Equivalency

We try so hard,

To explain and package,

Everything that we are and feel,

And is happening right up to now,

The same as when I was little,

Alone in the upstairs closet,

Trying to put on all of my father's shirts and ties,

All at the same time,

Each foot in one shoe from each of his two pairs.

Quietly In Spirit, With No Alarm

We crawled out from under,

Quilts that our grandmothers slaved over,

With our bodies feeling like they do,

Right out on the edge - all open

Swirling air and toes gripping,

Cold flat rock,

Like some tiny amount of control,

Was already being redressed to the grave,

Drawn back through our shadows,

Barely the size of children,

We made eggs and opened the window,

And talked as the temperatures equalized,

About Caroline, and how living

Never gets done feeling new,

And if we had enough money to spring

To get a bigger freezer,

While Hugh mowed serpentine across his yard,

The green scent meandering gently around our noses.

Tomorrow's Monday

So concerned that I

Am drastically behind schedule

At being the person and everything I want to be.

People are dropping like flies out there.

Let the Meeting Begin

The gnats like shooting stars,

Diving at the underwater light,

I felt so small up there,

So quietly representative,

Before diving in,

Listening to the congregation of bubbles,

The glaze that moves with my hands,

Sweeping around itself,

So unconcerned, or entirely there,

All the secret voices,

But before I could respond,

Laughter.

Reverse Mortgage

I awoke to doublestopped time,

Dylan's glasses and bedeviled,

Impossible infinitesimals in the floorboard,

Instinctively I reached for my face,

To feel for a bearing on my age,

And found it full of hiding places,

Not even a majority occupied,

Drinking from Mímisbrunnr,

Was probably a mistake in hindsight.

What I Remember

She made the autumn leaves,

Into boats that sailed down the creek,

Where the old folks washed their clothes,

We should've stockpiled our innocence,

But we were abandoned to it,

Like Icarus,

She had difficulty understanding the word dream,

We wrote new stories in the dirt after every storm,

About Aeneas, and Heloise, and Jesus, and Wiglaf,

She made my heart beat so bad,

Every time she skipped ahead,

Her hands covered in the granules of the earth.

The Epilogue Always Contains a Wedding

Balcony,

You sit like

You're so full of volumes

Weighed down with thirty,

The future,

Your too tamed tongue

Carmine your dress

Lacks nothing.

Your luster keeps up with the times

Until the dark very morning

Where coffee is more stirred than enjoyed

Early Morning, Full of Gusto

I want to throw my fresh-legged twenties,

Into you with smirked, swelled veins,

To repurchase every hillock and hostel alike,

To dig our feet into sunset sands,

The only fitting memory we have rights to demand,

To become new fictions to fall asleep with,

Luminous in space and time,

As entropy works accentuated knuckles,

Around the stars we dine by.

As It Always Moves

Sleepless,

Feeling for the fresh, new calluses,

Like the ones father was given,

After he buried the hound dog,

And wouldn't say a word at dinner.

Still that child,

Without any brothers or sisters,

Walking out along the fenceline.

Family Farm

You are

The tall grass I

Spent the whole summer

Talking to God in

Gödel

Perhaps the incompleteness

Is where we're supposed to fit

Pascalian nostalgia for trying

To merge into us.

Other Impressions Than the First

Your face will forever

Rack me of all coherency

Like domesticated fusion

Being Small

I remember,

Leaning over ledges,

Looking up staircases,

Watching the tops of the trees,

Pass backwards through sunroofs.

I've seen meteor showers,

Barely keeping my eyes open it was so early,

And I've woken up outside.

I've looked down on highways from mountains,

Made forts under covers,

Cautiously peering out from under the edges,

At a foreign world.

Rain running down windows,

Still holds my attention,

And when I get groceries,

I always ride the carts,

Out to the parking lot.

Being small is,

The best thing that ever happened to us.

Unwelcome Projections

In my dreams, not the ones where we're in incredible places, but the ones where the months fly out from now like so many dealt cards, I sit on a bench with its best days behind it, I wonder who put it there, what age of civic engagement it must have been to put a bench by a lake so distant from anywhere else, in fact I can't remember where I am, only that it is peaceful and that you are somewhere. And I'm always holding something to give: a mess of papers, wrapped up poorly-prepared cookies, once a cactus. So I know you must be coming, but the there's not much sun left, and first I sit atop the bench, then lay down across it, then return to how I started, with my hands and whatever item in my lap. And I feel that where I am must be so hard to find, that I know you must be looking, but when it gets dark, but never so far along that there's absolutely no sun, I start to worry that you wanted to find me but had to give up, and it's just me and the lake and the bench still, but no longer peaceful, and I worry, and I wake up.

Where Your Hair Sticks To Your Forehead

In silence,

He held down her pointed shoulders,

Against the sharp intake of breath,

Leaning, one leg up on,

The bare wood panelling.

"It's balmy" she finally said,

And he thought of all the places,

He wished he could take her.

Wooden Bowls

Tepidly

We closed the church doors

And Later we regretted it

Over fowl and bread

Madame De Beauvoir, did you ever skinny-dip with someone you had a crush on?

Wise Beyond Our Years

Off down the way

From the railroad crossing we hid

Waiting for the train to come rumbling by

Your lips to come rumbling over mine

So much time to come rumbling after itself

Like the dirt falling from your red knees

As we stood when it was quiet again

For the rest of my life I would hear that train

A truer heartbeat than my own chest

Meting out the deeper tethers

Like they were the very rails it ran on

And towards the end

I stopped trying to see beyond its natural bend

Off down the way

From the railroad crossing we hid

Your hands felt like the answer to so many questions

I didn't know I had

Generation Gap

Our heads filled to the brim,

Minds like a rolling boil,

That when they finally cool,

And we skip buttons at last,

Our children won't know,

Looking into that still water,

If it's still too hot to touch

Hole in the Wall

My hand,

Confident on the small of your back,

As we listen to the harmonies keep,

The spaces between them perfect,

Like middle school dancers.

And we laughed at how odd it was,

For our bodies to briefly match our minds.