I watch from the back unseen
as she comes in late and walks
down the aisle to my old seat
which is empty of me as prey.
I watch myself as though
outside myself. I’m trying
to protect us both
from my cruelty.
She wants to consume me,
suck marrow from my bones.
I feel a little bad about this,
but not bad enough
to be drawn and quartered.
“Happy Father’s Day!” I thought angrily as I walked back home,
Rather than driving with the nuclear family to see her larger family.
Feels hotter inside me than out.
I thought, now sadly: How did this happen?
Just then, her car appeared, turning the corner
In front of me and coming my way.
Relieved, I looked forward to fixing my errors
And hopping in to resume our trip.
But, she zoomed on past.
I hadn’t realized yet that the reappearance
Was only the result of taking the long U-turn
Of going around the block
To leave without me.
Happy Father’s Day.
we’ve learned to distill moments
into square boxes, is it only
worth living if a hundred smiling
circles think it so? will i remember
the way she squeezed my hand
on the dance floor, and drove
me home in the dark, or will i
count the taptap of her thumbs instead?
the day someone gives me the stars
and i learn to trust my own eyes
i think i’ll call it breathing
i’m still trying to figure out
if i love you
and i know that sounds harsh
i know it comes across as if
i’m being rigid and bitter
towards you
that i’m being an angry, hostile teenager
but i don’t want to lie
and don’t get me wrong
i’ll still try to be kind to you
because i still appreciate
everything
everything you sacrificed
everything you did
everything you pushed through
because life didn’t deal you a kind hand;
and yet,
i don’t know if that justifies love
because there are things you did—-
things you still do—-
that unsettle me
and i’m still struggling
through this murky water
and i think you are too
and that’s okay
but i’m filled with guilt
and i’m sorry
that i didn’t wish you
“Happy Father’s Day!”
yesterday
In the beginning, we were one love,
who, after eternities together,
wanted more love.
So we said Yes. Then
we separated ourselves
into light and darkness.
We were dawn and we were dusk.
Our fingers interlaced
at the edges of everything.
At a distance, I looked on your light, and I saw you
beautiful in ways I’d never known. You pondered
my dark complexity, defined the many edges of me.
We began this slow dance, arms encircling space.
Carefully we turn, observing
the worlds birthing between us, watching
innumerable lives mirror every detail of our own.
They expand it, they explain it, they expose it,
they live it, live it, live it —
they live it to the end.
When they die, they die our love.
All our births are infinite agony.
All our deaths bliss.
the Great Leap Forward out
of the gothic South
of Jones Street
to Broadway’s model home
with arched doorways
leaded windows
a shower curtain and dad
says
starving children of China
over peas
you can only fold a piece of paper eleven times
No matter how large
What if it were as large as a flag
what if it were an enormous sail
Could you fold it seventy times seven
Could you bend back once again
Im shocked, still
By the number of whirling stars in the sky
Darkening and darkening again.
Here you are and you’re white heat
Here I am , moving slow meanwhile
Everything inside my head’s moving delirious high speed
Wan and glum but there’s real love
In the squared oval cast of my face
pinned til daylight
A sky dense with snow geese
black-tipped wings wide
an ensemble inches apart
yet they maintain their distance
without collision—onyx eyes,
orange beaks, necks extended,
bodies intent on the way forward.
Doesn’t the loud sound or current
of flapping disrupt them?
O, to be that concentrated, united,
each a perfect mirror of the other.
