Breaking open the body.

 

Until it becomes a competition to see who can hurt the other one more.

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i write you love poems
because i don't know how
to say i'm scared.

these words slide down your hips like a pair of pants that no longer fit but which you can not bring yourself to discard. you cinch them tight with a belt made from the clothesline you no longer have a place for - the landlord doesn't allow them in the courtyard. cluttered, he says. eyesore.

and so your underwear, your sheets, are relegated to the tiny orbit of the dryer which sometimes contains relics left behind by the neighbors you never pass in the hall: today a penny, hot to the touch so that it leaves a small red ring against your palm when squeezed. last week a small silver button you have placed in the bowl by the door. some days it gets tangled in your keys when you pick them up, and you imagine that its owner will stop by with a letter meant for you which was slipped into their box by mistake, will recognize the button and think that you are the sort of person who saves things. wrong, you think. you do not save things, but you can not bear to part with them.

you slip leaves between pages of books, then years later open them to find just the skeleton remaining. veins, you think.

 you think, decomposition. you wonder where the rest has gone.

you carry language inside you
as the truly faithful carry
their gods.

soft-bodied and diurnal.

behaving as though love was something which we could digest. such slow violence and always at the end of the day we are left wondering why we feel so torn apart, so eviscerated.

i imagine the way dirt from under my fingernails will look streaked down your sweaty back on the days that i cannot wait long enough to shower after we have finished working in the garden. it will be the way you will bend to snap a leaf of basil, the way your hand will grasp at a tomato on the vine, the way your t-shirt will cling (softly translucent) to your skin, the way you will smell like the earth that will cause me to pull you down to the porch steps, to press my face into your flesh.

like the rhythm of prayer, this call
& response - smallest of alphabets reducing
syllables to ashes in our throats. we learn to
speak the tongues of the blessed, to pass
sacred vowels from open mouth to open mouth.

haiku

tides tug at my hips
like your sudden, insistent
hands hold back the moon.

topography (2).

say you can't believe in the miracle
of body. say anger, when
what you mean is fear.
say you are shaken, say disaster
is the one constant you cannot
escape any other way. litany after
litany - as though the rhythm
of breath is somehow disparate
from the rhythm of drums.

caesura.

just once: a moment
in which time
cannot catch us.

a pause, which by its
nature indicates
that these heartbeats,

these intakes of breath
do not deduct from
whatever our final tally
turns out to be.

practicality.

i am not clever enough
to invent a new and exciting
metaphor for loving you -
for this music we make,

so instead let me tell you stories
about jazz, about all the

improvisation

promised by storied hips
and soft half-moans or were they
moons like apples
with a bite already gone

i can tell you of violins,
of muscles stretched taut
against the strings,

bodies bent into instruments
until one becomes the other
and they both become fire.

wildlife.

Snake with foot found in China.


Man-eating bird.


Pink grasshopper.


Mountain Goats.

topography.

the study of landforms at any scale
no more two-dimensional representations
the surface shape
only hinting at the
broader meaning
(depth)
(how much we keep hidden
below sea level)
so much
less common