Where Dreams Live
They stay with me for a few moments
after waking, the blurred pictures in
my mind I had while dreaming,
conversations so interesting I want
to return to them to see how they end,
or decisions on the brink of being made
that would affect, you know, how we
feel about each other. And I am sure,
for those brief minutes between sleeping
and waking, I am at my most powerful,
a masterful conductor of will as I
attempt to stay present for this wild show,
like I can control the actors in it, and
by doing so, help them make choices
that will be good (I pray, be kind!) but
often I just watch the events unfold
willy-nilly, mesmerized by the place
where dreams live, in some static state,
delineated by both reality and possibility,
and I am realizing, as much as I do enjoy
the show, the entertainment of watching
myself in a scene both familiar and
unknown and not being able to change
a script I’ve never been given, I like waking
up even more, especially when the house
is still and I can tiptoe out to the kitchen,
throw open wide the windows and inhale,
deep in my lungs, the sweet air of morning.
Your Photograph
You are beautiful
made beautiful
and I fall into studying your face,
the stories I don’t know etched
like promises like mystery,
like decisions to feel, not
numb and move forward
forward anyway.
Little Boy | A Glimpse
I want to find other words to explain to you
how memory weighs on me
the contour of skin over cheeks,
puffing out like the sweetest apples
under deep blue eyes
where you hold me still, unable to move
backward or forward because I
don’t want to lose you again.
So I stay arrested, a willing captive because
I can hear your voice,
your questions that make me feel
unqualified and yet determined
especially the one I have for you
—will you come back to me as more than
memory at the end of the world.
Angels
They are around me
illumined circles
of many bodies
around me
around me
the kiss of your lips on my cheek
and your tiptoes
thunder muted
as I love like you
taught me
I love what
you’ve taught me
with this band of gold
surrounding
one born from dust
and made glorious
your lips now mine
marked with song.
Reverie
All day this day she bends, knees pressed into mud,
she dips her hands, cupping them like a bowl,
and pulls the water to her mouth
the rolling ocean within her
until she is small, submerged beneath sunlight,
gold ribbons wide as the sun,
and lets the waves pull her further,
their voices like children’s laughter in bustling, noisy rooms.
When You Were Five Years Old
How can I still feel attached
to you. Your hand runs time
backward and I stay to hold you.
Sweetness folded into
where I’ve always kept
music and smells and memories.
All that has made me.
And I want to thank you for
my heart now shaped
into something beautiful.
Your small hand clasped
in mine. We walk together
where I will always see.
Journey
The walk through desert
was many miles,
each step a day,
and my legs ached
from the weight
of my body,
all the dreams of you
a manifestation
I could see and touch
(if only in my
imagination) for
you were real to
me, a child to father
before I was a father,
and I had to trust
what I knew but did
not understand: you
were carrying me
even now my child
who loved, so loved,
the world.
The Fine Line Between Melodrama and Disorientation
Sorrow tells me I will not find myself,
recover the place within me that knew
the ease of things,
the trill of birds calling one to another,
exploding hope and promise,
while my knee aches
from overuse, I think,
and I hear the broken wall clock’s
minute-hand swing down to five-thirty
every six minutes while
my phone’s time reads phantom numbers
in the dark, and I wish I
were bike riding with you
in Amsterdam—or in Brugge when
we road outside the city to Damme and back,
through countryside of sweet green and windmills
and a bicyclist hit a woman walking,
or she had a stroke,
and people stopped to help her,
frail and disoriented, move off the path,
and we went as far as the path would let us,
one destination to another,
to accept going nowhere as a place
we no longer refuse to go.
Flailing / The Sheep’s Gate
I stand at the gate
watching you
wondering what you see
and imagine all sorts
of possible calamities
but not really
I actually don’t like
to imagine them
but I wonder
what you imagine
when the world you love
is motherless,
its arms stretching up
to be carried,
nestled deep and safe,
and it refuses to see
you standing there,
its mother who aches
to pick up its child
blind and flailing
desperate to be loved.
Clear Path
There is no risk. I follow you
through thickets that scratch my face
and tear my clothes. Not sure
where I am or what road
leads up or down
and I am not afraid.
Nothing harms me
though I am powerless
on my own. You hedge
fingers, heart, mind, toes so
courageous does not
describe who I am.
Just finally
weak, small,
indefatigable.
Touch me and
I am no longer here.
Breath
The little boy presses up on me
his hot body and breath what
I want to feel in the room
with chairs stacked too close
together as she reads poetry
from the front platform,
her hair wild and red and
covering her eyes like she is
embarrassed for us to hear
her words and I wonder
if I should care too
but the hot breath of sweet
air from the little boy’s mouth
distracts me as it would
any mother so really I
never hear her anyway.
Hot Tamales
The wood slats of the chair push into the small of my back. I creep my fingers between the top of my desk in the back of the room, my fingertips memorizing a small box’s smoothness. It’s full of hot tamales I begged my mom to buy for me yesterday when we went to the store. The classroom has a hot-kid smell that fills the still air. The kids around me are bent over their desks, their pencils copying down spelling words on beige brown paper, not the good kind with clear blue lines and crisp whiteness, the kind with holes for binder rings, but the kind that is cheap and thin and tears easily with the rub of an eraser after you’ve made a mistake. You have to be careful. I watch Mrs. Lasley at her desk, cat-eye glasses pointed down as she grades papers, stapling a sticker in the top left corner for assignments deserving praise. We put them in our sticker boxes inside our desks. Scratch-n-sniff. Puffy. Fuzzy. Smooth. Shiny-metallic with glitter. I like them all. With both hands hidden, I punch a hole in the box with a pencil—it isn’t easy—and I wrap one finger and one thumb around one of the candies, caressing a single red pill before I bend my head and open my mouth and quickly pop it inside. It is chewy, stickier than I was prepared for. I can’t swallow it quickly. I must chew it, the stickiness gluing to my molars and the cinnamon burning my tongue. I imagine I am a dragon breathing fire from my nose. I am not relaxed. And then Mrs. Lasley, from her desk, speaks my name. She calls it out in the middle of the quiet and everyone looks up, curious and searching. Are you eating? Her eyes are on me. She is kind, the teacher I love. I tell her no. My face burning now. And she doesn’t press me. But her eyes penetrate me, seeing through me, seeing who I am. She believes I tell the truth or wants me to think I think she does. And I die a bit right then. Even now the effort to not lie to you is exhausting.
There Is No Risk
There is no risk. I follow you
through thickets that scratch my face
and tear my clothes. Not sure
where I am or what road
leads up or down
and I am not afraid.
Nothing harms me
though I am powerless
on my own. You hedge
fingers, heart, mind, toes so
courageous does not
describe who I am.
Just finally
weak, small,
indefatigable.
Touch me and
I am no longer here.
Tethered
Who can say a dream is weightless,
without cost and measure,
a disturbance of time—
not actualized in action,
a belief that you are held by
a single thread
of fragmentary imagination,
and pulling will amount to
breaking what could never stretch.
But this is no fragile dream,
an occasion to tiptoe and
tread with bare feet.
No, it is a time to push
out of the shadows
of daydream and seize
the dragon’s throat:
I will slay him now.
Watch this.
You ready?
Ache
(a response to Mary Oliver in her poem, “Messenger”)
You tell me my work in the world is gratitude
a bowing, a pointing to the sky
and noticing its blue
or the soft coat of a dog
or the timeless song of my children’s laughter
even as it fades
from memory, and you tell me to touch this heart’s ache
as it struggles to feel
enough joy, enough pain, and wonder
as this world remembers when it was new and good
and beautiful.
And I disagree.
For my work is more than gratitude. It is remembering
his arms around me
and the celebration of birth and love and all things
good and pure.
And where home is—my work is remembering home and aching
for it to come again, back to me.
The Rebuilding
Who is to say how tall
the walls will be
when they crumble
around you, a steep
crashing until the sky shouts
them down. A desolate
promise to rebuild
the ruins of you until
light blankets every crumb,
every torn place pulled
from the wreckage.
You have the tools.
Pull yourself up now.
To Love Oneself
I go to find you in the depths of me
as if that is a place to go
while I examine all the moments
of my life as if they are puzzle pieces
cut jaggedly from the whole, belonging unsure.
I want to cup the pieces in one hand,
run a finger over the rough edges,
sing lullabies to smooth their irregular shapes.
Maybe here we find home.
Maybe here we learn to be kind.
How Beautiful It Is
When the girls and boys in drama class gather
around each other in groups of five and three
they are not pretending to be kind
like they know how to make love look
authentic better than we do
and I am mesmerized by their care
for one another, as well as their
jocularity and their
comfortableness with quiet,
the choice to not speak a word
or paint their hair red or yellow or purple
or sing loud broadway tunes
or reach their arms around one another
when they are sad and cry
and I wonder
if I grasped this freedom when
I was younger if I would not
observe love from afar but dance around it
and let it swallow me whole
even while I melt with angst
and beg you to accept me just as I am
right now,
how beautiful it is to be loved.
The Reconsidering
for J. O.
Describe it, the sound of a voice
cracking, a soul trembling
over the phone when it is just us two,
your voice and mine connecting
and we rely upon words to
heal, bring solace, offer a story to
make sense of what?
the reason why we choose
to protect ourselves from each other
at all cost and then feel the tearing open—
our tearing open,
self-preservation a thing of the past because
we don’t know how to do it now,
preserve what once was,
for there is sometimes (never)
a going back to what once was
only letting shame kill
its children and regret
bury its dead
and letting pain billow
in undulations
(keep feeling don’t stop feeling)
until it strengthens us
and we are not what we once were,
look, look, at the fire burning now.