You got a new car: a 20 25 Tacoma. It’s practical you said: look at the 6 by 7 truck bed! Sure 23 miles to the gallon isn’t great but who’s counting? You are I guess when you laugh and tell me it’s your last car—consider the commute times the distances you drive now which don’t add up to be much since work is closer to you than I am here across the country—I get it, I said, it’s practical
He starts with with his height: six foot something (as if he didn’t know) which is in fact bigger than mine. We’ve talked about this (my tendency to self-compare) but look at how close he is to the magnolias from up there. Now he’s a poet too. He sees what I see only once it’s fallen to the ground, making a mess of things like I do, often without a sound. The inches added won’t bring me closer to anyone (my parents on Magnolia street for example) or anything. But he assures me that Spring has a petal for everyone. Maybe it is all mission, like Rilke said. Minor probable disasters waiting everywhere to blossom. Even here within this mess, a menage that houses things I have yet to confess, flowers that need only a vase (and the slobberiest part of my kiss)
There’s a chance this works: Meaning the odds are in our favor: Meaning I’ll do better next time. Arguments will be concluded, calls answered, the dog fed even without your constant reminders. Romance will be back in vogue. I’ll even read the Roy and Howe you hold so close to your heart just to have something to say when you walk through the door.
You misunderstand: it’s impossible. We’d have to try over and over again before a conclusion can be made. That’s how we’d know for sure. Besides: the evidence is weak. Meaning: the boxes are packed: Meaning: my arms are slumped like a broken slinky and will remain so. I’ve learned who you are. And I am stuck in my ways.
Twiggy spider on my yoga mat thank you for undoing the past hour of self folding and holding with your unannounced appearance. I know you’ve been watching and have suggestions for how I carry my body. After all I have a thousand times the neurons and only a fraction of your intention and grace. You walk on eight stilettos and still men like me chase beauty and women and forget you exist. But we get each other. We’re foreign to ourselves but not strangers. We give birth and die. And in the in-between we weave and cradle worlds with our extremities. We might even for a second acknowledge the other in passing: I a moving mountain, You a pebble who has seen it all from your small corner of the world.
How beautiful it is that landlocked bodies of water will find their way to the ocean through crevasses no one else can see. That something as light as wind can carry the heaviness of traveled waves for miles through miles of emptiness and longing to distant shorelines where at last they may find a witness to their journey.
There goes the body again trying to find answers where only questions exist.
Where do we go from here? Why does hope feel so heavy? Who am I without love and direction?
Rilke said to live the questions, as if by following the curves
of their bodies you would be led to the full-stop of your life.
Of course, everyone has their answers and I am still here
writing of curves and bodies. Such is life they say. Did Rilke live his?
is to sit in coffee shops with strangers who feel like home, every one of us a vessel for croissants and coffee we don’t taste. We sunbathe and drink behind windows and wonder why we’re still so pale. Meanwhile the sun continues to give life to the land and anyone who sees that the exit is the entrance, that coffee was meant to be enjoyed in colder hands.
On the day you fell the life you lived the future you wanted came down from the clouds to taste the cold Earth. The strong column of bone that carried your spirit was crushed not by the fishing boats you once sailed in the West not by the numerous hours you spent hunched over printing photos in the dark for acclaimed men of New York City but by mere coincidence a misplaced foot perhaps in a life that couldn’t keep up with you. Still that didn’t stop you from peeking over the fence and startling me with your big glasses and bigger hello one early morning. You bent over and gathered some sprigs of lavender from your lovely garden. A housewarming gift you said for the new kid on the block. Then there were the eggs I wanted but couldn’t eat, freshly laid by your loved hens. Their happiness was a familiar sound in the quiet dawn that housed our street. I heard yours too in the way you talked to them as if they were sacred, royalty. “They only eat organic.” Even the wildflowers listened. You always asked them to come home with you (“if they wanted to” of course) and they responded always with glee. They knew what care and joy felt like. Rising from my own fall after all these years now I know it too.
There is always the trace of you in these places we once called ours. I’m here again today and now they’re only mine and yours.
I come from time to time just to see if things have changed. Not much has though there’s a new couch now.
And there is still that familiar knot in the butter of this biscuit as savory as our kisses were.
My coffee is still dark like the blades of your eyes, your rooibos tea now a touch lighter than mine.