“throwing yourself headfirst into the imperfect footsteps of giants”
Kurt Vonnegut said
everything was beautiful and nothing hurt
like it would not be possible for these two things
to happen simultaneously
last week when everyone was feeling salty,
Emily said I am with you in your brininess;
it was like she was invoking Ginsberg
I am with you in Rockwell
and I am,
I know exactly what Yeats meant when he wrote
Come away O human child to the waters and the wild
and yes
the world is more full of weeping than we can understand
everything is beautiful and everything hurts
in Rockwell
where dips the rocky highland
and
it’s okay
to not be okay
Saturday 30 April 2011
April 29 (poem 29)
"things that have made me cry this week"
1. he sang Palisades for the last time;
Jon do you remember when I offered you
my dna and the field in which it grows?
that offer still stands,
but I cannot promise that your children
would be able to maintain perfect pitch
through whiskey the way you can.
2. drifting through the place I used to call home;
it smelled exactly the same as four years ago,
only the names on the doors had rearranged their letters
and the postsecret wall I made was absent.
Emily do you remember dead poets society nights
and how your room always smelled like thai tea
and warmth, how we rafted mattresses together
in the lake of your floor, swallowing goldfish
crackers, chocolate chips, and orange juice?
Remember smearing purple shit into my hair
and how we stained every bathtub and shower
in the building for three whole months?
Meryl do you remember the time I dialed 911
the night I stopped loving the girl whose life
I saved by calling, how you anchored me to the good
dock of your arms as I sank again and again into
all seven seas of your chest?
Gabe do you remember how we played dirty scrabble
and translated everything into braille for your roommate?
Katrina do you remember how you used to stamp
kisses on the envelope of my cheek? It was the first time
I felt like it didn’t matter that I was gay,
you treated me exactly the same, thank you.
Do you remember the day Tea scraped a razor across my scalp
and Liz said, incredulous, that I was still beautiful
and my girlfriend’s silence said the opposite?
She was my first kiss, first fuck, first girlfriend,
and we had nothing in common.
3. the signatures orbiting the photograph of me as a baby.
I am not sure why I think I will miss a community that
made me feel so lonely toward the end.
I noticed when you made mix cds for everyone except me,
how your inside jokes sprouted in the sunlight of the
gatherings I was never invited to,
how I didn’t quite make it into all those photographs you took,
how David was surprised when I told him
I felt like a distant satellite most of the time.
1. he sang Palisades for the last time;
Jon do you remember when I offered you
my dna and the field in which it grows?
that offer still stands,
but I cannot promise that your children
would be able to maintain perfect pitch
through whiskey the way you can.
2. drifting through the place I used to call home;
it smelled exactly the same as four years ago,
only the names on the doors had rearranged their letters
and the postsecret wall I made was absent.
Emily do you remember dead poets society nights
and how your room always smelled like thai tea
and warmth, how we rafted mattresses together
in the lake of your floor, swallowing goldfish
crackers, chocolate chips, and orange juice?
Remember smearing purple shit into my hair
and how we stained every bathtub and shower
in the building for three whole months?
Meryl do you remember the time I dialed 911
the night I stopped loving the girl whose life
I saved by calling, how you anchored me to the good
dock of your arms as I sank again and again into
all seven seas of your chest?
Gabe do you remember how we played dirty scrabble
and translated everything into braille for your roommate?
Katrina do you remember how you used to stamp
kisses on the envelope of my cheek? It was the first time
I felt like it didn’t matter that I was gay,
you treated me exactly the same, thank you.
Do you remember the day Tea scraped a razor across my scalp
and Liz said, incredulous, that I was still beautiful
and my girlfriend’s silence said the opposite?
She was my first kiss, first fuck, first girlfriend,
and we had nothing in common.
3. the signatures orbiting the photograph of me as a baby.
I am not sure why I think I will miss a community that
made me feel so lonely toward the end.
I noticed when you made mix cds for everyone except me,
how your inside jokes sprouted in the sunlight of the
gatherings I was never invited to,
how I didn’t quite make it into all those photographs you took,
how David was surprised when I told him
I felt like a distant satellite most of the time.
April 29 (poem 28)
“five of eight”
sometimes love is
a box of See’s candies
five of eight of which
your grandmother ate
before she gave the box
to you.
sometimes love is
a box of See’s candies
five of eight of which
your grandmother ate
before she gave the box
to you.
Friday 29 April 2011
April 29 (poem 27)
“imperfect anniversary”
It has been three and a half years since
I saw the candlewax version of you ensconced in a casket,
your cheeks completely the wrong shade of pink,
your eyelashes actually visible.
When no one was looking I touched the thing that had been
your hand,
and I could not wash the coldness off my fingers for days.
You did not look peaceful or asleep,
you looked like a casting of yourself.
Six months earlier you drove six hours to see me,
your first and only granddaughter,
graduate from thirteen years of doodling on public school desks.
You told me you were proud of me
and I didn’t understand why—
“It’s just school, Dad Dad” I said.
You were always Dad Dad because when my tongue
was first learning how to walk
it tripped over Granddad and fell on Dad Dad;
all five of your grandsons, tumbling out after me,
following my lead,
never learned the correct steps after that.
There are six of us
grandchildren,
and I am the only one who graduated
with you watching.
Now, as I prepare to walk again,
I wonder if you would be proud of me,
your bald-headed city-clinging granddaughter,
who you taught how to flip a fish inside out,
who climbed every tree you introduced her to
barefoot,
who begged for stories about hornytoads and rattlers,
who navigated Lake Chelan from the captain’s chair of your lap,
who brushed off beestings
and filled her pockets with river rocks shaped like feet,
but who never scooped together
enough courage to tell you she’s gay,
and who did not even cry for your funeral
until three and a half years later.
It has been three and a half years since
I saw the candlewax version of you ensconced in a casket,
your cheeks completely the wrong shade of pink,
your eyelashes actually visible.
When no one was looking I touched the thing that had been
your hand,
and I could not wash the coldness off my fingers for days.
You did not look peaceful or asleep,
you looked like a casting of yourself.
Six months earlier you drove six hours to see me,
your first and only granddaughter,
graduate from thirteen years of doodling on public school desks.
You told me you were proud of me
and I didn’t understand why—
“It’s just school, Dad Dad” I said.
You were always Dad Dad because when my tongue
was first learning how to walk
it tripped over Granddad and fell on Dad Dad;
all five of your grandsons, tumbling out after me,
following my lead,
never learned the correct steps after that.
There are six of us
grandchildren,
and I am the only one who graduated
with you watching.
Now, as I prepare to walk again,
I wonder if you would be proud of me,
your bald-headed city-clinging granddaughter,
who you taught how to flip a fish inside out,
who climbed every tree you introduced her to
barefoot,
who begged for stories about hornytoads and rattlers,
who navigated Lake Chelan from the captain’s chair of your lap,
who brushed off beestings
and filled her pockets with river rocks shaped like feet,
but who never scooped together
enough courage to tell you she’s gay,
and who did not even cry for your funeral
until three and a half years later.
Wednesday 27 April 2011
April 26
“disorder”
I am used to having blood pinched
beneath my fingernails,
rusting my sleeves,
and streaked across my tongue;
I know exactly what the elixir of
anxiety and boredom
tastes like:
beer, pennies, and my own
inability
to stop.
I am used to having blood pinched
beneath my fingernails,
rusting my sleeves,
and streaked across my tongue;
I know exactly what the elixir of
anxiety and boredom
tastes like:
beer, pennies, and my own
inability
to stop.
Tuesday 26 April 2011
April 25
“Mimmie”
She had always wanted a girl.
When her boys were young and grasshopper-legged
she sewed the same three letters to the insides of all their exoskeletons;
she had named all three of them with identical initials,
different from the ones she had tucked away
for the daughter that never happened.
The first boy steeped in creation and
Creationism. He taxidermied birds and soldered stained glass,
storytold and storytold and storytold.
Now, chip-chinned and balding,
he preaches resurrection in a room illuminated
by mosaic windows
in a town the size of an illustrated
pocket-bible.
The third boy seethed in the loneliness of being the littlest.
He learned to whet his words and
throw them like daggers;
it was his only defense.
Now, with two boys of his own,
he uses his law degree to raise them to be
fastest smartest loudest but still
lonely.
The middle boy, as all middle boys must,
mediated.
But she always wanted a girl,
a long-haired rose-hip-lipped Cherokee-cheeked
girldollchild, not these
thorny-shouldered tumbleweed-limbed sons,
too bright to look directly at amidst all the blue of
a Wyoming sky.
The middle boy,
he’s my father.
On the day 45 years after she was born
so was I.
He whittled me girl and
sharpened me loud.
When I laugh, my noes wrinkles the same way hers does.
My cheeks are just as Cherokee as hers
but my eyes are more Wyoming sky
and my hands storytell loneliness.
She had always wanted a girl.
The Sunday two years ago we all held hands around her table
to celebrate the rising son
I rolled the boulder out from in front of my throat
and told her my hands held another girl’s.
All she could do was tumbleweed her head back and forth
back and forth and back and forth and
smile in a way that made her tears
collect in the raingutter wrinkles that her laughter
has installed on the bridge of her nose.
She had always wanted a girl,
not two.
She had always wanted a girl.
When her boys were young and grasshopper-legged
she sewed the same three letters to the insides of all their exoskeletons;
she had named all three of them with identical initials,
different from the ones she had tucked away
for the daughter that never happened.
The first boy steeped in creation and
Creationism. He taxidermied birds and soldered stained glass,
storytold and storytold and storytold.
Now, chip-chinned and balding,
he preaches resurrection in a room illuminated
by mosaic windows
in a town the size of an illustrated
pocket-bible.
The third boy seethed in the loneliness of being the littlest.
He learned to whet his words and
throw them like daggers;
it was his only defense.
Now, with two boys of his own,
he uses his law degree to raise them to be
fastest smartest loudest but still
lonely.
The middle boy, as all middle boys must,
mediated.
But she always wanted a girl,
a long-haired rose-hip-lipped Cherokee-cheeked
girldollchild, not these
thorny-shouldered tumbleweed-limbed sons,
too bright to look directly at amidst all the blue of
a Wyoming sky.
The middle boy,
he’s my father.
On the day 45 years after she was born
so was I.
He whittled me girl and
sharpened me loud.
When I laugh, my noes wrinkles the same way hers does.
My cheeks are just as Cherokee as hers
but my eyes are more Wyoming sky
and my hands storytell loneliness.
She had always wanted a girl.
The Sunday two years ago we all held hands around her table
to celebrate the rising son
I rolled the boulder out from in front of my throat
and told her my hands held another girl’s.
All she could do was tumbleweed her head back and forth
back and forth and back and forth and
smile in a way that made her tears
collect in the raingutter wrinkles that her laughter
has installed on the bridge of her nose.
She had always wanted a girl,
not two.
Monday 25 April 2011
April 24 (poem 24)
“If you are looking for hope”
There is a woman in France who smears salve in the form of
braided strips of fabric
into the chapped lips of the Parisian streets.
Her name is Juliana Santacruz Herrera.
There is a swan in Germany who has spent eight years
in love with a blue tractor,
trailing it as though he has found his red thread,
as though his heart could speak engine
as well as it speaks grit.
Currently there are more libraries in the United States of America
than McDonalds;
sometimes this is the only statistic I can stomach.
I have easily consumed more books
than burgers in my life.
As for you, Swan,
I too have learned to love things that rumble;
our hearts are not so different,
when it comes right down to it.
Last,
Juliana,
I just want you to know
that the potholed road I call my heart could use
some yarn art
to fill its splits and cracks
with softness.
There is a woman in France who smears salve in the form of
braided strips of fabric
into the chapped lips of the Parisian streets.
Her name is Juliana Santacruz Herrera.
There is a swan in Germany who has spent eight years
in love with a blue tractor,
trailing it as though he has found his red thread,
as though his heart could speak engine
as well as it speaks grit.
Currently there are more libraries in the United States of America
than McDonalds;
sometimes this is the only statistic I can stomach.
I have easily consumed more books
than burgers in my life.
As for you, Swan,
I too have learned to love things that rumble;
our hearts are not so different,
when it comes right down to it.
Last,
Juliana,
I just want you to know
that the potholed road I call my heart could use
some yarn art
to fill its splits and cracks
with softness.
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