love.
Chemistry—the way the elements slot together
into molecules, the variations of
heat and substance and the state of
everything everywhere. Malleability, the shapes
were are and the shapes we can be
hammered to fill. That fireworks
and bombs
are points on a spectrum. And government—those
rights which are theirs, inalienable, distinct,
the rules that give space to breathe and
boundaries to cross, the poetry of the amendments
and the flow of the process,
the periodic tables of
change. The hooks and
barbs that hold cases into precedent, that demonstrate
the law itself as malleable, mutable, magic.
History—Beat poetry, and the baby boom,
all those phrases that birthed the music
they do know, the images on
their television screens. I drew patterns—
the War brought the poets, who
tried to bring the physical into language, to
create elemental verse, to create themselves
unprecedented.
To push the edges of the
acceptable, even if it led to trials.
Frustrated, I gave
them Howl and hoped, maybe,
for a spark to flare, for a moment to
open, for a reshaping.

fourteen.

Seventeen that spring,
burying myself in the basement stacks of
the downtown library, spending my
evenings and weekends shelving
magazines with flaking edges and books
with gilt lettering, collections stamped
with the dates of stories long dead.

I curled into a chair, surrounded by steel,
waiting for the dumbwaiter to ring,
dragged the handle upward and reached into
the cool dimness for slips of paper
requests in careful printing. Life,
Time, Good Housekeeping,
all the virtues and vices.

Somewhere in April, a volume fell open.
September, 1911. "When a factory building
is not a factory building, it can, manifestly,
make no great difference
what you put into it."
Tonight, I find it again
and download a copy to my computer.

Thirty seconds,
instead of the hours of copying,
skimming every index, digging out
references to a tragedy no one
remembered. I came home most nights
with pieces of the past stuck in my hair,
coughing fitfully and newsprint smudged on my face.
Learning. Nothing important
is ever on the first page. Or the second.
That lists tell stories. That the
boundaries between now—this
place, this person I was not yet become—and
then are very thin indeed. No more than
the thickness of a page, a line of text.

thirteen.

David Lehman wrote a poem
every day, lining them up
like tin soldiers, ranks of metaphor
and cordite echoes of his
imagist forefathers.
He wrote poems, and gave them dates,

critics lauded them for sincerity,
and all I can think of is my
shoes, red converse with broken laces
(the mud rubbed into the heels and ballpoint
political cartoons smearing on the
toes). I try to say poetry

and instead I get this. I string together
metaphoric platoons but
they're all just another way to admit
that my shirt itches where it crosses my spine
and the rain has gone done the back
of my collar and my bus is late.

twelve.

Our problems taste of
plaster mud, and it’s a reminder,
that there are things we cannot say,
will not ask.
And some part of that
comes from this:
when things go wrong, we write
of them so very carefully,
turn the pain into a story,
a moment we can share.
A place to rest.

eleven.

My nails are painted the color
of those summers, when
we would lie out in the grass and
talk about the places we'd go in
twenty years. The pale pink
of childhood, the shimmer
of getting out of a rickety town,
driving ourselves
into the spaces we
saw from the back row
of the cinema. I'm not there, and
you're not here, and somehow
we lost each other in between.

But this color reminds me
of cheekbones, glazed
with too much afternoon sunlight, and
dark eyes, shaded under the
pale blond of your hair. It echoes
the brush we used to paint lemon juice
through the strands.
My skin, freckled and constantly
peeling, yours golden and shining with
oil that only made my shoulders tighten
and my nose itch. All the
small moments, and the shades
of the girls we wanted to be.

ten.

Tonight we've left the windows
open to the breeze. I leave them be,
even though it makes me nervous,
even though I fall asleep
and wake to the edges
of nightmares. Dreams of the year I lived
across from a dealer, my room
lit by an old picture window
and facing the street, the whistle
of a bullet too loud with it open. Of
climbing the wall into my childhood bedroom,
struggling not to wake my sister,
locked out of the house and caught, suspended.
Of my hair in my eyes and my feet kicking at brick,
breath stuck somewhere between
home and away. Of the monsters that
children fear, and adults ignore.
Here, the trees sound like the lake in a storm,
and I can't sleep for the missing
smells—no pine needle damp, no
granite sharp like a summer afternoon,
no hints of old varnish and the
orange crates my grandfather's father used
to build the windowframes.

nine.

Look, I say, I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know
what you want
to hear.
I want to say I love you,
but there's a bruise on my hip in the
shape of the hibiscus we wrapped round the
deck the summer I didn't get hitched, and
I think that means Tuesday. It's
just what we are, what I am,
and you fall
silent while my voice fills all
the uneven gaps—
that said gasp, for a moment, and I almost
left it there, uncertain
the way I often am—but
in the end I chose sense over significance,
and that is why, I say, we could never
work out.

eight.

I'm thinking a poem about choices.
I haven't written it down yet,
still tasting the possible words
on my tongue, in my throat.
Newly blonde—a lesson to
always read the label, keep the box,
follow the directions.
Accidents can happen, otherwise.
And that itself is a road not chosen,
like the one of the curly-haired boy
on the bus in front of me, in his
Transformers cap—backwards,
as he listens to heavy metal
on an ipod that matches his pink polo shirt.
His sleeves are turned up, and
I'm on my way to buy hair dye.
I don't ask where he's going
right now, but I make up stories, poems
to explain him.

seven.

"You can't ride two bikes at once,"
says a coworker.
She's right, the though of it is
ridiculous, like trying to make a line both
a chord and a tangent.
It can't be both.
The Greeks made that clear.

We shouldn't try,
should stop trying to turn ourselves into
something we aren't, should stop
pushing children into
molds
that will never fit them.

Of course, I can say that
because it's never my child, never my
dreams and hopes
for her that are falling apart.
It's very simple from where I'm
standing. It's a question of
bicycles, not hearts.

six.

There's a boy, a man,
my age or younger,
and he's sitting on the train
with eyelash yarn wound in his hands,
knitting.

A scarf, maybe.
He's new at it, counting stitches silently,
his lips moving through the steps
of his fingers.

I wish him luck.
I could never get the hang of
all that repetition, the patterns.
In my ear whispers

we tether our dreams to the turf
and as a child I would have called
it the radio, a tape, a record, but now
I don't have the words to

describe music.
Perhaps there aren't any left.
What will we call it
in another ten years, twenty?

How will we share the things we
love? In another decade, will he sit
with a child, teaching her
to count? Will she sing
under her breath?

five.

My mother calls, and starts her conversation
with, "Your father doesn't want to play Pontius Pilate,"
and I think, this again? But this is what we do.

We argue, in that way that means we agree. Static. A breath.
In the background I can hear him laughing. We talk only
when my mother calls and starts the conversation.

And it hurts, this open space. I still know the words
but no longer believe them, can only recite the childhood
verses, think, this again. This is what I do

to keep the peace, to paste myself into a family
who raised me and let me go. I answer, because
my mother calls. She starts a conversation, and

the careful language of biblical interpretation holds me
still, a string from her heart to mine, a mirror of our losses.
Even as I think not again, this is what I do:

I keep talking. She doesn't interrupt, I break into tears
and still the words come, our onslaught of uncertainties.
My mother calls, she starts the conversation,
and I think, finally. Again. Let this be what we do.

four.

I've been reading TS Eliot on the bus.
He makes me laugh, loves poems but detests
poets (hints that Johnson was a wanker,
claims Milton spoke his own dying language,

reserves for Joyce strange special kinds of cruelty
wrapped in beribboned backhand compliments)
and I imagine going down to the pub with him.

Did he go to pubs? Did he sit around with a pint
and listen to people call him names he
didn't know? Did he swallow down the thoughts

he didn't want and drink faster? I bet no one
ever told him to smile pretty as he walked down
a sidewalk or sat on a bus. I bet he could wear

what he liked (kitten heels and short skirts, maybe
corsets—who knows, even fishnets, garters, fabrics
that shout strangers can touch) and go out

alone, even late at night. I bet he never poked
himself in the eye with his mascara wand.
I bet, when he argued that poetry should be in
phrases that are genuine, I'm not what he meant.

three.

A student said to me yesterday, "you must really hate English,"
and he meant it, took my insults and wandering history for dislike.
I stopped, thrown from my tangent, started again. Tried to
put into words the way that love can look, sometimes, a little,
like rejection. Think of starting with a story. Once upon a time,

my ancestors crossed an ocean. They chose a land under green-black
water, and they called it home. They gave it hearts, children,
much that they cherished and all that they dreamed. It gave back rain.
It gave winters that bit and clawed, summers that cracked the clay
and swallowed the seed corn. It gave and gave, and they

learned not to ask. My grandmother taught me to force my hands
to make something beautiful, and this was how she spelled love.
Words were too glaring, gave notice, and to keep people from taking
too loudly, we offered no more than grudging affections. The way
my father always asked where I'd been timewasting, in place of the

words for worry and hope. The things we love, we treat like the
dirt under our feet, the grit we adore and fear in equal measure.
Start again. I don't hate the language. I love its sharp edges, the
complexities that drive me mad, the places where other languages
lap over and slide between and space themselves out on my tongue.

This is why I call it names, point out its flaws, teach children to
imagine it as a tool they can own. This is language as birthright,
as the home we fall into and shape and release again, changed. If
I weren't in love, I wouldn't need to complain. That's what love is,
the places we accept, cracks and shouts and stitches, all.

two.

There aren’t easy words for
the place I called home, no
simple definitions to describe
how the scrape of wax makes
me shiver and the sound of the
cars on the highway calls to
me of Lent, the light, breaking
through a window, of tombs.

one.

In the crooked corners
of a house I no longer own
are bits of our lives left behind.
A pair of shoes, toes-tilted,
from a recital we didn't attend.
Books, pages uneven like promises,
still stacked along the wall
where the water came in.
We tried to peel them apart
but in the end it couldn't be done,
the stories had become each other.
Ivy wilding down the
sides of my grandmother's funeral
plant. That candle, the one
you never loved, the one forgotten until
we couldn't decide
where it came from,
who it should follow.