Posts for June 1, 2019 (page 9)

all the pages have been turned
she closes the book
closes her eyes  

dissatisfied with the ending
she’s going to write
a sequel  

I listen as the cardboard seal breaks
when she opens her sixty-four count box
of Crayolas on the first day of school.
I fumble through my supplies, searching
for something that might work.  She retrieves
the one marked “Goldenrod,” and begins
coloring a picture of Kentucky’s State
Flower.  I hear the waxy stick rub against
her paper.  A perfect choice!  She mirrors
the ideals of her parents: only the best
for the best.  As the day wanes, she places
her box of colors into a new backpack
before the dismissal  bell rings.
I use a crayon simply marked
“yellow,” then gather my broken
colors into last year’s pencil box.

this time next year the sun will rage and burn
the moon will hide her pale, worn face—
the earth, no longer, turn

the stars that fill the sky, like beacons in the night,
will each fade out—one by one—
for we have lost this fight

family will shelter among the rocks of coal-stained hill
the lives once led, a memory—
each day sharp blades doth kill

the end will come swiftly,
none left there to mourn
when all are bones, a new day dawns
and Adam will be born.

You came as you usually do, yesterday:  like light pulsing, never gone but always shut away from view—until unseen apertures iris open, the shutter breaking its former settings to give—no—to take its glimpse at the world around, and within, me—like the rise of a great and billowing curtain, drawn up and away, so you canook upon the stage of my life, for but a breath, from distant and shadowy box seats;You can’t watch, can’t peek, however briefly, without a partial reveal of your own.

And standing there, breathless, the last gasps of spring whispering the leaves into motion above my head, Gratz Park inhaling the birth of summer, so much like that summer, three years hence, when you appeared on my radar, just as you do now—a sudden bird of energy and remembrance and spiritual reflection, just out of view until you, until I, turn the faces of these clocks, contrariwise, to one another—hands shifting, touching, til they synchronize, again, for a breath, for one brief beat of wayward hearts—I recall.

You, sitting there, your nose and eyes in a book so that I can’t quite be sure it is even you—I recall our story like a rush of rewind, end to beginning—like all the cosmos is a finger depressing a button on some archaic VCR—until this present sensation aligns, finds parallel with that first time I shared air with you:  Feeling you, before I saw you; knowing you before I’d met you; the slow-motion epiphany of a man turning in his seat to see had entered, upstage.  The flood, then, and again now, as if at the first, seeing you, and in seeing you, seeing me, knowing what we were before I knew what that even might mean.

And then the mental montage gathers speed, finds momentum as it bleeds across the moments that followed moments, the years our stories would foment, together, crystallized—in ever-widening fractals—metastasizing like cells given fresh and echoing genesis—the arc within wheels, within circles, forming cycles, lifting blue and purpled petals from the trees, so that we could be, would be, what we could be or would be, but we weren’t and couldn’t hold the center or close the ritual.

But we are here, were here then, last night, again, in Gratz Park. And you opened to me—perhaps when you saw me—perhaps in your heart, because of something you read—because you were reading (or I thought you were reading; it may not have been you).  And the cream of your legs and shoulders, sprinkled with nutmeg freckles, glowed in the half-shade of the trees, green above as green below.  Older now, and studying, stretching, being more than before.  And I wondered. I wondered if I should say something, if I could get you to look at me again, as you looked at me before, or even as you did before you turned and walked away.  But I didn’t. And you didn’t answer my unspoken call.  And I walked on, as I am always walking on, and drove away, as I am always driving away—your hair like the fires of another life, burning a Viking goodbye
          in my rearview mirror.

We lived in a housing project behind the buzz and hum of a factory
with forever-churning steam and orange sodium lights
glowing like embers. When darkness fell
it dropped hard, never enough deadbolts
to keep us safe.

Summer came, and with it shimmery-jacketed beetles
crowding the porchlight. They kept us awake,
telling stories of where they’d been. On the back porch
with my parents, I stood in the June evening
and watched the burn.

It was a house up the street, consumed with flames
licking the chimney. Hungry, relentless, eager.
Sirens ripped the air apart,
ash was already falling like confetti on our heads. 
An omen.

The air was greasy, slick with kerosene. It smelled like
the past and the future, like something I knew.
I bowed my neck, dipped my head like a bird
to rest a cheek against my mother’s palm.
This is the beginning, I thought.

I

I wish he hadn’t
said those things

II

I wish I stood up
for myself

I (addendum)

but that every
word, statement, urge
he shared with me
would write itself
on his palms so that
he could never give
his wife and daughters
anything without them
knowing about it.

II (addendum)

the way I know
my sister would:
her voice a sudden snowstorm
and his windows open;
her eyes rigid potholes
for his 70mph truck;
her spine a proud column;
her skin untouchable.

many like to look
at mountain rivers 

their moments of
wild holiness

few care to watch
far more subtle winds

even as they become
like flowing water

If you caught me year ago, i would have stuffed all these broken birds into my coat pockets,
balled-up fistfulls of crooked wings and taped up legs,
all cawing and hissing and vengeful-
Woulda anxiously stuck my fingers in to feel the bald spots and get pecked around my nail beds,
all chewing and spitting and messy and Sick-

but my Body’s grown too big now for all that spare room between hips and pockets; belly too full to entertain guests.
a woman gets bigger and bigger and bigger and all those birds get pushed clean outta her like a tube of toothpaste.
no more nests, no more feathers, no more loose thread from trying to sew it all together.