Season of Snails

-for Oscar

I was telling Oscar the other day,
about the season of snails,
The way the spirals on the shells
which are so delicate, just keep swirling
and how I stop on my walk
to run a fingernail around the edge
and their little eyes on antenna
roll up at me.

And then I start to worry,
I worry that they will get stepped on,
that I will step on their delicate shells
with my big stomping boots
because I am not paying attention

or that they will be hidden under all
the dead leaves that litter the sidewalk
and I won’t see them
or that that a businessman
so intent on catching the bus to Manhattan
won’t take the time to avoid the snails

and they will be crushed as if they were never there, nevermore
and the thought brings me to tears, so that I have to stop at the wall,
and watch them exist in case on the way home, they are gone,

and then I realize,
I sound like a crazy person.
Poor Oscar. What madness I put people through.
I don’t even tell him about the missing organs
the ground teeth, just nubs of shattered white
the red pumping fist,
in it’s place there is just a picture of heart
torn from a medical text
onion skin thin, taped on. My lungs
fat wet fish are missing too. Just images taped up in place of the real thing.

My jaw, broken, knocked lose,
I have only a wrist and a hand
that melancholy holds
and she’s making me take her everywhere in the city
with her little white curls in her hair
and her grip is fierce and cold and
I can hear her silvery whisper in my ear all day.

This is my season, I suppose
and the snails will be gone in a few weeks
but I’ll still worry about them, like a crazy person
the way Oscar will still worry about me,
reading these notes from the other side of the ocean,
where it’s almost noon and time for a drink.

Ghost

I am growing out my hair
to my feet and when I look
in the mirror it will not be me anymore.
I will dye it with ink,
darker than your night
jet black and I will sell it.
They will string violins with it
and use it to make necklaces
and that piece of me will be gone.

And then I will give away my bones,
the ones in my hand first,
hollow like a birds
and like a birds,
easily crushed. And then the ones in my feet.

I will lay out the pieces of me
skin and muscle side by side, like memories
of folded paper, undone, wrinkled, pressed smooth
with the flesh of my hands and your hands
gathered together like those moments that we
try to remember
or worse,
like the moments we try not to remember
from ten years ago.

And I will give that part away too,
tied to a rock and sent down
to the bottom of the black ocean.
Until everything I am, has fluttered away

I will be a different woman,
Severed from the reflection you saw
And then I won’t have to worry anymore
If I am still that person you once loved.

I Don't Worry About Curses

-Good friend for Jesus sake forbear
to dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be he that spares these stones
and cursed be he that moves my bones.
-Etched on Shakespeare’s grave


You told me that I never eat eggs like this.
You said, in fact, that you have never seen me eat eggs at home.

But this is not home. This is England. And more importantly
this is a little restaurant in Stratford Upon Avon

and it’s so very old, older than I can really fathom
when I run my hands along the wood beams of the Garrick Inn.

Older than you or I or the other lives we lived before this.
So I am different here too, older even, walking the cobblestones

in my loud boots, creeping through the chancel
to see Shakespeare’s final resting place.

The man at the church says it isn’t his fault.
He says there is nothing he can do.

You tell him we crossed the ocean.
I see your fingers twitch as you want to grab him by the collar.

But he says you can almost see it. He is British and proper.
He says the construction at Trinity Church is necessary.

And I think, well, it was bound to happen.
I tell you its okay. I can be proper too.

But in my dreams, I am not reasonable.
I don’t stand on my tippy toes, to see peek through scaffolding.

In my dreams I slip through the railing and I climb across the pews.
The proper English man yells in the background. He tells me to stop.

I lay one cool cheek on the tombstone
I close my eyes, hold my breath, and I trace my fingers through the curse.

In my dream, I don’t just walk away
pick out a stone to keep from the walkway.

I don’t just glance back and think about what I could have done,
what I should have done, after all these years and miles.

Untidy Life

My back pockets are filling with lists of things I must do
before this trip over an ocean.

I have to talk to the neighbor’s kid so she’ll check on the cats.
I have to stop the mail.

I have to clean my clothes, my apartment, what with the kid coming over,
clean out my back pockets, the cat’s litter.

I’m busying myself with the tasks of tidying, management,
packing all these little moments into their tiny boxes,

packing those tiny boxes into leather suitcases
latching those leather suitcases with metal buckles

Wood crating those leather and metal suitcases and
labeling them with paper and ink till everything is stacked in the center of the room.

This is what I am busying myself with,
watching the cats cry at shadows and pace the room in their anxiety.

Watching you tell me, darling, there is time for everything. Relax. Have a drink with me.
But I have this trip to take, and if I don’t come back

If I slip into the crowd of another city, to have another life,
and I don’t come back to this one.
If I just keep moving, passport in hand, keep taking, and keep boarding trains, well

I just want to make sure it’s neat when the police come to move everything out.

The Poet's Book

I hold your book open walking though the Atlantic Avenue subway station.
The pages are so white that the black slashes of your words seem small.

I hold your book open walking through the subway station
cradling the spine, keeping the pages back with my thumb

The way my mother taught me to support the babies head. Always.

I hold your book open walking through the subway station
and lower it, like an offering, so that the people passing by can see

As if they could read it and understand your words
about your brother’s death, and the winter when the snow didn’t come.

But your words didn’t come out. They stayed in my head.
Your song, sung, open mouthed and low behind the rumble of trains.

I hold your book open walking through the subway station
like a divining rod, like a guide, your holy voice, like it will bring me closer

to what I said and what I always meant to say.

Happiness

It’s like there’s a microphone hanging over everything I say, I tell him.
It’s not like that, he says.
Besides, I always make myself the bad guy.
Not that I mind, I say, I’m careful to add that.
That’s not the point, I tell him.
You take things out of context. I sound like a nag, I tell him, nagging.

You could do it, he says.
But I won’t, I say.
And I think, for a moment, that I mean it.

We are quiet.
We sip our beers.

On the subway there is a sign for happiness
and right below it another one.
I didn’t know happiness was advertising.
One is written in pink.
The other blue. Like the colors people subscribe to babies.
I stare at the word for so long, it comes apart.
The letters separate and spread like when you run your hand through a spider web.
The p’s pull apart
until they are just pink and blue letters.
Until letters are just shapes
and they blur into a smear of language.
I start to wonder if it’s a message for me.

I want to tell him about this at the bar.
I want to ask him if he thinks it’s a message.
But instead I ask him what order the Gomez albums were recorded in.
I tell him I want to listen to them in order.
He perks up.
This one, he can answer.

All that Good Water and Air

Our neighborhood was a warzone. And no one would have believed us
out there in the country, what with all that good water and air.

Our parents left the city, so we would be safe.
Though maybe they just settled for safer, at least safer than what was reported on TV.

Your dog got shot with the neighbor’s bb gun,
and he walked with a limp after that.

There were strangers hiding in the woods, when we ducked under the
star rock, we could see them pass through the leaves like monsters.

There was playing chicken, dogging the cars that sped round the bend.
But that danger we created, thumping hearts, panting tongues, slick smiles.

We walked the narrow lane down the only busy street into town,
our mother’s hearts fluttering with caution. Other children had been found dead.

Other children had been found hung. Strung up in the front yard
like they were lynched. Postcards of the hanging.

We stole boats and rowed out into the crater lake.
It had a creature in it. Everyone knew that.

There was the Birdman who would leave his tracks in the snow
by your bedroom window and we stood around it in a circle

You had a stick in your hand and said we were lucky to still be alive.
We didn’t know what he would do when he got us, but it wouldn’t be good.

We made some of these nightmares. Others found us.
Like when the little girl next door was found face down in the pool.

Her hair spread out like little rays of sunlight.

The whole neighborhood migrated then, moving toward the house.
But we sat at the top of tree, our feet swinging, knowing we were invisible.

Years later, the boy who shot your dog, his father got cancer.
Then everyone got cancer. Maybe the water wasn’t so good after all.

He walked down the steps to his basement and he bolted the door behind him.
He laid down on the cool tile and he turned off the light.

They say, it didn’t take long.