Poems

Circle

Circle

It’s you again, glowing in technicolor. Your face is haloed in a perfect circle. Behind you are waves, glass rippling. I want to reach across the distance, as if to step through a portal to find you where you are, somewhere I’ve only read about. I know so little still. How to hold you without stuttering. How to send my laughter without obstruction. The past accompanies me everyday, renders every message with a shock to my chest. I fumble again, and that’s when you step through with a rock in your grip, as if to say this is harder. The Greeks merely pondered the same mountains you are climbing. You step further and tell me to grab, to bring with me what I’d rather forget. Hold there and here, you say, I know the way up.

Song of the crickets

Song of the crickets

I ask you to describe the scene. You respond with a moonlit sea of crickets. A trail ahead of us converging into a single point beyond the trees.

You have your headlamp with you but decide the darkness is where we belong. You’re happy here as I am following the fading sun.

There are no questions for once. They come up only after I become a stranger upon leaving you. I step back into the subway station, accidently going

A Fantasy

A Fantasy

(“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” –Donald Winnicott)

It is strange to think, when I ask myself like Tony Hoagland does in “Distant Regard” what I would do if I knew I had a few months left to live, that I’d like to spend my last moments alone. I’d like mostly to feel how enchanted and dignified I am after reading Proust, about Swann’s enchantment with the quiet phrase of a simple sonata, one that binds him to Odette and the maddening reprieve of invisible truths, what is always within and out of reach. What else is like sitting here with Proust and Tony, pondering these fleeting images I have of lying next to you, rather than lying next to you. For some reason my parents are here as well, next to my death bed. It’s not as warm as I want it to be. But I am full somehow, possibly with the air of forgiveness. I prefer nothing else than that which I am thrown into, this place that has become a home of sorts, even with its shade of loneliness, its hours in the dark scrambling to escape only to find myself back inside, yearning for more. I want to be here, which might say something about my relationships, which says something about myself, or only myself and how I relate to others, things I may not like to admit and hence are best left without explanation. Until I feel close and rooted enough with someone like you I will continue to likely want the presence of dead men and poets I don’t know. I will enjoy the daydream of a felt understanding while thinking of you, you walking up behind me with a kiss ready to give as I am squeezed into tears by the beauty of sadness, the tenderness of longing, for the loss of that which has grown familiar. You with your mouth which one day says I know why you are here. It is yours and yours alone, you say. I will be here, waiting, waiting in shadows of my own, watching the candlelight flicker on reflections of your face.

WORK MEETING IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY

WORK MEETING IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY

The problems are multi-factorial: mislabeled data, unstandardized input streams, the constant search for certainty in categories: aggressive behavior, generalized anxiety disorder, risk of harm to self

and property, each with their own modifiers that seem only to multiply along a spectrum from mild to moderate to moderately severe to a shape more

unknown than what a name suggests on top of the urgency for future funding and the need to be productive, to prove that something but talking

CHILDREN IN THE PARK

CHILDREN IN THE PARK

There they are, running around, biking in tye-dye T-shirts. It wasn’t always the case that they were always able to do this. They were once only merely capable. All they could do was stumble before the imperative to rise raised them up into the air where they disappeared, became the wind itself while riding on a two-wheeled machine fast enough to warrant the worry of people once like them, of the humans who made them: the machines, the children, the tye-dye T-shirts flapping against the sky.

Allure

The allure of distance. Something beyond reach I can never know. Trains rumbling over rust outside my window. Engines startled into going nowhere fast. How long

have I been here, listening? What songs remain possible to sing? Ant hills and galaxies are assembled every day. But the mind is slow to catch up.

It is busy determining itself in the mirror of its name. How quickly it forgets even that when, rushing off into the horizon

Moving

Hollow out the rooms. Compress every detail into boxes locked in permanent ink: kitchen, bedroom, handle with care, fragile. It takes awhile. Even after settling the dust that licked our letters. The sediment of sentiment that adorned our dreams. The sigh sagging from your mouth. The key in the clumsy crook. How hard we tried to make a dwelling. Something of ourselves in the brief breath of what we knew to be our lives. The air remains still to be breathed. Remember the floorboards who took you in. How every step managed to impress them. Those who would not forget.

Line of fire

It’s you and me standing on the edge between two subway cars riding the seven line hands holding the rails facing each other on our way to a Mets game our faces are pressed into the afternoon hair waving watching the city pass us by with smiles unsure what the next stop is happy not knowing where the cops are stationed since we are committed to acts of violence against deadened hearts; our eyes catch the gaze of children moving the opposite direction we are role models in our histrionic display of true affection now you’re screaming fair play every strike every swing I’m in your line of fire even the moths don’t know the difference between the stadium lights that frame our smiles and the rising flame between a home run and a kiss what was once a bubble is now the whole of the crowd this game is us swinging keeping time at bay

FATHER'S DAY

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