count the possibilities on your toes this time, as if they were suddenly released from the grip of boots too small for feet meant to kiss the earth. Walk until your feet need rest and rest. Worry for awhile and let the sand remind you of rocks and change. Then go and find yourself on the other side of the shore where love always fits in places it once couldn’t.
You’re a painting You’re a body of photographs framed in a movie reel –
You’re music You’re a guitar that sings on love-stained strings –
You’re something to behold a rose never to touch a smile just for show –
Does the hunger ever end? even in romance and pretense even in more-than-just–friends –
You’re poetry You’re heaved sonnets to a delicate love song– An Oliver and a Dickinson
in a world that wants Cummings and Nerudas –
Hold on. Forget to have have fun. Rerun every kiss you ever held like tomorrow won’t come.
Watch the sun paint the sky in thankless strokes. Let your mind play roulette with all your hopes. Tell yourself you have to do this alone. Remind yourself you’ll never find yourself and your way back home.
Don’t confess what a mess you are. Count your sins and every scar. Convince yourself you still want what you don’t want and let the Myrtle tree out front shed her pink dress without the lonely eyes of her only witness.
You didn’t text me on my birthday. I know I know, I walked away but you asked if you could even when everything was breaking between us in that burning room and now I’m breaking and thought you would save me, like you always did. But still, perhaps, you knew, like you always did, what my heart needed most, and gave that to me instead. You, the better put-together half, are still saving me, even after all this time.
You miss her. You want to tell her you miss her. You want to say you feel lost and alone, that you feel like you’re the world’s biggest dunce every morning when you wake up empty-handed every empty-handed minute before nightfall. But she’s not what you need right now. You need to confront, with compassion, whatever it is that led you here. You need to let go of the dreams and fantasies and to root yourself in reality. You need to be and to become the one you need. It’s difficult to let go of what you loved, so be patient
I’m eating my last bowl of oatmeal, looking outside the window of a life that was meant for us. It’s perfectly framed:
You in the sunlit kitchen singing dad rock making ciabatta, swaying your small hips to rhythms still foreign to me
and I endlessly pondering how to fit all of it onto evenly spaced lines.
Love was delicious to you. The tomatoes you grew welcomed eating and everything else that needed to be tasted.
I hold the world In a single equation.
Don’t forget to express the bifurcations.
A flap in the wind A sudden change of heart I have accounted for every unknown start.
But what of love and culture and all the -isms too?
It is all certain in the limit of time.
But until then what will you do?
In the nook of this morning there is the urge for busyness and meaning. But the golden has just hopped between two humans musing about the sun. How difficult, she thinks, to be so thoughtful. Her neck cranes downward toward the dirty floorboards takes a whiff of what is missing and suddenly remembers the shape of dirt.
Look at what all these years have done to your hands. The hands of a man born on two shorelines, hands that make knives pirouette on stained bamboo boards. You still season the chicken with ginger and sarcasm, and your pho reminds us that all love needs is bones and water. I’ve tried writing the steps down, but what recipe could ever contain you? Who could hope to recreate what you have touched? God has made his attempts but the angel you once held wants nothing more than your hands again.
Hunched over in your garden like a daylily on the boardwalk watching the world spin faster and faster on its slant axis. You still water the plants we bought for you three summers ago, as if you were still showering us with your wordless love, your thankless devotion, praying one day that we will grow back in your direction.