1247 Love poems

In the error thinking of non-intervention with you. A red sun (don’t look) pokes through. Staging development and the cutting loose of its facile integrity its disproportionate personal non-response. The wince. The shrug. The belated semi-acknowledgment of owning just enough to take part. In the era, thinking of you will quit my job in one year to get more done, work harder to insert myself into the fragile extension of space between us to get something done. In the ear thinking after you.

but lake winds pick him up & blow him into the clouds. I married a dreamer. I wait. He stops to listen to the early lilac orchestra. He starts to change into blowy horizontal lake rain, then migrating red admirals. I thinksay remember. I remember us. We chose the imaginal north/south somewhere between Bartlett Avenue and Jupiter, between Lake Michigan and the Aegean. Remember we drink Serbian Cosmos together, we eat squash blossoms and red snapper soup. We visit the Calatrava before bed. We nurture a magnetic field of words. I am remembering you back. Remembering plays time. Thinking is all remembering. I remember our young bodies. I'm not finished with us. Remember that. If someone asks, "why is that lady out walking in that lake storm?" Tell them "months ago her husband went to the store in a blizzard & never came back." Tell them: "She can't stop looking for him.”

He marked the page with a match and fell asleep in mid-kiss, while I, a queen bee in a disturbed hive, stay up and buzz: half a kingdom for a honey drop, half a lifetime for a tender word! His face, half turned. Half past midnight. Half past one.

I’m so tired of pretending each gesture is meaningless, that the clattering of niu leaves and the guttural call of birds overhead say nothing. There are reasons why the lichen and moss kākau the niu’s bark, why this tree has worn an ahu of ua and lā since birth. Scars were carved into its trunk to record the mo‘olelo of its being by the passage of insects becoming one to move the earth, speck by speck. Try to tell them to let go of the niu rings marking each passing year, to abandon their only home and move on. I can’t pretend there is no memory held in the dried coconut hat, the star ornament, the midribs bent and dangling away from their roots, no thought behind the kāwelewele that continues to hold us steady. There was a time before they were bent under their need to make an honest living, when each frond was bound by its life to another like a long, erect fin skimming the surface of a sea of grass and sand. Eventually, it knew it would rise higher, its flower would emerge gold, then darken in the sun, that its fruit would fall, only to ripen before its brown fronds bent naturally under the weight of such memory, back toward the trunk to drop to the sand, back to its beginnings, again. Let this be enough to feed us, to remember: ka wailewa i loko, that our own bodies are buoyant when they bend and fall, and that the ocean shall carry us and weave us back into the sand’s fabric, that the mo‘opuna taste our sweet.

I swallowed the sweet thing in a dream. I woke up heavy. I said, what’s the matter with you. I said, stop seeing what’s the matter with me. I ran to/from only moving one frantic eye. Something snitched. Then back to the argument. It is more acceptable to steal from the ether. When you said, we take matters into our own hands. I didn’t start the day with a ritual. Again. Twenty days and counting! I said, I was supposed to address my wrongs to you. The sweetgrass still in its plastic. Keep it there for its poetry? Then the driftwood resting on my father’s ashes. Well, you said, ecstasy from a fluted throat. Ha. As if there were presence enough in me to notice, before this. I said, I’m less angry now that you don’t exist. Then the aha moment announced. Whistling nothing like wind through fistulae. That happens here. Left to my own devices, I said. As if language were a refuge. As though the sound of walls.

He was touched or he touched or she did and was, or they were and would. Or the room could, its three doors, two windows or the house on a slant touching, touched by the drift down street, cars pressing quick or slowing. All along the town touched a river, the river the filth falling through it. What was clean— a source pure as rumor—a shore touching lake touched by wind above, and below, a spring. All touch blindly further water. That blue touching blacker regions in the sea so weirdly solitary, each to under, to every sideways past deeper, where nowhere.

“I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty.” —Confucius Dolorous, here he made his stand Like those who are beaten, Behind, the mountains, and in front, the sea, To the west a rock by the brown river eaten. Here beauty went along the strand Smashing green waves against the white sand. “Beyond the rock there, that’s his thatch.” So spoke up a neighbor. “And you’ll be finding leather string on latch And him inside, at peace from labor.” So he was run in, the fox to his earth, He the old reaver, warm by his hearth, But where was the booty, the gems and doubloons Filched from fat merchants by tropical moons? He, of all pirates prime hierophant, No swords, no silver, no silk of Levant? “Four things,” he answered, “of all things that are: A rock, a river, a tree and a star!” This is his wisdom? He welcomed me ill; I passed by the tree and strove up the hill. This is the saying of one wise as he? A river, a rock, a star and a tree? This is the place, the shrine of the sage, Who lived his last days with beauty for wage. Here’s where the tree was long ago humbled, And a space points us out where granite has crumbled. The river is empty, and a wind sweeps the stones; The stars are not whiter than freebooter’s bones.

Were you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead: Nor would you rise and hasten away, Though you have the will of wild birds, But know your hair was bound and wound About the stars and moon and sun: O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.

The heart shifts shape of its own accord— from bird to ax, from pinwheel to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest, a brown bear groggy with winter, skips like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent, the corn dog stand. Or the heart is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead wait, paging through magazines, licking their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks through a door into a maze of hallways. Behind one door a roomful of orchids, behind another, the smell of burned toast. The rooms go on and on: sewing room with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles, room full of file cabinets and torn curtains, room buzzing with a thousand black flies. Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke, a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt. Heart makes a wrong turn. Heart locked in its gate of thorns. Heart with its hands folded in its lap. Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake. It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down. Bored, it watches movies deep into the night, stands by the window counting the streetlamps squinting out one by one. Heart with its hundred mouths open. Heart with its hundred eyes closed. Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel, heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence. Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked in devoted rows, their dusty spines unreadable. Heart with its hands full. Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history's lists, things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart. Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal. Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues. Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe. Heart with its feet up reading the scores. Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster. Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club, banging on the lid.

She has painted her lips hibiscus pink. The upper lip dips perfectly in the center like a Valentine heart. It makes sense to me— that the lips, the open ah of the mouth is shaped more like a heart than the actual human heart. I remember the first time I saw it— veined and shiny as the ooze of a snail— if this were what we had been taught to draw how differently we might have learned to love.