Some Poems for Fall '22
The light is heavy too
I’ve been waiting on approval to get this final booster [due to being on immunosuppressive therapy for so long] and I keep returning to Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where he wrote:
“Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from our [lost] loved one[s], and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself.”
I was telling my therapist recently that I keep returning to the neverending story’s “nothing is lost, everything is transformed” & I don’t know if that’s true or feasible, but it is still the target.
It is still the target.
Know that like life, I have not forgotten you, and hold you [ and our friendships ] in the palm of my hand:
here are some poems for our even-month essay gap:
[ Look, that’s where we are ]
This drives my body to lie in the middle of the wet road. It is what quiets my world. Sometimes, I am not interested in what Mary, or Rilke, says about grief. I don’t want a framework or solution. I want wrists and arms. I don’t want a theory; I want the poem to live in me. I want it to unfurl like a ballad while eating its seven courses. You know - the song that goes to eleven. I want the light to stake me, to catapult me into the clouds. I want to sink into the rhythm of love. Feel its breath running down my neck. When yes opens to yes - when close isn’t close enough - the only time when time slows down. God, perhaps this is that winning pass / when the cornerbacks are too shocked to react. The world bites down on them, and they can't say a thing. The world has everyone in its mouth - and it’s chewing / while it digs another hole in your yard.
and it's up to you to fill it with rain / will you do something useful with your sorrow? you have to find a single flower in this grave / strange, the last luna moth that clamored against our shared window - dried between the pages of my copy of a thousand mornings, staining the page with its flattened body-its outline, a crusty halo around the time Percy came back. All stories are, in some form, prayers - the way I circled the deck in search of a place to park, now I circle the yard howling a name without a name. But who am I to believe I know enough to call this enough? The boat hammers against the dock it's tied to. Your mother touches my cheek and leaves my tears for me. Our memories are everything that remains besides the remains of you.
Two people I loved refused to die in the city they grew up in before they died in the city they grew up in. Next year - the passenger beside me on the plane will hold my trembling hand. They’ll want to know if I’m afraid to fly. Someone will ask where I am going once we land. I will tell them that I am going to say goodbye - I will tell them again / for the last time.
My grief is shrieking.
My orbit changing.
The center does not hold -
Sadness, too, can fall apart.
Something in me is blooming.
Even in winter.
Even in this dark.
[ triple texting but there's no pressure to respond ]
I think all I'm asking /
is for you /
to hold to /
the possibility of tomorrow.
Hold onto that breath.
Don't expel
the despair
unless
you're going to make room,
I won't leave until you come back from the dead. We already came back from the brink, I'm just asking, can you come back, a bit farther? This revival / could be a city. This grief / could fill a graveyard. This text could be the shovel that hits the missing link.
I left all of the lights on
when I stepped out at dusk.
Leave me a shoebox full of love
letters like the treasure maps we used to dream about.
We used to dream. We used to do a lot of
things. Put your hand on the door, your mouth to that hand, pick up the delivery I sent you. I know things are heavy. I'm going to be in the YVR terminal again. That terminal. Let's take the light in. Like a knee to the chest. Like a blessing. Listen, they're playing our song over and over. I'll leave the lights on. Keep talking. Put your hands out / in the dark if you must. I'll keep walking toward whatever hasn't turned to dust.
[exultations for the living/spring 2017 ]
When I think of how you move
when you enter a room, how the dusk
enters you;
when you step out into the night,
and the night sky falls into your hair
when I think of how you stand
as if with everything
and nothing in your hands
and how I have nothing to offer you now
save this wild and beautiful emptiness
When I think of how you leave
the air untouched
and how you came into the world
my grief had wrecked
and made it shine again
simply by walking slowly toward
and beside me in the dark
Best friends, my loves, I believe
this life is still a miracle.
[ Astigmatism ]
Sitting in my doctor's office, and I want to
Praise the miracle of science
that allowed me to touch you
before I ever touched you,
telegraphed our palm’s heat
& contrasted auras,
assured us of the heavens in our chests
that chases the precious pulse
solely holding back death & its chariot.
And still, I have to praise
Every spell
I have yet
to take / on faith
Praise the witchcraft
that chooses the lucky
and the willing
Praise the nurse
down the hall
who asked me to dress
into something bare
held the moonlight
when it caught
the slope of my neck
traced my shoulders as they loosened
their heaviness into tomorrow's dawn.
Praise the marvel of a love
I have yet to discover or bury.
Praise the miracle of your 7 shades of hair.
This bright longing.
Everyone's fingers tightening.
around the carbon fiber
as we tunnel through more distance & dark.
I can almost see you.
every ghost glaring through the glass
grief gleaming into glaze
Can I heed the warning,
or is it simply a reminder ?
that subjects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
[ instead of moaning, inform them that, unfortunately, Flash 9 is required to listen to audio ]
I wake up in this gift of a body I have always disdained
& throw a hail mary across my collarbone
since no one else
is here to do it
I think it’s because
I have never imagined
myself holy
or prayed
to be forgiven
for wanting
because I have never asked
heaven for anything
like deliverance
save every blessing,
save the hunger
I have / for life,
please, another day,
I want to be,
here & now
loved & loving
like I have always been
My want fills every forest
with the green
of longing
with a kiss, an offering
of barrelled hips and thighs,
and twenty sighs after another
& god takes their time
or [an] eternity
to answer