Forty Four

Today you would have been forty four,
with all the complications
and beauty of forty four
this double digit life.
I wonder
what you would have looked like
if you would have had another child
how much you would have hated these wars,
but loved your birthday,
and seafood,
and surprisingly early autumns.


But no,
instead you are gone,
like you were
ten years ago,
a stone left behind,
a carved name,
to remind us
as if anyone could forget.

These Days are the Days of Long Wanting

These days are the days of long
wanting, of shade-less stretches
down Lexington Ave, of swirling
blue and green and flat trees you can touch
only maybe.

These days are the days of nowhere road,
going nowhere, coming from nowhere,
entering the part of you that is still
nowhere and unseen and hidden.

These days are the days of the dying,
of the lifeless tubed rattle breaths,
of the choked hysteria, of the bed
with just a key in the tenement over Third.

These days are the days of living,
of heat and saliva, of ocean water
salty foam, boys in shorts, with hairless chests,
of kissing and finger twirling, ache and spasm,
the ripping seer, the bold woman, naked
with the light on.

These days are days of movement refined,
of packing for California, of bent backs arching
and the curve of deepest knee,
of leaving and staying and going and remaining,
of paint and text on paper and pencil marks,
and new poets who are old poets, their bodies
already wracked and broken underground with the rat kings.

These days are days of you, twisted glass scars,
cold glasses of beer that you hope come and keep coming,
of movies, of Spanish lilting phrases and songs, the
chatter of fast moving tongues and cold bedroom sheets
eager for calves and heels and feet.

And these days are the days of me, too,
and perfect pancakes and hardwood chairs,
of old hips and myself, turning ever so slight
to the left, a new light, to be a person you thought
you have never seen.

Garage Sale

They start out small, nervous with detail,
labeling with a felt tip marker
the price on each little china plate.
The ink bleeds and floats like a plant root
digging through so much soil paper,
spirals
like a seashell
a sensation.
What a memory,
this life,

What agony,
what history laid out on the cheap
plastic tables.
No one wants this, he says,
lowball offers on someone else’s
memories. Save your money,
he yells to the woman with the felt tip.
This is overconsumption.

A breath between

the things that we want
and the things that we fear we need.

A breath we think might save our lives.

I lift the doll from the table.
Trace a finger over her pursed lips
her plastic needles form eyelashes,
half missing,
lost somewhere in the backyard,
her chipped finger
un-stichable body tufts of grey wiry cotton loose.
What desperation
what soft hands,
Tilted her back,
so often
wordlessly
cheap plastic pursed lips,
one eye closes
one stays open
staring right up into the sun.

Inside the Waiting House

Somewhere inside me there is a house,
with the windows thrown open.
The floorboards are split where the roots
have come through.
And both the sunlight
and the moonlight
make their home here together.
They do not argue
or vie for attention.
They bow and wend up the stairs,
polite,
with bent heads
and gentle words.

There is music playing
softly
something on violin
and it wavers in the air
like a memory
just about to surface.
There are also mice
and bent blades of grass,
there are flowers,
dew to drink.

But also
and most importantly,
inside this house
there is you and I,
untouched
by everything that is happening
outside
where I am lost miles from you
and you are thirsty
with the straw bent in the water,
slowly
too slowly
dying.

Inside this house
is the night that I made up,
the day that I pretend,
the you I didn’t know,
and the me I should have been.
I remember the day you almost died but didn’t
and the feeling that came with that.
I thought it would last longer.
Longer than this night, at least.

Inside me there is a house,
and we wait.
We touch, lightly
and we wait.
We do not speak
and we wait.
And I want this house
to be real,
the way the song is real
the way your voice
used to be real, higher than mine, thicker.
The way
I am still painfully real.

Dreams

I am collecting memories
like souvenirs from a recently dead man’s room.
I will take the chair, the lamp,
the baseball t-shirt
and the trip to Madrid.

You can have the sweater,
the shoes, and our time in Paris.

I take the ballpoint pen,
the one that doesn’t scratch the paper
because I believe in the tools.
I will take the memories of the funeral
You will take the pencil
and the birthday cards
your mother’s letters to your father.

We are scavengers now, crawling
through the landscape of a life,
crawling over our own history,
trying to keep what we can.

You pile things on your back.
Steady.
Steady.
I reach for the tickets to our first play.

Leave it,
you say. You pull at my hand
Leave it. We’ll come back.

Here is the story:
Your life is a molecule,
stretched over a vast space
and time
the way the river runs down to bigger water
always bigger.
You need to know this.
There is so much the body cannot contain,
so much it cannot carry.

That is the life inside you. That is the real you.

Es Mi Culpa

It is 10:00 in the morning in New York
But my watch says 4:00 in the afternoon
because it is 4:00 in Madrid.

This is my fault,
I know that,
trying to carve something
out of nothing,
trying to keep some part of it with me
because back here,
all the news is bad and
there are moneylenders
inside our temples.

The sun in Madrid doesn’t set
till 10 or even sometimes later,
when we waited at Finnegan’s.
Where the bartender told my friend
that my husband
has a good kind face.

I think it must be easier to fall in love
in Madrid, with it’s language and it’s laugh,
with the way she tosses her hair and says
excuse me and goodbye.
She hates Picasso and for that,
I love her with her sunglasses and her beer mug.

Maybe it is just that there is more time,
in Madrid, more time to sit and talk and be told
We are not Americans. More time to make them understand
why the poor choose leaders that abandon them.
Why the poor believe the lie. More time
to teach them dirty words in English and
learn them in Spanish.

Maybe time is slower there, a lazy winding river
so that when he pulls the waiter aside and
orders more beer,
we are saving second, minutes
we are keeping them in our pockets
we are storing them under our tongues.

And the days are not doorways
we pass through blindly,
they are things we eat and keep
and carry with us, onto that plane,
and over that ocean.
It is 4:00 pm in Madrid,
the sun is high
and it will stay that way
because I know that at 10
or even later
that sunset, better than any sunset
I have seen over Staten Island,
that sunset in Madrid,
will break your heart.

The Flight to Madrid

This is the life we have written.
We chose carefully, drawing second by second,
as we move through the airport,
our luggage in hand,
our eye on the clock.

We stop for beers
and food. And then another beer.

We walk down the ramp,
our ticket scanned,
the flight attendant says
hello, with a wide smile
but she doesn’t look at us,
as we inch
slowly
though
tight
aisles

and sit down, prepared for this journey.
This is the life we have written together.
The buckle snapped,
my water and journal with me.
We line up, the plane rolling for so long
I wonder aloud, are we driving there?
You smile, and take my hand

and then the worst part,
the speed and wobble and pressure
and I think to myself
most accidents happen during takeoff or landing
and then I try not to think about that.

This is the life we have written
and I say to no particular god
if it is going to happen, please
let it happen on the way home,
after I have already laid a hand on
the crumbling stone of an ancient church

after I have already tasted and drank
and kissed.
After I have laughed and talked for hours
with old friends, now real.
After I have already watched from
the train window that city leave me
and the country find me
after I have already climbed those stairs
and fallen into bed exhausted.
If it is going to happen,
let it be after,
I pray
to no particular god.
And no particular god
doesn’t answer
but later there is a hot sunrise
over so much blue ocean,
that I don’t care anymore
about anything else.
This is the life we have written.
What will happen next?