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.