52 spoken Poemagraphs
I slap horse-dust from my palms and cross caliche to the lamplit porch. The rocker creaks me to sleep, fast and deep. There, I do it all again, unbothered.
In the morning, I make tea, while she uses that same knife to cut bolos lêvedos and spread hog-plum jam. Thick, the way we like.
When she was new and could fit in my hands, I'd whisper truths about her mother into her fontanelle. "She could cook the flavor out of anything," & "Her love plugged me in," & "We were bashert."
Now that she's older, I sometimes see a puzzled look cross her face, and imagine she's remembering something softly spoken, confused at how it got in her head.
She sings tizita while I watch from a table at the front. There is sorrow there, and heartbreak, of course. But there is hope and independence, too.
On this night, the Eritrean air is hotter than on most, and while we lie still, body-to-body, steam rises from her skin like a lullaby from Mekurya's horn.
Tomorrow, she will head west towards Senegal, while I stay with our children, who understand better than I that only time can bring back our beautiful mother.
I cannot get past my friend's betrayal. When her name lights my call display, my heart becomes a hissing swan.
When she travels, I get sick and fall to my knees, retching. I claw the earth, trying to pull her home. Dirt, bark, and stone bleed my skin and nails.
I concentrate, convincing conifers to conspire, their roots reaching farther than my arms can stretch. One speaks of a sequoia sympathetic to my suffering, and soon the forest is teeming with my desire. Pull, I beg, pull!
The vine and the flower, the weed and the wing, critters large and small, the breathing and the dead—ally to ease my pain. Pull, we think, pull!
The mountain looks down on our efforts. Pity that we're even trying? Or astonishment at our progress?
Feeling my love summit its peak, it resounds: Pull, pull!
My enchantment confounds her. She is the birder among the reeds, unaware that her gaze powers the heron's grace.
She doesn't believe in reincarnation, just energy returning, parts of us portioned out to bumblebees and birch trees, prairie dogs and dirt that will one day make its way back to the riverbank.
My thoughts bloom at what our unknown ancestors anticipate witnessing our backyard lovemaking while they cross over in the smoke of a neighbor's burning leaves.
If she's anywhere, she's everywhere. I wake and reach for her, finding only darkness.
Does she sleep, too, and dream that I surround her?
We are trapped in a cycle turning to power this world. Gods wager on the consequence of our inevitable union.
We are all woven into the universe. And though some mistake the tug of passed loves for invitations to cross over, I know that you pull to tighten my weave.
She laughs and we lie back on the bank of the Brahmaputra. Our mouths to the sky, I pledge my love while she whispers our dreams to Ganesha.
I see her now, pregnant, after all these years. Bested by a man I do not know, jealousy tears through me like a pack of wolves.
The bedroom smells of sex and sugar doughnuts. I see her naked in the kitchen prepping breakfast. I've searched enough. She's the one. The toaster pops. Butter? she asks. I feel the air behind me for a chair.
Forget love? She laid eggs in me when delivered, cradled on your breath.
Back home, I dream of the water beyond the break and wake older, angry at borders that keep me foreign and dry.
Did my wretched ancestors, who walked inward, abandoning shorelines and settling centered, fear the power tides gift me?
And will my absence pull from both coasts, to my landlocked city, salt water so deep as to drown their evil guiding star?
I could have learned piano.
I could have picked up a new language.
I could have taught myself to draw.
I could have danced.
I could have made a new friend.
I could have memorized a sonnet.
I could have written a song.
I could have made a lover proud.
I could have climbed a tree.
I could have gotten fit.
I could have tidied up.
I could have taken a bath.
I could have eaten.
I could have...
But then, I would have had to have gotten up.
The day I learned to snap bottle caps across the room, my mother said she didn't know any wonderful men. The New Brunswick air was thick with sulfur, and the taste on my tongue brought back fleetings of my time in her womb, and the sound of her blood clicking with the certainty that I'd be different.
While I sleep, God comes to me in the form of a past love. I wake exhausted, "single in a double bed." The peacock colors of my love-drunk heart cannot compete with the farewell note she's written across the morning sky.
Marie Bo made delicious lap-lap and was aces with a machete, working all her life to raise her children — extra hard after her husband died from a love of kava. She found me intimidating the day we met in a hut in Pango Village, Vanuatu, but over five months we became fast friends, me teaching her English and she trying to teach me Bislama, both of us stitched up at the other's difficulty. "Me likem you," and "Lincoln blong Marie."
I was numbawan dog sitter and she was numbawan housekeeper. Together, we pierced coconut eyes to take begonia flowers plated with cassava chips and the best grapefruit you've ever had.
Take away all that I deserve, but give me five more minutes on the back of Beth's bike
My dog believed each thunderclap a posse sent by God to find her. We lay stacked together in the darkness until the riders passed.
In June, a horse stopped. A rider cocked his head.
Today, I believe each heavenly crack scorn, sent to rebuke, for having kept her from his side for so long.
There are nests where our hairs are interlaced. They cradle eggs and warm undercarriages of the birds in the neighborhood where we grew old loving each other.
Between kisses, we draw breaths. And through the shy crowns above our picnic, I glimpse a curious universe.
I find her in fiction between Duras and Durrell. She wears the kind of dress in the kind of way that makes a grown man notice for the first time how beautiful yellow is.
A falling frond becomes a bird that takes flight. And I am that bird, above the city in which I lived. Rising, I see the Venice streets. The beach, the pier, the Pacific. The places I played, never thinking any of it would ever be anything but there for me.
Everything communicates: trees, corn, crows...
One day we'll discover how the rock speaks to the soil while still insisting in our own voice of our superiority.
There are places I've lived where only a bullet through the sky would quiet the barking night.
The sound would scatter the hungry raza galgos to distant days.
Hours later, I would search the sea at sunrise for my sleep-saving 3 a.m. slugs, never once seeing them shimmer or shine.
Imagine with me – the befuddled faces of fishermen finding my rounds resting peacefully in the just-opened bellies of their afternoon catch.
Young lady on King Street, hair cut like Seberg’s in ’60. I only asked for directions because I was afraid to ask for everything else.
Give me a current to swim against. I am drowning in these placid waters.
The perpetually tanned who walk the beach in Piles see him asleep on the sand and imagine he is washed up from a distant land.
They comment in Spanish that he has the body of an American who needs to get more sun.
How can a man let himself fall so far? Oh, Spaniard, he's fallen much, much further.
Once, centuries after living left me hollowed out by love, I was reanimated by a winter wren's welcoming trill.
For certain, I've been watched over by the winged since this world began.
Grouse confirm I'm sure-footed when stepping through the field.
Shoreline egrets promise air to my swimming lungs.
And who cannot shed tears of joy, dreaming beneath the screech owl's protecting gaze?
What is this grace that you give, that sweeps me up and swaddles me to your breast? Who sent you with instructions to comfort me like mother's milk? Where will I go when I leave this heaven for the next? Will you be waiting for me there, as you were in past times? And what will I call you when we meet again?
When we rose this morning, the clouds said "No." The clouds said "Stay." But we never listen to the clouds. We never listen to any thing or any body.
And last night, when I said I love you, I didn't love you at all, like I love you right now sitting across this table with the storm outside our window.
Sitting across this table with the storm outside our window, I'm drawn to you. I'm drawn to you and I can see right into you. I can see the way you're looking at me. You're looking at me like the clouds might know a thing or two.
Lying in this field of flowers, you hold a buttercup beneath my chin. Overwhelmed by first love, I watch you search for the yellow reflection.
A distant nightingale serenades its maker, and I finally understand my place in this world.
On days when the sun feels unmotivated, I suspect that it rises to catch a glimpse of you in the morning light.
Shocked to still be living, the robin grips my finger like a newborn. I offer her what remains of the worm that had interrupted her flight. I'd eased it from her throat after watching her plummet to the ground in front of me. This time, it goes down right.
It's been years, and I see her often.
Oh, love —
Where are you?
I've been waiting all day.
Found as a stray, his youth's been stolen — soiled by an old man's sin.
He'll get away, sharp and broken, a bone escaping skin.
The night your blouse buttons pinged the flowerpots on the windowsill, I drifted off to your voice.
"I'm counting your bones."
I'm as lonesome as a nameless star.
Next to me, her sleeping body reminds me of the time I hiked a mountain in Spain, searching for the sound of Rilke's god breathing.
Resting on a rock, a migratory bird alighted on my hand. It was small, almost weightless, and then it was gone.
Dance with me. Press your cheek to mine and whisper words true enough to silence this stifling world.
Even as we press against each other, there are gaps: folds in our flesh; the concave nature of our palms; the time our lips are apart; minute dimples on the surface of our tongues.
I'm tormented by the space between us. It's oceans, as I write this. It can never be too small.
Burn it down. Torch everything. Firs and oaks, sequoias and willows, pine, walnut, and birch. Make the wildfire outrun every land animal, and the flames soar higher than any bird can escape. Boil the lakes and oceans. Run the creeks and rivers dry. Turn the beach sands to crackled skin. Crumble the mountains. Split the rocks. Melt the asphalt. Let gravel jump like popping corn. Choke the mycelium, devour the sun and stars. Blacken time and smother the universe with a blanket of quiet nothing. Tuck everything in for good.
My baby doesn't love me anymore.
Every woman my father ever wanted became expert at hiding bruises — except my mother, who uncovered them for all to see the truth of the man he was so expert at hiding.
When she got away from him for the final time — her left eye bulging from its socket; his arms cuffed behind his back as he lay on the marble floor of the women's bathroom in the Toronto Courthouse — there were gasps. Unintentional sounds escaping the mouths of people paid to deal daily with violence: cops, bailiffs, bondsmen, and the judge who moments earlier declared Edward Stewart "Harmless," and to be released without delay.
Sometimes, I think of those men. But more often I think of their wives and lovers and the answers they heard when they asked that evening "And how was your day, dear?"
Just before I fell asleep, the birds would darken the sky. Not once did they ever make a peep. Not once did I question why.
Then, when I was swimming, a grizzly ate me whole. He must have thought me salmon. I was happy to play the role.
My mother made me hug the earth, dressed in my new school jeans. My arms completely round its girth. I squeezed it to smithereens.
"All things shining," yes. But you brightest when I close my eyes and float on this calm sea in the day's middle – the bird calls above me jarring in their beauty and lack of rhythm. Beneath my back, a parallel world, where creatures dream of their own partners and places. I know it as surely as I feel your love for me in all my faults and trying.
When next we meet, may we return as grace, and recognize one another by our longing.
Unless I say, "No one has ever said 'I love you,' to me." No one ever says, "I love you," to me. So, I'm telling you now, "I love you," even though you've told me you're sick of people telling you, "I love you."
Hanging my hat on my knee, I feel the heat escape my brow. What went with it? Is this the process of dying? Tiny, frequent releases, night and day?
And those who appear younger with time, are they breathing it in? How? Can it be learned or transferred with a kiss, a fuck, a handshake? Where do I go to meet them? And whom do I buy a drink?
Ashamed of what I've done, let me be lost against you, a blush in the night pressed close against your saffron-colored hair.
My grandmother would pause to take her teeth out when shuffling the cards, then use the shock of her competitors as a distraction to deal from the bottom. It was just cribbage, but she took the game seriously. One time, I got a 29 and she called the local newspaper thinking it'd make a front-page article. I remember her berating the story desk that they didn't know what they were talking about and that they needed to send a photographer right away. When we weren't playing cards, I would sit and roll cigarettes for her while she watched On the Buses. One time, she got ridiculously drunk and sang, oh the music goes round and round, over and over, laughing outrageously before singing the phrase again. It was the first time I'd ever seen a woman drunk, and was the most frightened I'd ever been around an adult. I knew that she loved me, but I'd never felt more alone than on that night with my grandmother, a bottle of gin, and Louis Prima on repeat.
I throw poems at the sparrow in my rafters. She is unmoved. I crack a window and go for a walk. I imagine the bird gathering my poems for her nest. When I return, the bird is gone, but the poems remain.
Before tossing them in the wastebasket, I open one: "The stars have a better view, but know nothing of heartbreak."
I nap and quickly rise to change "but" to "and." Then, I change it back.
Do not seek your abusers. They will be drawn to you like dogs to laughter. Just look at Balthasar. Poor Balthasar. He is not a donkey, but a mirror.
The shine went out of my father when he went to live at a home that specialized in patients with Parkinson's. You could tell he wanted to say that he'd been promised this would never happen, but that he knew my mother could no longer look after him. Stairs, showers, the outdoors. They'd all become dangers to this man who'd flown bombers during the Second World War. Now he was surrounded by people he'd been taught to hate while growing up in the Canadian prairies and later while fighting in Europe. Roommates, and some of the staff, with "foreign gibberish" coming out of their "dark faces." He declined bingo and game shows on the TV in the community spaces. He ate dinner most nights alone in his room. The last time I saw him, he called me a "distant relative" and asked the nurse to stay until I'd left. Born in 1920, he died at 99, and for the 40 years I knew him, I wondered what kept him going for so long – I couldn't imagine hatred and distrust providing so much sustenance. But occasionally, I check online, read a paper, or look out the window.
We tried to kill each other for years and called it love. And though you're long gone, my blood still sings when I recall the words you used to summon me.