starts

The semester is closing its jaws and retreating back into the jungle.  I am told to write what is true, what is fact and to gather my sources carefully, picking only the purest fruit.  I have moved away from the land of metaphor and experimental sentences.  The semester was watching, eager to bat me with its paws, claws only partly retracted, from my creative whimsy, my poetic prose.  Now the semester is slinking backward to sleep away a few weeks of summer and I open my notebook to the light and let my heart pour out.


***


The shades are tight around my windows like drawstrings on a velvet sack.  I want to keep the night.  There was a siren that woke you and you reached for your right foot and realized your sock was missing.  That sock also took your foot, ankle, shin captive.  You rubbed your right knee because nothing existed further down.  Must have been stolen from you.  Must be lost wandering in some bodiless landscape with all the other arms and legs that were blown off near the finish line.  I hook my two arms around your torso and imagine we're a seven limbed super creature capable of anything.  You love me and resent me. 


***


She'd like to get one of those espresso machines to add to our already too crowded counter.  I didn't argue.  I never win.  Besides I like coffee, though I'm almost certain I'd much more enjoy a swath of counter space to butter my toast.  But when there's so much to fight about and so much uncertainty in the world, I don't argue about an espresso maker, it's not a baby, or a new house, or another lover.  It's a machine, a clunky, superfluous machine.  Things could be worse.


***


Sister Mary Anne loved me.  I used to throw rocks over the fence into the street.  One day she took my hand and put a piece of butterscotch in it.  "Don't throw everything away" she told me. 


***


The pockets of salmon oil danced in the frying pan, sashaying against the icy river water on one of Kodiak Island's many waterways.  My hands shook, not from the cold, but from the fear that Mama bear and her two babies would round the river bend to track down the delicious smell of fried sockeye salmon.  Our crew took turns conducting dishes duty.  We all hated it.  We were camped right above the river.  A short trail took you down to the river bank.  The only thing separating our little tents from the bears that frequented this section of the river was a fragile looking electric fence.  It seemed no more rigid or daunting than a string of Christmas lights.  We also had a shot gun.  When one person went down to the river to wash dishes another played look-out from above, the electric fence stopped at your belt line.  I barely scrubbed the pan before I heard my co-worker clear her throat.  In the distance, I could see a bit of splashing.  I'm still not sure if it was Mama bear.  I scrambled up the river's embankment and got behind the electric fence.  I stood there for a while, waiting, the humps of spawning salmon galloping like horses in the river. 


***

Mary, me and a diner

Six gray hairs at your left temple, kinky and strung out.  They saw too much of the world too fast.  Lines, like the shallow rivulets of a delta, bear themselves at the corners of your eyes.  You’ve gotten older.  So have I.  You lift the coffee cup to your lips, drink it black, like the land before time. 

“Where have you been hiding yourself?” you ask, your mouth hidden behind the diner mug. 

“Here and there,” I laugh.  My knee is throbbing from my run earlier this morning.  I’ve been running every morning since I got back hoping to build up enough momentum to pass your house, to tap your mailbox, to kneel upon your welcome mat, all sweaty and sore and beg for your forgiveness.

“That’s good,” you say as you set the cup down.  You pretend to be absent minded though you’re anything but.

The waitress docks at our table and fishes a notepad from her crusty apron.  This is the diner where we first met nearly ten years ago.  I suggested we get a coffee after a late night exam study session.  You didn’t even need to study but did so because you saw a flailing creature, slightly beautiful and terribly confused.

“Are you ready to order?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I say staring at you.

You don’t look at me and instead read off your choice slowly, deliberately from the Denny’s menu.  “I’ll have a half an order of the Grand Slam Breakfast”. 

“Eggs Benedict,” I say still staring at you.

"So how long are you here for?” you ask.

“I don’t know,” I say, my eyes soft with the possibility that my indecision may prompt you to ask me to stay forever.  Because we loved each other once.  Remember?  You say nothing.  You’ll wait me out because I always have so much to say, so many words to ruin myself.  “I’m not quite sure what I’m doing.”

Once, you found my directionless life a precious thing you wanted to cradle, once, you wanted to be my evening star.  I threw out the line from my dilapidated wagon, couldn’t you see I was completely lost without you?  Can’t you just give a girl a ride?  Just for this lifetime, just for one complete rotation ‘round the universe?  You lifted the cup again, hid your mouth and said, “Hrm.”

My heart sank.  I traveled over 3,000 miles in a last ditch effort to correct my life.  I had been waiting for this cup of coffee for 2 years, thought about it every day, thought how I would rest my head on your chest and you would cover me like the Madonna.  I was getting my metaphors mixed up.  I was never very good at religion, had a problem with devotion, but surely you understand, I’m a fallen angel, we all are, except you.  Shouldn’t you want to hold me?

“I suppose I’m looking for a reason to stay,” I said.  My hands reached toward you with no consultation with my consciousness.  There was no sense in being subtle.

You snatched up the cup again.  Surely there was nothing left in it.  You held it in front of your face, both hands wrapped around it.  You looked like you were praying and I saw the pain in you.  And how dare I drag you into all of this again?  How dare I?

I pulled my hands back and coughed into them.  You said nothing.  “Well, anyway, it’s been good to get away a little bit.  I’m always moving you know, looking for something, but I never know what.  So silly.”

“Keeps you young,” you said in an effort to be kind.  But we all knew my moving was only aging me.  All the heavy lifting of packing and unpacking and trying to start up again.  I don’t know how to apologize, wasn’t born with that gene, so I move when I mess it up.  Like ripping the page out of the journal.  I was running out of pages though.  I could feel it, I was 35 and I could feel it.  Look back on my life and see there’s nothing there.  But I remember you.  Remember that page perfectly.

“Yeah, young,” I laughed. 

woman of my life

You woman of my life,

Long haired, dark-eyed woman,
Dances under weathered tarps woman,
Heavy heart anchored woman,
Sinking woman smiling in the sea
Salt water filled belly woman
Rescued woman
Fine white sand dusting your apple cheeks woman.

Could it be you woman

This is the end of me woman
Dropped jaw journals woman
Scrawled woman
Deep bone bruise woman
Paralyzed to refuse woman
Could this be love woman
So swift woman
Seabird in her hair, ocean woman
Metaphor love laced woman

Unknown woman

And known woman
At the corner of my mind woman
Painted in every shadow of my thought woman
Woman’s woman

Humble woman

Repetitive stroke of the C cord woman
Snow drifting down roads and wrapping streetlights woman
Where I biked in darkness and let your snow light my lips woman
Thinks she’s homely woman
Thinks her body’s her best feature woman
Golden heart woman and doesn’t even know it.


Big dreams and quiet mouth woman.
Waiting at bus stops, wants to change the world woman.
Not your woman, so stop looking at me woman,
Lesbian woman.
Loving woman
Just wants someone to hold woman
Under the sheets
In the wintertime woman
And the summertime woman
All the time woman

Gets cold easily woman

And breathes heavily in her sleep woman
Compassionate and much too kind woman
Eats too many sweets woman
Holds me tightly woman
Loves me like I love her woman
Under the sheets, hand always on me woman. 

Doesn’t understand her own mind woman.

Guilty woman
Always sorry about something woman
Blessed woman
Doesn’t forget woman.
Earthbound woman that loves to stroke the hair at my temple
My temple woman
Whose closed eyes I like to kiss in the morning woman

Mirror woman

Mirror woman I know you.
Laughing eyes closed and crying woman
Small feet, small hands woman
Underestimates herself woman
Deserves better woman

I promise to love you forever woman.

I promise to love you forever.

Not Sleeping

You were the first person I slept with but never actually slept with.  Every afternoon when I left your house, I’d go home and sleep off the night where your body next to mine, wouldn’t let me rest.  You slept, soundly, a curled up fern and I wrapped my lonesome, adolescent body around you like morning dew.  I loved knowing that within the blink of an eye, I could touch you and feel the warmth and pulse of your being. 

 

                I was in love with the idea of what lying together meant.  I was in love with my hand cupped over your oblique smoothed like clay into the small crest that was your hip bone.  I was in love with knowing the cascading slope of your ribs, the soft ringlets of your hair tickling my nose, the delicate line of your spine beneath a light blue cotton t-shirt.  It was then, under the cover of darkness, when we were that close, when you trusted me, when I loved you, when I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to kiss you.

 

                I spent the summer not sleeping, but pretending like some Shakespearean actor, to close my eyes and fain surprise when you would, one night roll over, stroke my face and bid me to kiss you.  Just once. 

 

                But too much was at stake, so much would change with that brief touch.  I moved my hand from your hip and tucked it alongside my other hand beneath the pillow.  I tried to sleep but I kept dreaming of you.