Gold Bands on Arthritic Fingers

It was a birthday-candle strength that brought him here, bone-marrow reality and gold bands on arthritic fingers. It was stardust love, ushered by asteroids, tide pools and baby’s breath, miracles and malt mistakes, and here he is on the other side of echoes, fifty year old vows that he still intends to keep. I watch him as he feeds his wife, creamed corn brokenness and mashed potato depletion, his hand bringing the spoon to those lips that he kissed; he remembers hurled insults, red lipstick, long Thursdays, her lilting laugh, her camera-shy smiles. He alone now vaults the memories, her wrinkled face in his wrinkled hands, dust to dust, dependent to dependent, but she is beauty to beauty, and she’s all he can see. She hasn’t spoken in days, doesn’t have much left to say, but she knows who he is and her baby-blue eyes show it. Lantern-light and Missouri dawn, he reminds her of all she’s ever been and done, and he kisses her forehead like they’re alone in their bed, and she smiles to herself without a single word said. Loyalty that pleas the fifth, a meal a day he spends with her still in his arms, and I realize more how in love I am with you when I think to myself, “I know for mine, I’d do the same.”

Six

Specks of sawdust floating through

Caught between our roaming eyes

Digging through these professed truths

Bombarded by half-truths and lies

(We’re half a year past the night we promised to try)

The weightless dustland waste we see

Wearing on our clearer sight

Obscured by fire caught on your clothes

You drop and roll too late to fight

(I’m still fighting for you when I cry every night)

Ash to ash and hate’s debris

Settled down, you look unwell

Resuscitate with dust of space

Wandering students of love in hell

(But we picked the other up every time they fell)

The world is small compared to love

When we compare them in the light

We laugh if we wake up unsinged

But hold hands, shaking through those nights

We both promised to stay, even when it’s a fight

Lucid Dream

I’m all tremors and windstorms, God knows that I mean well,

but the only thing I can manage to do right

is to need you, and want you, and break down and miss you,

when I’m shaking alone (but still warm) late at night.

I try to stay busy, kaleidoscope daydreams,

you’d be desperate as me, if I had any choice,

but my life’s like a lucid dream that I lost hold of,

I find your hand with my hand

but then, lose my voice.

She Was Made of Pyrex

As it turned out, she wasn’t any readier than she used to be, when the end came. She was especially ungraceful when it came to endings. For all the tenderness she had tried to replace with stubbornness, she was still breakable, more Pyrex than porcelain maybe, but still not made of stone. Her hands shook like they were holding triggers when she put the ring on a chain and then into a box, putting her costume on as she went back into the world, losing whatever was left of herself as the stale basement door closed behind her.

Breadcrumb Promises

I followed you there, to that place beyond wakefulness, and you said there were no secrets; my heart unbuttoned like a shirt. You scattered breadcrumb promises, and the birds came after us, growing strong, taking what wasn’t theirs. Now their forms silhouette the smoke-filled sky, while I sit without a trail to follow, the forest ablaze by your flicked match, but you never come to save me. The breadcrumbs will end up in bird shit on an old couple’s car. You will come to the funeral and you’ll say, I loved her, and you’ll say, I’m sorry, and everyone will nod, but no one will look you in the eye.

Symbiosis

The music speaks of symbiosis, my heart the size of an ocean, empty without you now. It’s not just a want, no simple catastrophe, but a need, an explosion, the draughted forest is on fire. You are the water and the arsonist, cause and effect, beginning, ending, opening, closing, doors slamming, nights spent clinging like a child to your chest, a crescendo crashing down on us, our own destructive insanity fresh on a blank page, our misunderstandings dancing through long division, the rise and fall of breath and whispers saying “Don’t ever let me go.” Codependency that we signed the dotted line for, you buy the detergent and I do the laundry, you give the love and I give it back, and now that electrical surge of a circuit, of the cosmos, the code in our DNA. It’s the beauty in the things we cannot understand. Ushered by a hand beyond us, the galaxy twists, our atoms shiver, and we find that our love keeps on going. It is infinite, and we are infinite. We become the mysterious forever when we remain a “we.” 

Seesaws and Wheels

The little red seesaw teeter-totters on,

through power trip clouds and pretty eyed mornings,

the bloodshot of tears and not hangovers.

The cartoon temptations work their way through your bones,

and then around your head in a dizzying halo

of white powders in baggies, blotters and brandy,

pens in hands, worry and wonder.

The devil’s in the details

and the details are in the wheel,

the wheel of memory you give a rough spin

every now and then to switch up the days.

Is your face happier in the rearview

or in these coalescing presents?

You wonder silently,

sometimes out loud,

but I can always find that question in

the spinning in your eyes.

The stars are clear tonight.

When will you decide?

All That You Are

You are a peacock feather dream catcher hanging from my rearview mirror. You are a thick book of thoughtfully selected mix CDs in the center console. You are the first tip I ever get as a waitress. You are the first million I ever make as a writer. You are the Swiss Alps and the subway into Brooklyn. You are the sun in Peru and the moon in Alaska. You’re an herb garden on the porch. You are the laughter of our daughter getting covered in henna tattoos at a fair. You are love letters scattered all over the hardwood floors. You are a January snow angel, a July burn from the too-hot sand. You are the shadows in your own face and the wrinkles in the corners of mine. You drip with the art of decades spent lost in hazel irises and growing pupils. You are the smell of earth and cucumbers and soap. Your hands are the calloused warmth of lazy Sundays tracing down and up the frame of me, ever-changing. You are affection that doesn’t change. You are the houses we will inhabit, the cities we will conquer, the languages we will speak, the food we will grow, the love we will always feel burning just under our skins.

You’re not just in my future. You are my future.

The tree and the sun. What is one without the other? What would all that I am be without all that you are?