for Angela Cooke-Jackson, on her birthday

A knock at the door. A full measure
of jazz. Tilt of the Earth that makes the sun
shine on the motherland. Purity of heart.
Wisdom of doing. Shaking the rattle
to rouse the goddess & cause
good things to grow. Amber eyes
that see depths because they’ve looked
deeply. Sound the heart
makes when called to action. Sound the heart
makes at rest. Sound of the space
between the two. Wisdom that divides
between spirit & flesh & the necessary
hand that won’t always but always
can smack some sense into you,
the steady reminder of what home
is, & how hard & good
the road is getting there.

for CM, on her birthday

The day you were born
your father stole the stars
& now they gather no moss.
21 years later you must be tired,
running like time,
waiting for no man.

It’s not you, it’s me
writing this poem, on hold
with heaven, who say
they’re missing an angle.
A seraph in the hand
is worth two in the bush,
I’ll tell them while I pass
you the saline solution
to rinse heaven
out of your eyes.

All that righteousness
stings, & the beer’s better
down here & look at you,
no angel, just a human
woman clutching that guitar,
on the thousand-mile
journey that begins
with a single sip.

A rabbi, a priest and an imam
walk into a bar
& see you perched
on a stool & who knows
what happened to them
because this poem
celebrates you, on earth
these 21 years & most
of us have only known
you for a fraction
of that but aren’t we
all the better for it?

So don’t put all your aches
in one basket. Sing some,
hold some, let some go.
Don’t cry over spilt
miracles, just open your heart,
lovely songbird, brave, strong
& if you love something
set yourself free.

The longspurs were leaving.
I’m blurry, bleary-eyed
in the kitchen, watching
them one by one.
together clouding the sky,
so gone, so long.

In this empty house,
I’m standing on the counter
flapping my arms,
hoping to catch
them when I finally
start to fly,
so gone, so long.

4AM, you’re still gone.
I’m walking the room in circles,
we’re so gone, so long,
so wrong. 5AM & I’ll never fly
high or fast enough. Mine
was once the voice you clung
to when you felt lost
at sea. I held you all the nights
you thought you’d float away,
so lost, so gone.

Again again the same damned story,
you’re raging in the hallway,
all you swore you’d never be,
nothing but darkness on your tongue,
so lost, so long.

You’re so gone & this room
is crowded with all your secrets.
I’m the dream you pinch
yourself awake to escape.
I remember that first night
you whispered “perfect” to me,
called me destiny.

So what? I’m just another one
clouding your sky,
another nickname,
another reason you’ve done
nothing wrong. You’re done,
darling, so gone. So long.
So numb.

       if i seemed to swing
                           back and forth
at the end of my rope
                           it was because when i tried
              to come close
                              you anger, you hurt,
                      you pushed
                               me away

don’t need to hear warhorses
tear the earth to know
what it is to be
invaded. the heart can be taken down
by an unknown, lone trojan
bearing no gifts or weapons.

don’t need to stumble in dark
forests running from wolves
to be lost. the mind
can unwrite itself, can
be its own serpent
offering freedom
to itself from nonexistent cages.

how quickly the heart
becomes a quiver of arrows,
how easily the mind
becomes serrated.
how swiftly navies
bite into ocean,
cut pathways to discord.

like petulant goddesses
we scramble for empty
affirmation. worlds
die as we unmake love
in love’s name &
standing on the city walls,
watching men gather
like storm clouds,
helen eats an apple.

———

written with Elizabeth Miller

Beloved, I’m writing a book
of lines you don’t want to hear.
My heart writes them in my sleep
when I can’t stop it,
when, people tell me, I should
be falling out of love,
getting over you. But it’s not
working. Time passes
& my rebellious heart adds
more lines to this book.

Yesterday I woke & read the lines
where I’m a sun, burning alone
in eternity, burning for you,
hoping my light finds you
as you walk the night of some
distant planet.

This morning my insurgent
emotions had composed a lyric
on how you are the treasure
for which I’d sell everything,
for which I’d give my life.

Tomorrow? Who knows?
I’ll wake to an ode to your brown
eyes or your slender wrists
or your diamond-perfect sentences
or how gorgeous you are
when angry.

Time heals, except when it doesn’t.
A man fills his day with distractions
but nothing protects him when he sleeps.
At night I go deep into love
& my soul’s searching for my Eurydice,
singing to everyone who will listen.
The rabbits follow behind me and scratch
my songs into the earth.

Each time I go deeper
in. Each time it takes longer
to resurface. One morning
I will not make it back
& I’ll wake without a soul,
& commute to work in an office
& when I feel the wind
I’ll remember, momentarily,
part of me is out there, still
writing in the secret book
that now no one will read.

sunlight, ten thousand new days,
a hand that holds yours,
arms around you, slight breeze &
green grass, smell of steeping
tea, song you’ll sing
& sing & keep singing.
Someone to hold you,
strength for you to carry
it all & just like the song,
a river of peace, a river
of peace for you, for you.

Untongued, I find all language become argument.
What this leaden lump of muscle in my mouth is,
I forgot. I may as well speak through water,
slackjawed, dumbfounded, incoherent. I’m my own
wrong-eyed Judas, selling myself for thirty pieces
of nothing, the devil plucking my vocal chords,
black-and-blues of misstatement. Ideas crash
to the floor, wineglass crows that twitch until you take them
up for darts. They should have been doves,
rising to sky but their beaks puncture me.

Blessing become weapons, & you, you, you
never miss.

“I will rise now & go about the city. In the streets & in the broadways I will seek her whom my soul loveth.” — Song of Songs

Beloved, this home we only just began
making is a city. Hear my feet
on its wooden streets
as I wander, room to room,
in search of you. Feel the cooling
air as my shadow flickers over these walls.

The books are all witnesses: that I love you,
that you love me. That I hurt you, & you me.
One remembers nights of crying.
Another testifies to how we have held
each other & saved each other.
But none of these watchmen
has seen you.

I sink into the furrow of night,
lost in the places I love you.
Holding my ear to the wall,
I can hear the whisper of love’s singing.

I ride the couch like a subway train,
scanning this crowd of ghosts
of all who have lived here
for a face that looks like you.

Seasick in my bedroom, I teeter
under the weight of all the spaces
you are not in. They make a mountain,
or a crushing sky of no stars.

Like a shadow, your absence
is an echo of you. Submerging
into it, I become the minutes,
the hours, the days
since you left. I age years
without growing.

I walk these streets, shoeless.
I stop & wait for traffic that doesn’t come.

In our home I am looking for you,
my beloved, in this city
where you used to sleep.

I can’t suck
the words back.
Bell stays rung.

No regret or apology
will unmake your pain.

There is only repentance
& repair. There is only
the future & its limitless
choices. There is only

me at each crossroad,
choosing love, kindness,
listening, patience.
It is work, the blessed
adventure, the choosing
& choosing & choosing
again, choosing love
in every step

its rhythm the tide
of my soul.

When I say I love you, wall.
Wall wall wall.
Heart on my tongue, repentance,
commitment, passion. You bring wall.
Wall wall wall wall.

Wall. Wall. Wall.
Wall wall wall wall.
Wall Wall.

Wall.

All the time between us. Soft
moments, honeyed words
& you build wall. Wall.
Wall wall wall wall wall wall wall.

Wall wall wall.
Wall wall wall wall wall wall.
Wall.

Wall.

I love you.
You build wall.

Your testimony’s got pantyhose
pulled over its face. You love truth
the ways gangsters love law:
it keeps everyone else doing
the right thing while you’re breaking
kneecaps. You move the goalposts
so often we know standing
still with the ball increases our chances
of winning. Dim the lights, dear,
& diagnose us blind. Cross
examine with darts & tell the jury
we must be guilty because we’re ducking.
Set your dogs loose & pretend
we’re leaving you when we run.
One day we’ll be all used up;
one day there’ll be none left
with scales under your thumb.
Then the world won’t bend
around you anymore, then facts
will snap back into place
& you’ll have to acknowledge gravity
or waste yourself pressing
against its certain force
like the old king
who pushes & pushes
that rock but never
gets it up that damnable hill.

secrets begin small
as spores but soon fill the mind,
become its master

I’m standing firm
in the town square.
I’m painting giant letters
with water on the hardware
store wall that I love you
but everyone’s busy singing
the same song in a hundred
different keys. The cacophony
sounds like hell’s lullaby.

I’m standing firm,
hoping for consonance.
One day they’ll sing
in harmony. I’m writing
I love you one thousand times,
locking each note in a post
office box & throwing
away a millennium of keys
so they’ll remain unread
until unearthed by archeologists
from another civilization.
Our love will become the great
romance of that age.
Their poets will allude
to us in verse. Filmmakers
will name lovers after us.
My bones will hum a melody
every time your name is mentioned.

I’m standing firm, but resolutions
are like champagne glasses:
I know I’ll eventually break all of them.
So, bottoms up. Here’s to us.
When you were a child
did you know yours would be
the romance of centuries?
The trees point upward in tribute.
They know to what we aspire.

So I’m standing firm. I’m a letter
waiting for you to run your delicious
finger along my seam, tear
me open. I’m a rabbit standing
perfectly still. I’m writing your name
on the inside of my eyelids. I’m
a radio sending out music
instead of receiving. I’m a light
that never goes out. I’m standing firm.
I’m the burning light. I burn
for you. I burn for you.

Remember me, dearest,
remember. This is my skin.
Remember? The way it tightens
under your hand, the music
I make. Remember? This is my hand.
Remember? Tracing your exquisite
curves, trembling like a teenager.
Remember? This is my eye.
Remember? Wet with the total
ocean of all that can’t be said
when you kiss me. Remember?
These are my lips. Remember? Soft
as blood oranges when you bite me.
Remember? These are my legs.
Remember? Tangled like a fifth-grader’s
cursive with yours. Remember?
This is my heart. Remember? Sinking
down to you, thundering, galloping.
Remember? And my head.
Remember. My heavy thoughts in there
but forgotten for every delirious
moment as I bury it in your neck.
Remember? Remember?

I’m the land you conquered. I’m the waiting
wind. I’m the freeway, the darting
rabbit. I’m what’s singing
when your plane lands. I’m asleep
on the couch waiting for you
to come home. Won’t you kiss me?
Won’t you slide up against me?

I’m the one who listens
when you fall asleep 800
miles away on the phone.
It’s like a message from space.
I’m the one who whispers
I adore you in your open
ear, the one who quietly
sighs while watching you sleep.
I know your pulse & the tide
of your breathing.
I’m your love & lover. Welcome
home. Kiss me. Remember.

knows where I live
now & keeps driving
back & forth slowly
on my street. I know
it goes through my garbage
because I’ve seen the snow
flakes on the trash bin.
It’s the jealousy
that did us in. I keep
telling it the thing with Christmas
was a one-night stand.

Here’s winter in the dead
of night pressing a wall
of cold against my front door.

I can’t even look at photos
of us castrating snowmen
so we’d have ammunition
for the snowball wars
or spraypainting the black
ice white any more.

We had a few great months,
I write in my break-up letter.
We used to be lovers,
but by Valentine’s Day
you were all bows & arrows
& no kisses. Our love’s a wound
you sliced open so now
when I long for your ice fingers
to touch me I bleed.

I wanted winter gone
by March but when our love
burrowed underground,
scared of its own shadow,
I knew it’s be weeks & weeks
of wind & tantrums before the snow
melted to show the obvious,
brown & matted against the ground,
& winter made its exit
sometime this side of Easter.

Give it six months though,
and there’ll be a knocking
again on my door.

to walk with you
i must forsake every
other path
but this one,
where we walk.

tonight the sunset
may be more beautiful
on some other path.
birds may sing
a song i’ll never hear.
a wind may caress
the skin just right.

i’ll never know.
some other night,
with you, this path
will open its own
unique miracle
made more unique

because i won’t see
it with just my eyes.
if i am quiet & listen,
i’ll see it with yours too.

Yes, I know you
keep saying they fooled
us all but you’re
either wrong or blind:
they never fooled me.
So does that mean
they made fools of
you? Or, as is
more likely, in your
haste to appear “fair”
& in your avarice,
you made fools of
yourselves?

The dogs seek to fill the space
with mournful verse. It rains.
Cars break down. Rust works
harder, faster. Oxygen writhes
away, snakelike. Wars
& rumors of war.

And me. I forget to shave.
I know I left my toothbrush
somewhere. Really, should one
person drink that much wine?

The walls seem cobwebbed.
& the ashes. Clocks are slower.
Water’s somehow less wet.
I know there’s music. The sky’s
just clouds piled on clouds
& someone moves, remains
in my peripheral vision.

I’m a lost dog with no telephone
pole xerox. It’s less about can I tie
my shoes & more about can I find
them. I know I put my keys
somewhere. I remember learning
to talk. I’m sure the world
adds up to something.

I’ll walk into each room,
certain what I’m searching
for is there. See me standing.
See I’m looking without seeing?
Each room, & oh yes, the keys
are in my hand.

Now if only you’d come home.
If only there were a door
for these keys to open.

This room is filled with questions
clamoring like birds to get out
but it’s winter. Spring will come & I’ll open
the windows to watch them decorate
the sky but in night’s season
each room has the music of their flapping.

One asks: my love is 800 miles away
but I long to see her. Where can I go?

The room answers: Inward, to the heart
where you hold her, to the dreams where you
see her. Open all the doors you find
& walk to her.

Another asks: what if I am not enough?
What if she turns me away?

The room answers: That is not why you love her.
Put your ear to your lungs & listen
to the poems they whisper. If you wait
to remember love, you will always forget.

A third asks: When can I again breathe
words & promises of love into her ear?

The room answers: Why did you ever stop?
Sing without ceasing. Love’s the garden
you are watering.

The quiet one says nothing.

The room answers: Learn her and keep learning.
She is the home you’ve chosen. She is the world
waiting for you. Love is alive & always new.
Don’t wait for spring. Weave the light & warm
into every moment. Walk these floors,
rejoice & bless the day:
you are in it, singer, & so is she.

So sing.

The stars burn & burn in space
yet on the night’s longest year
we imagine them made of ice,
not fire. with centuries of travel
between their burning and us.
The light itself might be the shadow
of a dead or dying sun
but it decorates our sky still.
Light-years from star to star
& from where we stand
the distance is inches. We like
to arrange them into pictures
of long-dead gods. We like
to imagine those pictures
dancing with planets. We like
to think that dance means
something about us. We like
to sing of three sages looking
skyward for wisdom
& finding a promise of hope
from the light of a star no longer
in our sky whose light was all
that was left of it when they first saw it.

The light was its last flash
before death,
& in it they saw
a birth that might, this time, change
everything. We like to believe
everything will change
& we keep keep making their journey
in our hearts when the night
is longest & the world’s turned
cold.

Some of us know the story’s
all there is & all there’s been
& that’s as it should be. The world
keeps getting cold; the stars are just
burning trillions of miles away
& no gods dance in the sky
but we keep hoping & hoping
& the light of that hope
will still be traveling long
after we have stopped.

We don’t name our gods anymore
but they still hover in the corners
of our rooms, they still jangle
their keys & taunt us with their paranoia
& promises. The rabbit bullets
through the bracken, carrying
the secret with him: we make
the world with the stories
we believe. Oh tumbling rabbit-heart,
do you know why we let the gods
of fear & abandonment pour
their poisoned stories into our ears?
Why let them make the world
for us? Why not write our
own scriptures? Name the gods
& they’ll learn their place.

Abandonment, Fear, Deception
& Mistrust, take your crutches
& knives and leave this place.
We have our own stories to tell
& they are not old or worn
like yours. They are new.
They are alive.

We will rewrite the world. The rabbit
flickers away, but we know he is true,
he is truth. Let the sky
fall. Let the gods rage. Let them.
Nothing will keep us from loving.

september ended with sun-warm skin,
last harvest of tomatoes, honey green leaves.
december comes bringing leafless trees
pointing their dozens of crooked
fingers to pearl-wet clouds heavy with snow.

there are all the books. coffee mugs. paintings
& engravings. musical instruments. scarves. legos
that once were mine & now belong to my sons.
more shoes than i care to admit. cassette
tapes & compact discs & the relics of deprecated
technology that possibly still play them. sweaters.
wine glasses. a photo of my father
when he was sixteen. photos of my sons. dozens
of notebooks, sketchbooks, journal books
filled with words. think

of that: i filled
pages that filled
notebooks that filled
boxes that fill
the living room

at least for a few more days.

Pressed between two masses of cold
air like water between two smooth stones,
it whips, writhes serpentine, sings
in a shock of sound we never hear.
It’s a god’s breath, angel’s wake,
incarnation of rushing.

& they named your little
car after that wind.
So black it could melt
into the ink of night,
it’s still while the streets
& the whole world
roll under it. Discarded chariot
of some goddess, leaning
toward sky as you drive,
it aspires upward, wanting
to go home, wanting to carom
again on the quickfrost wind
of the god’s breath.

The days are getting shorter
you say, & want to know
why. With lightbulb & ball
I try the science of orbits,
rotation, light & gravity.

Is it terrifying or thrilling,
imagining us all stuck
to this wobbling rock
blistering at mythic
speed through eternity?

In the long night,
you’re cold & come from bed
to find me & you make
yourself a little ball
in my arms.

The world’s careening, hurtling,
but on the couch
in my arms
you’re warm & we make
our own world of peace.

I have come to you and come to you
out of my brokenness like a lost
traveller into a clearing out of a dark woods.
It is too often I come thus, having nothing
to recommend me, nothing brought with me
save my brokenness. My face hard as flint,
I speak in anger. Misunderstanding freedom,
I pull us apart. It’s not that I’m blinded by my pain,
it’s that I keep closing my eyes, I keep eating
that darkness. It stains my lips,
and I stumble to you out of my folly.
I cannot ask forgiveness, yet you keep
feeding it to me, embers from the flames
purifying my lips.

Sometimes it’s you in the forest and me with fire.
There is no magic cure. There is only choosing,
and choosing, and choosing again. I turn away
from you and turn back and you choose me.
You run from me and run back and I choose you.
We rip us apart and come together and choose us.

In the clearing
there’s a home
we are building
and it is never completed,
we are always healing,
always building.

no it does not fix
everything, doesn’t even
come close. there is no repair,
not for the dead,
not for the enslaved, the heartbroken
& crushed souls.

it feels so much like the last
shall be first that i almost believe
it. & i have looked
at the tv weeping;
i’ve hoped & rejoiced.
we have a black president!

but this does not fix
everything, doesn’t even
come close.

i reach out to touch
you in darkness, all that i
can know for certain

you hold on to me
every morning, your day
anchored by our love

i’m unhousebroken,
suck my thumb,
stinkbomb in the living room,
shoebox letters in the basement.

don’t get me started.
spark in the grain silo,
white elephant or albatross,
what customs’ll catch you carrying.

that thing you said
you’d rather not remember,
night you’ll tell no one about.
i’m what you said you lost,

what you said you forgot,
meeting you weren’t in,
stolen glance, crossed fingers.
when there’s no one else

here i am, default position,
breath frosting the window
as i look in from the cold

everything shadow sings
inky-voiced to the place
the moon would be on a moonless night.

my fingers settle,
birds roosting on your arm, their
autumn cathedral

I dream I’m embarking
through the late hours
to her. I dream I’m snow
frantically swimming cloud
to ground.

The satellite & pinhole
camera argue, each certain
it sees the true nature of things.

Does the sky remember birds
flying like I sigh at the memory
of her hand on mine?

I dream I’m a chapel
waiting through winter solstice
for someone to come pray.
I dream I’m the piano string
the delirious moment before the hammer.

The saints debate, seated
on the floor in the throne room
of heaven, but in hell
everyone agrees.

These questions sleep
in the heart, like bulbs
through winter waiting
to show their faces to spring.

She smiles from the crack
in the doorway, lets me in
& we embrace. Who is the prodigal?
Who forgives & is forgiven?

I dream I slide dawn
into one pocket, sunset
into another. When I empty
my pockets I forget which is which.
I dream our hands find
each other in darkness
& hold tight. I’m one hand
but I don’t know whose.

One more question goes
to bed to wait for spring.
Have I always loved you,
or does my love begin
each morning when I wake?
The moon, with her many faces,
whispers the answer. Both,
dear one, it is both.

i don’t want any river to carry me
anywhere. i don’t want the night to sing
the bitter goodbye. i don’t want the history
of us to turn sharp like a cloud of swifts
& bank away forever. i don’t want to blame
anyone, cry or beat air with my fists. i don’t want to blink
& wake to never seeing your face.

i don’t want to forever turn my head, wondering
if it’s you. I don’t want to close the book.

Here’s a question the world keeps asking
like a child who hears the answer but doesn’t
yet understand. Where is love?
it asks, where is love?

Take this heartbeat, I say. Follow it like Noah’s
dove, to the garden where she waits, my heart’s best friend.
Love is not the waiting, or the garden,
it is the heartbeat going to who cherishes
it, who listens to its drumming, who smiles see it fly.

& the shadow that monthly swallows
it & the way it pulls at the blood,
you surprise me.

just when i think i know the gallop
of my heart, the spiral of its song
through my body & how it ties me to earth
you surprise me.

just when i think i know the air
that teases & writes its poems
across my skin & its sadness,
you surprise me.

i have gone into night & sagged
under its sleepy rhythm & thought myself
into its unforgiving corners & listened
as its agents laced my ear
with oily blood of its whispered lies.

i have tried to warm myself against stones
& shaken with the earth’s seismic
catastrophes & fallen under the spell
of carrion bird songs & wasted my tears
on dehydrated soil where nothing grows.

just when i think i know there are no stars
& will be at the ocean’s mercy & am waiting
for the cruelty of sunlight to pare me down
to bones, your song comes thin but true
across miles of waves & I can take hold.
I come over distances in morning’s darkest
hour along the channels of your beacon
to love I did not expect & the sea is chattering

your love is wind that knocks me over
& is the unexpected birdsong jumpstarting
spring & the push of flowers up to light
through soil, a miracle every time,
what i cannot ask for. just when i think i know,
you surprise me.

there’d be a splash of dark feather, motion,
the animal reminder we are not civilized.
were i william carlos williams it’d be the wine
glass, the notebook, the leaf the wind won’t stir
that tells the whole world my disappointment.

were i billy collins, this poem would be about itself
and mary oliver, i could listen to the birds, watch the grasses
bend and know the truth of things.
wendell berry’s plainsong would teach me: those who judge,
by their judgments, disqualify themselves from speaking.

adrienne rich would tease out the power dynamics,
peel back the bourgeois facade
that makes you pretend nothing’s wrong.

the sky would darken over william stafford, a meteor
would fall, and he would listen to it ticking,
counting down to world’s end. eliot would be there,
waiting to hear its pathetic sigh.

bukowski would clank his glass on the bar,
now that he’s finally seen you for what you are,
vultures, he’s muttering. coat over his arm,
he shambles for the exit, licking chapped lips,
shaking his head. the poem he’ll write will end
with the plain truth:

you’re just
like all
the rest.

you’re not thinking of its uneven
mass, that it chaps your skin or pushes back
against your palm, bites into it as you cock your arm
back like a catapult.

You’ve forgotten picking it up & the ritual of selecting
for balance & weight. The sound it makes on my shoulder:
satisfying, dull, yet it echoes off walls you can’t see.

Look at him, you think as you blindly fish for another.
He can’t even walk straight. It’s sad how erratic he is these days
& you throw again, watch me wobble.

Used to have his act together, you’re thinking and you lob
another. I crumple. It’s just so sad, you think, striding toward me,
how you think you know a person, and I’m scrabbling
the ground, trying escape.

Blood in my eyes and I can’t see. I try to walk, tripping
over your ammunition. See? You tell yourself.
He’s just not making good choices. So sad. Look
at those bruises. Never used to see him in this kind of shape.

Too many rocks have parched your palms
and you leave me, looking for water,
each muffled thud of rock on flesh
still echoing from walls you will not see.

- to my detractors