Choosing to undertake a challenge means
Having completed the most important step.
Advancing forward is nice—
Leaving the past in the dust,
Lunging toward victory, but
Even if one cannot make that final step?
Never crosses the finish line?
Giving it a try, to start, is
Everything that matters.
“After silence, that which comes nearest
to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
— Aldous Huxley
“Music is the silence between the notes.”
— Claude Debussy
In 2012, I was graduating college after a long foray
into the west, into the Navy, into adulthood, into a marriage
that would finally give up its ghost only two years later.
My energy, my attention, was on the attempt to build
(to repair) a home & a life for two sons.
But other larva
were breaking branches where sewn a year before,
were falling to the soft soil, were feeding on sap of roots,
had begun that slow transformation into nymphs,
beneath the ground, until they would break again
the surface of the earth in 2025
& climb kilometers of trunks, bury themselves in cocoons to sexual
maturity, that wings might break through the flesh of their backs,
crack an exoskeleton, leave it behind, still clinging to the bark
like a cold, dead, statuary monument in honor, in memory,
of what they once had been.
Tonight, there is no song.
One month, more or less, saw their flight. One month that the skies felt
the thrill, the threnody, the rapture, the rhapsody, the vibration
across the skin of its clouds.
One month reserved for love
& search for love, & twinned creation of another
generation buried to bring life
thirteen years in the future
once again.
***
Another June comes & goes
without fireworks, without fanfare, without commencement or wake.
Another month, another day, splits the night of the year in two
with a yawn & a stretch—rolls over to close its eyes & drift again
into that slow fall
to its end.
& where I sit in the dark of my summer-night patio, legs crossed
like a ward against what remains (or does not) of the one life I get
to live, my throat holds the memory of vibration from when I sang
for you—for bedtime, for rest, for peace to wrap you
where my arms cannot.
My peace is in the peace
you ask & find
in the limited range
of my voice.
***
Did you know it is only the male cicadas who sing?
That let the notes of their longing resonate
through their otherwise-hollow bodies?
Did you know the females remain silent, listening?
Did you know that they cannot bite? Cannot sting?
That though you might feel a pinch, it is only
from the barbed-legs that allow them cling
& mature in their solitude against the bark?
Their song may vex & annoy, their voices
raise against the uninhabitable night
& the reality of their eminent death
or their fear of failing
to find a mate. But
they cannot lift a wing
against anything they find in that dark—
least of all their intended
or that union.
They would (& will)
sooner die than cast a shadow
of a doubt of their nature
against their moon.
***
You are not within my sight. You press your head
against the Schrödinger’s softness of a pillow, somewhere
four hours north of where I sit, singing, answering
your request for that act.
In the throaty, scratchy-velvet
of a voice slipping like molecules through the veil of sleep,
you make me promise. You say that no man has ever
given you this act, this love. You plead that I would
do this for you, every night, at the end of every day
of the rest of our life.
& I answer without a breath or a thought,
yes. Of course, & always, yes. Though no woman has ever
wanted to hear my song, or even see my old-fashioned
trembling. Only the sons who would call every night
they were away, leaving me pacing parking lots,
slow-dancing pools of light falling from poles,
passerby thinking me insane
as I sang
them to sleep.
But you do. I know you do.
So I do. In every melody, in every lyric,
in every lifetime—
I do.
***
The cicadas are so brief.
They are a mist, a vapor
in the exhale of a summer
so brief—a mist, a vapor—
amid the parasympathetic
system of a universe
& its lurid complexity
& its lingering
& expanding
truth.
What is a month?
What value exists,
can exist,
in a love & a life
so brief?
What am I
but one
of your
meteors?
***
In one month, we will break
this present distance & fly
to the place where you broke
through the skein of your mother—
the warmth of her womb,
the sanctuary of her body—
to the places where you broke
& were broken—left broken
open—by relationships & men
whose only songs screamed anger,
whose only voices chased you
fleeing into the darkness
of the night to find peace
& yourself & belief
in anything left buried
in your creation.
Together, whatever distance
we find will be our music
in the silence
between the notes
of hands that cannot hold,
lips that cannot touch,
tongues that cannot rise
or fall in a sigh
of what we know
to be truth.
Together, we will be
apart, until we can be
all we know
we can & will be
together. & then, & only then,
will we break ourselves
again, & ever again,
against the shores
of these shells
like an echo
of the waves
against the shores
of a place we’ve yet to go
together—until we break
& bury our love
in the depths
of what is left
of a life
together.
*** “What am I but one of your meteors” is a line from Walt Whitman’s Year of Meteors (1859-60) ***
God gives me god impatient to be God,
for God’s name is an everlasting rod.
Make me a bed, not another rod.
Let me fall to sleep in pastures green.
Fall to snowy sleep in pastures green.
Full you are the fountains ‘neath the Earth.
You are city fountains up upon the Earth.
I want these rivers sprung to fill my core.
Meet a river of the east, spills through my core.
Vltava. Die Moldau. Smetana’s hunger—
a sounding deep with strains of hunger.
A god not old but ever younger.
Where the name is pure, yet rough and dogged.
God gives me god impatient to be God.
Sitting out back, admiring the garden
planted just a month ago, tomatoes
over-spilling frames, their branches laden,
blossoms heralding even more new growth.
Did what was necessary: worked the loam,
cleaved a path for steady afternoon light,
gave burrowing roots a wide berth to roam,
hauled out the hose and watered every night.
Now I must sow patience and step aside
let nature own the show — you know it’s true –
dig a hole in which to bury my pride,
let the gifts ripen, don’t pick them too soon.
Give mother sun, sister moon, their just due,
appreciate beginnings — endings, too.
* * *
Thank you LexPoMo family for the generous comments and close-readings of my poems. They weren’t all winners, but there are a few that I think could turn out to be keepers. This community means a great deal to me: I learn so much from you all. ‘Til next year!
I used to think
that once my parents
and maybe my sister
died
that I could have
a few decades left
to live freely as myself.
Now as the world turns towards fascism
and hates my kind,
it feels like there will never be
enough
blood spilled
to satisfy me.
I’m the reaper
whose thirst for death
is endless.
I’m the vampire
who wants to
bleed the world dry
just so I can survive.
I never asked
to be your monster.
America
is memories
demolished
upon memories demo
lished
upon memories de
mol
ish
ed
It is suburbia
of vacuum tube TVs
Roadmaster bikes
Howard Johnson’s
d
emol
is
hed
I was a prince then
sitting on my vinyl throne
paper crown ringing my head
feasting on burgers and fries
heir to an America
always under construction
going somewhere faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast
But America f
e
l
l
crashed at Carrier Circle
ruins of an orange roof
warning land schooners
away from the rocks
America’s debris
f I e l d
(
&8*
$.
£. £
£
$$$$
Gaping motel rooms
naked like old men
expose
me
A TV somewhere crackling
the play-by-play
from
Forbes Field
Mets versus Pirates
me on the floor
plastic batting helmet
on my head
pulling for Clemente
The pitch
The crack …
Back in my car
rounding Carrier Circle
The boy grays in the day
America
will be
demol
i
shed
again.
Friend’s husband, Dennis, asks, “Have you thought about getting married again?” My eyeballs involuntarily roll heavenward, then flash him a piercing side eye. “I guess that’s a no.” I agree. “Don’t ya get lonely?” “With two goldens and a chocolate Labrador? Being solitary doesn’t bother me; I treasure my alone-ness. No one tells me when to eat, sleep, go anywhere, and all the other stuff.” Dennis, is a direct, straight forward guy, so “other stuff” escapes him. (He and Cindy match perfectly.) “Dennis,” I say, “I’m a narcissist magnet. I dump nice guys and opt for assholes.” He lifts his battered blue ballcap to scratch his gray head.
I do not tell him how when younger other stuff meant survival, how my skin crawls at cultural demand for intimacy, how what was once a thread of resistance evolved into hawser. I do not say how storms rattled two marriages with deluge, lightning, slamming thunder, even tornadoes. I do not tell him how pairing left me a smashed, tinderbox house cast across a blood-soaked ground. I do not tell Dennis about three dead dogs and a horse. I do not tell him how I became wadded up poetry, stomped on, and tossed into a woodstove. I do not elaborate on how other stuff scrambled my battered brain. I cannot speak unspeakable words that made my ears ring. I do not tell him women don’t interest me either. I don’t share my simple opinion — what other people do in their bedrooms isn’t my business, but what happens in mine is. I do not tell this gentle person standing beside me how boundaries had to become cinder blocks.
I’d never heard of “ace” until I was old. Dennis wouldn’t understand.
Jo Pye and sunflowers,
Milkweed and straw flowers
buzzing with honey and
bumblebees, nectar sipping
among yellow, deep pink
and brilliant orange, all framed
in differing hues of green.
Mint and lemon thyme,
Basil and rosemary, landing
Pads for butterflies and ladybugs,
stopping by for a sip.
6/29/25
KW
