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.