61 Heartbreak poems

What is this about losing respect? Do I have to talk about it? He said he feared what I might write about him when he was gone, and I told him not to worry. He worried about the “streak of morbidity” in your work. He was a man of God, not of imagination. And it wasn’t his fault if he got the shakes. It was a familial tremor, not nerves. And it first happened at a gravesite. Near where Brigham Young did his number—“this is the place.” He called him Friggin Young. Well, during his bleak tenure in Greenville, his congregants would tell nigger jokes and he would force a smile—afraid now to rock the boat— a mere exercise in stretching the corners of his lips— a fake grin he would have noted on another face—false faces being one of the things we loved to laugh about when together we observed congregants’ idiosyncracies, their ruses, their guises, like one temple president, the son of the “richest Jew in Salt Lake” who, seated in the pulpit’s other red velvet wing chair, would expose the holes in the soles of his shoes while he batted his eyelashes to wake himself up— (though I owe him one: “Rosencavalier” didn’t turn me in for copying the wrong answers from Mary Weinstein on our “final exam” in Sunday school prior to       confirmation. He was ashamed for me, young Rosencavalier. He could hardly disguise the curled lips and downcast eyes of his contempt for this lawless “Rabbi’s son” whether or not my name was Strome or Rudman, but where teaching Judaism was concerned his plodding methodical reading to keep up each week was a pathetic substitution for Sidney’s well-wrought, impromptu riffs. So there!) Marty was ashamed of me. I left town. As night was falling? * In Utah you can drive at fifteen so by age fourteen a lot of our talk was hard core car talk and somehow the word Volkswagen came up after confirmation class (it was no GTO but you could drive so far on so little gas...) and Marty’s father—a redhead like his son— made his way up the driveway’s ice, smoke billowing from the exhaust of whatever sleek black foreign car he drove. Pulling on his elegant pigskin gloves he announced he’d “never buy a Kraut    car.” I was    bewildered (what, hold against a country now something that happened so long    ago?) and he held my gaze and I shivered inside the shiver I felt from the cold    I thought he would transmogrify into a southern sheriff and ask “what kind of    Jew are you    boy” but he didn’t have to say another word. * In other words you were ready to leave town. I’d had it with Utah. But you wanted to stay in the west, against your father’s wishes? Yes. Unequivocally? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you did submit to psychiatrists and interviews with the heads of schools during your sojourn in the east that summer?

"You can be so inconsiderate." "You are too sensitive." "Then why don't you take my feelings into consideration?" "If you weren't so sensitive it wouldn't matter." • "You seem to really care about me only when you want me to do something for you." "You do too much for people." • "I thought you were going home because you were too tired to go with me to a bar." "I was. But Norman didn't want to come here alone." •

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they’re wasted— I never see myself, standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand. That’s why I can’t account for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends. In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous. People like me, who seem selfless, we’re the cripples, the liars; we’re the ones who should be factored out in the interest of truth. When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers. Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas red and bright pink. If you want the truth, you have to close yourself to the older daughter, block her out: when a living thing is hurt like that, in its deepest workings, all function is altered. That’s why I’m not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind.

All my stories are about being left, all yours about leaving. So we should have known. Should have known to leave well enough alone; we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put our cards on the table, your card was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t get till 4 am, so tired from wanting what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads, we’d lost our minds.Love, I wanted to call you so fast. But so slow you could taste each letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear. L, love, for let’s wait.O, for oh no, let’s not.V for the precious v between your deep breasts (and the virtue of your fingers in the voluptuous center of me.) Okay,E for enough. Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . . But not so wrong to try. That means taking a lot of walks, which neither of us is good at, for different reasons, and nights up till 2 arguing whose reasons are better. Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13 years my marriage. 5 years you my friend. 4th of July weekend when something that begins in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods so we can keep the crazy beads clicking, clicking. It wasn’t a question of a perfect fit. Theoretically, it should be enough to say I left a man for a woman (90% of the world is content to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman lost her nerve, I left for greater concerns: when words like autonomy were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on; bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket to call one, then the other, or to call one twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him— remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly, but two sheets of glass to shiver between. This is called being street-smart: dialing a number that you know won’t be answered, but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried. And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called hedging your bets? I fish out my other coin, turn it over in my fingers, press it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

I called up tech and got the voicemail code. It’s taken me this long to find my feet. Since last we spoke that evening it has snowed. Fifty-four new messages. Most are old and blinking into a future months complete. I contacted tech to get my voicemail code to hear your voice, not some bozo on the road the week of Thanksgiving dubbing me his sweet and breaking up and bleating how it snowed the Nashville side of Chattanooga and slowed the beltway to a standstill. The radio said sleet. The kid in tech sent on my voicemail code. I blew a night on lightening the system’s load, woke to white enveloping the trees, the street that’s blanked out by my leaving. It had snowed. Lately others’ pasts will turn me cold. I heard out every message, pressed delete. I’d happily forget my voice, the mail, its code. We spoke at last that evening. Then it snowed.

I said love because it came closest said leave because you did we do this peeling off each from each each from suddenly other said come back but meant don't go I said dead and meant every one of those instances of vanishment how the dead swim away from us in time their tide their closed wooden boats I said tide but tide was never right said tide because we have no word for that kind of unforgiving away I said tether when I meant anchor when I meant stay but when I said stay one thing I meant was against confusion against yet another loss I meant two-faced Janus January's god of fallen gates of trying to look both ways and when I said farewell I meant again don't go but it was too late I was here in the hall this tunnel full of mirrors glass and strange made-up faces and when I thought funhouse I meant its opposite I meant this rusty carnival town the men so sad they paint their smiles in place they paint their faces white paint their eyes wide and full of crying

They thought the trouble was over, they thought they had talked it all out, it was a mistake, she’d said, this infatuation for someone else which had turned suddenly too serious, she could see that now. But they thought there was nothing left of it, their nerves had been rubbed so raw through bouts of anger, shame, even love, so many words had come and gone between them that they couldn’t easily remember what they’d said, what they’d imagined. But it didn’t matter now, they thought they had gotten over something difficult, something which had felt immovable, the long unbearable ache which had become too much a habit, and they were celebrating in their way, having dinner at a new expensive place where they had no history of being together, where they expected nothing. They were sipping wine, a deep rich red, the waiter was hovering over them like a generous uncle and they were selecting everything he had suggested— how good to be in his hands for awhile! Soon it was happening, the old ardor was coming back, they were beginning to flirt with one another, the way she said baby, the way his shoulder was brushing hers, the way they were allowing themselves to think for the first time in a long time of the good sex they might later have, the after-talk which would be easy and low. And maybe he hadn’t meant what he was about to say, maybe when she remarked how she loved the leek soup it was the wine in him, his jauntiness, that made him ask what else she loved, jokingly at first, whether she loved the stuffed mushrooms on his plate, the braised beef, or maybe she loved what others were having, this one in the dark suit, or that one with the coyly unbuttoned collar, or maybe she loved the whole damn menu in fact, he couldn’t help himself, the words came pouring forth, spilling all over the table. And it was not until late at night when she’d finally gone to her room and closed herself off from him in sleep that he stopped talking and remembered only half of what he’d said because he’d said too much, created too much damage, crossed some boundary he had avoided most of his life. Maybe it was desert, maybe tundra, or the white insinuating madness of the polar ice cap, but wherever he was was strange and dangerous, and somehow dazzling for all that, and only in the morning would he know for better or worse in which direction each of them would be walking it, though never had he felt, as he had tonight, so permissive with himself, so luxuriously tactless, having said again and again the words he thought he could never bear to use, so suddenly commonplace, so readily available to him now.

You said I will pull you out of my body in 237 ways. What you wanted was beautifully to sever things. Here love: the same things. changed. Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though you were the one who was sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would. You, who are a valley of no, I hear the music leaking. (How she. How she. How I.) You say low key and I do not believe you. I forgive everything: the perseveration of skin. My hands that are a chopping block and I cannot touch him. I cannot touch him without not touching me. Because if you leave, and you are already leaving, there are three. But you say less than three. And the couch, in your absence, is crenellated. And who is going to watch us as we leave. To add to the list of changing things: life preservers are no longer about preservation. They have become less holy. P F D = personal flotation device. Endlessly possible. Unlike wood. Stacey May Fowles wants a lover who will hit her. (I do not believe in submission.) I want you to erase me. This is a kindness. A kindness you tell me. A kindness I do not deserve. On the floor. By the bed. Hotel Congress. March 19, 2005. Room #23. We are a long way from disintegrated. You said Now. Look at me. And I did. And you bloomed. (When my mother died, I will say. Many years after my mother has died. But I will not believe her. I'll be like my grandmother who despite my parade of girlfriends and her profession that nobody should be mean to them, still doesn't believe in being queer. I don't believe in being dead, I'll tell my dead mother. And just like you she'll repeat herself.Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New.) I expect there will be a morning when you walk up to this very gate while I am sitting here. I know this. I know you less each time I see you. I know this like I know you are more lonely than glass. To your languishing. To your bubbly. To your recent. To your hologram. To your desperately. To your seeking. To your dictaphone. To your you. Neuromuscular facilitation is just another way of saying Vancouver. Always is yet a matter of roller derby. Just in love with you. You, more than sleep. In the top drawer is a photograph of them touching. It is not so much that it is a photograph. It is that it is a depiction of what. not could. I want to tell you about my body. About testosterone as unwitting art historian. About recovery. Me(n). What it feels like underneath there. The part you cannot know. but should. Either way. It's a house. It's a house like everyone else has. I take things away. I don't take them for good. How delirious must we sound when we are falling. I miss you, you can't even imagine. And how bad at math.Less than three. Less than three. Less than three. And what if. I completely remember it wrong. What if I remember there were two of us. And then what if. there was only one death. I do not believe in the existence of holes that lead to nowhere. Muscle memory remains an enigma. Still, you can touch her. You cannot touch her without not touching me. (And still) you are not not a part of me. The world is uncharacteristically unresponsive. I could thank you. You stay with me. like grass.

Since so ye please to hear me plain, And that ye do rejoice my smart, Me list no lenger to remain To such as be so overthwart. But cursed be that cruel heart Which hath procur’d a careless mind For me and mine unfeigned smart, And forceth me such faults to find. More than too much I am assured Of thine intent, whereto to trust; A speedless proof I have endured, And now I leave it to them that lust.

You don’t listen to what I say. When I lean towards you in the car You simply smile and turn away. It’s been like this most of the day, sitting and sipping, bar after bar: You don’t listen to what I say. You squeeze a lemon from a tray, And if you guess how dear you are You simply smile and turn away. Beyond the hairline of the bay the steamers call that shore is far. You don’t listen to what I say: Surely there’s another way? The waiter brings a small guitar. You simply smile and turn away. Sometimes I think you are too gay, smiling and smiling, hour after hour. You don’t listen to what I say. You simply smile and turn away.