He Could Have Been Sleeping
There is a hum beneath our layer of the world,
sly as a vent turning on in the night,
unbroken and low.
-
Mother sometimes pushes my head down
so my ear can almost meet that sound at the thin
divide. But she does not know
-
there is so much earth between this place
and the other. There is so much silence
and movement. So much fire
-
underneath even the hum, and under the fire,
a red blanket with a child wrapped
neatly inside.
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Underneath that I don’t know. I had to stop there
and scratch the child’s back and sing him
a lullaby. He did not move.
Please do tell me if this poem makes any sense
Last Night at Home
-
and my mother goes with the dogs
for a walk. I toil with laundry bins
and bleach, drying the last of my clothes
in the dark. When they’re tumbling, I sliver
outside to my father’s backyard.
-
I pick a snail up from the dirt
then put him down again, miles off
on the lip of an ivory hydrangea.
He curls inside himself when I whisper
You live somewhere else now, too.
-
Behind the beech tree through
the gaps in our moldy back fence, in a window
of light I can watch the neighbor girl’s landmine face
waning and waxing, chest falling, rebuilding.
-
The great cathedral of her mouth is echoing
with practiced song, her brother’s sitting,
listening with ears that burn his skull—
So this is love, she keens, So this
is love? When my mother comes back
-
she looks up at the ether and points
with her stubby fingers so like mine
at the small light of mars which only
she, I think, would notice. She tells me
-
one of the old stories, about
the little sister of the world, who inherited
a box of ingredients
that never made anything edible.
Sunday at 10 p.m.
and you are painting
cobwebs over a body,
intricately crossing silver lines
-
in mid air above my stomach,
turning each to a tangible, sticky string
with your luminous voice
-
which in this place is tinny, whistles
like a steam train in the darkness
that my dreaming always brings.
-
When I wake I cannot rise
for fear of being caught, so I
turn over, press my ear to the mattress
-
and listen to the hard coursing
of my heart as it rumbles
through every spring.
-
These summers I go
restlessly from room to room
on Sunday nights,
-
hoping I’ll find evidence
of your breath, just
a crack in the wall
-
where your caught
voice slumbers,
where I’ll hear the deep
-
throbbing of your want
from before it turned
into a vicious wildfire
-
enclosed by the keening
lines of my body—
that roaring and laughable plain.
I don’t know what to do.
Colonial
Outside there are people waiting.
They have lights on their heads and they
are standing very still and tall amongst the trees.
-
Inside there is nobody. Nobody living
next door, nobody sleeping beside me,
nobody checking the windows or touching the taps.
-
Outside there are streetlamps waiting
to take me. They are so loud! Everybody
has to go deaf or die unless they listen.
-
Inside there is nobody. Nobody living
for me. Nobody coming. I am the glow
in the glass and I’m scared of the fish.
-
Outside I could be settled, I could go
where everybody else has gone, where water
burns green under the bridges.
-
Outside there are thousands of lights on the ceiling
there are chain-link fences, glass
pyramids over the train stops.
-
Outside is a boat by the Charles
I could steal and paddle with my hands. There’s an island
you can’t reach in summer.
-
Outside is a world where lips turn to me
when I ask them to say something happy, which kiss
instead of answering.
-
Outside is a world, is a boat, is a light. I could go
where there are streetlamps waiting,
people standing tall and still. But inside
-
is a stain I am trying to clean, sharp and bright
on the floor, a dark stain I cannot understand, so I guess
-
inside there is somebody, too. Somebody living.
Los Angeles, 2011
There is something going on outside, the dog
is lifting her ears, see? The muscles in her jaw
are tightened, too.
-
The backyard is an ocean
nobody is swimming to find me—the doors are all
locked anyways—but that wont stop something
from going on outside.
-
Once I looked out there and saw
a light around a body, and that body
bent over itself and there was no one else.
-
That is how I know.
-
This place was dark before we knew it.
We came like lightening—burning blonde
streaks in the ether. We were happy.
Nobody said we shouldn’t be, you know?
-
Out the back window, when I still looked, the Pacific
was a moat nobody was swimming to find me,
I might have asked why aren’t you swimming to find me?
if there had been somebody there to tell me
I could want anything else.
Adult Swim, and Kristen
has her hand around mine behind the changing rooms,
an inch deep in the mud, our toes squirming
under the gaze of Older Boys who can swim the deep end,
but cannot swim now.
-
I feel like I am swimming sometimes
when I’m not. I want to plug my nose and
close my eyes. Kristen’s mouth is wide
and she is talking for me.
-
Everything is simmering down this summer.
Even the trees are quieter this year. I am
a sponge getting heavier and heavier and
being wrung out each day.
-
But here behind the changing rooms I am Kristen,
I am wearing a two-piece and talking to the
Older Boys. I am gentle curves and smiles.
I am never wrung out.
-
I look around the corner of the changing rooms
at the bodies in the pool, I look at them
and turn back from being Kristen. Half an hour more
before they’re getting out—
-
The morning glories are blue behind the changing rooms.
They come softly out of the earth and there
are so many. We make crowns out of them every day
and never run out.
