Another January

Grass isn't growing under my feet; it is winter.

My days are easy, nothing changes. The sleepy office. The light pours through the glass walls all morning. Feed the fish. Answer phones. Sort the mail. Make the coffee. Clean the coffee pot at the end of each day.

Hours slouch by in lazy increments, measured in rounds of PopCap computer games. At 4 o'clock I walk 2 blocks home, aggressive evening filling my footprints.

He is at home; the apartment is warm because of him. And because our landlord pays for the oil. lift some weights. Hot running water. Cuddle on the couch, then wash dishes, then make dinner. When she comes home we eat together. Then shopping, then laundry. Doctor Appointments and Stopping By Mom's.The daily details of Our Life Together. TV shows and videos and video games, until we can't sleep, or else bedtime and nightmares, and ghosts from the past. old pain like brown stains in the hardwood. Under the rugs, you know they're still there.

It is those old marks on the heart still pulling on me. My feet itch. My thoughts buzz like a broken radio that keeps flipping stations.

Gypsy blood. The kind that ignites if kept still for too long.

The road as I am walking home pulls me; true north to a needle. I wish the frozen ponds were roaming oceans. The train whistle is a fish-hook in my heart. Names that I love are too thick across my tongue. They want homes and houses and feel safe inside the word “Stay.”

“Stay” is a noose getting tight around my neck. A Better Life is the hangman. The outlaw in me wants Dillinger days. A few more before I start swinging.

The sky outside threatens weather. A Winter Storm.

I want to walk home tonight in the snow. To look up at the white swirling down.

I want to turn my face to the black behind the white and fall up into it, away from the earth and everything.

Things Too Heavy

Memory collection fails me; I'm terrible at taking pictures.

Souvenirs inspire me to fiction. It pours like water over the inky facts of the moment and smudges them into impressioned sentiment. Sea glass has me thinking of the day we found Atlantis, not a sunrise spent walking and worrying the future. The smell of blooming lotus; I dream waterlily seas, and sailing to the moon. Drinking by the lake with you is blurred in the reflection.

I am the Monet of remembrance.

So I cannot remember what I said that day, that inspired you to stay with me through so much that came after. I can't recall the secret you said you'd never told before and would never say again, or even the scientific discussion that kept us talking for over 10 hours.

When I think of you I only see the sleepy autumn in your hair, and the weight in your smile

when you realized you loved me.

Zugunruhe

I mixed cinnamon and honey

in my coffee this morning.

I wanted to hold

the desert in my mouth again.

I miss the hot wind

and the promise

of the lonely unexpected.

I miss a sky the color of

all the voices of God.

My cigarette does not taste enough

of the fires of California.

The Nor'Easter outside does not

contain the spices of

the Santa Anas.

I have been too long from the road.

I love...

The smell of roasting pumpkin seeds
watching the little kids walk home from school
full moon nights, the sky scrubbed with clouds
the shine of wet leaves on a brick sidewalk
California sleeping in the far off distance
unlocking doors
my lover's breath between my shoulderblades, cold hands between my thighs
bells in the morning
pealing pistachios
honeycrisp apples dusted with cinnamon
accordions
naked trees rippled upside down in puddles
a cigarette and coffee in the cold outside morning waiting for the train
tucking him in before I leave for work
crysanthamum petals edged in frost
warming cold coffee cups with hot water now that it is November.

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These Evil Nightmares

And I keep dreaming that I'm drowning, in a sea of my own blood
and you keep screaming you will save me, but you don't know how to swim.

In My Room the Women Come and Go

If only they would limit their discussions to art.


Instead, they lament, voices plaintive and thick, slurred with alcohol and death.

Go away, mournful ghosts. I do not want to know the weight of your sad hearts, the texture of your scars.


Why pour your misery into me with such intimate whispering? You have no secrets. You splashed everything out in bright blood blossoms all over your pages for everyone to read, the neglect of parents, the betrayals of husbands and lovers, the abuse and abandonment of your children. You have no secrets left. Your words and memories should be enough to carry all your guilt. Your ghosts should not even exist. And still.



Even when I sleep, your voices drill into my head, mewing complaints forcing me awake. I spend my time in your cigarette garden, whiskey watered guilt-flowers stinking up the landscape.



God, given me back the bachelor butchers: the General, the Surgeon, the bleak and sour-faced soul-reeking priest.

I'm more comfortable with demons bent on destroying me than these mad, mournful ghost-ladies clawing for pity, tearing my heart into strips, swallowing the pieces.

With All Due Respect.

And now a toast to my drunken formothers, Dorothy, Anne, and Sylvia, Virginia, Zelda and poor, sad Vivienne, "Dear Muses, thanks, but no thanks. I will decline your fame and hearbreak and die content in benign obscurity. Take your gin and genius and leave me just my sanity. Amen."

A Reminder

When there is a day or a stretch of days or a year that is so hard that all the sweetness goes out of the sky, when Music is no longer luscious, and food and fabrics and words are leeched of all their precious taste and touch and the lists of life's amazements mock rather than comfort, when someone says, "I love you" and you say, "It doesn't matter," this is as bad as it gets. It isn't a question of pills and razorblades but of walking out of your own life forever and not even stopping to say goodbye.

Walking until you just dissolve, and who knows what's become of you?

Unless someone says, "It matters to me."

It's a pin through the heart and it hurts but it keeps you there. It's a chain of names and faces far too heavy but they anchor you.

You cannot drift; you will not come to nothing.

When it is as bad as it gets, balanced on that edge and about to fall

there is nothing left that can be done, or undone or wished or said except, "I love you, that is all."

Between the Boy and the Bees

1.

Is this going to be one of those days?
Everything reminds me of you,

the Honeybear,
the radio buzzing out of tune,

the cranefly on the windowsill,
back legs crushed:
useless and dangling.


2.

Our Mother's voice,
cracking with static electricity
jolts the sleep right out of me.

Last night it got too hard for you
to breathe,
and they took you in an ambulance.
"Infection. Complications. Tests."
Of what things she said
that's all I heard.

Now my own breath catches
and I wait for words to see,
if, with the coming weeks
you will vanish, like the bees.


3.

On Monday you called to say,
"Melissa,
all the honeybees are leaving."

The use of my true name
sent a shiver straight
through my skin.

In my legs, a hum
like a hundred
thousand pairs
of missing wings.

"Dying," I said,
thick and low, but
"No. Just disappearing."

You told me the mystery.
Abandoned hives, still and empty,
no predators nearby,
no poisons, parasites,
no bodies.
I told you it worried me.

Your reply stretched like golden glass,
a sparkling amber about to smash.
"I'm not worried for the bees,
just for human beings, maybe.
What will we do if they all go?
What do bees know
that we don't?"

Translucent words
too bright with wonder,
so sun-kissed sweet they
made me shudder.
If the bees come back,
will you get better?

4.

The wounded cranefly at the window
dances up the glass,
legs swinging in
a broken jig.

I stir my coffee with cream and honey.
You've been eating Royal Jelly,
pollen, honeycomb and nectar.

It gives you strange dreams
but they say it's good medicine.

I dream of you going away with them.
I dream of your back
split open with wings.


5.

This is one of those days.
Everything reminds me of you.

On my cafe table,
on my lunch break,
an arrangement of sunflowers
poses for a picture.

One droops dying,
seeds swollen,
petals wilted.

The other,
yellow corona bursting in
full bloom,
attracts a dusty bumblebee,

6 legs strong
and fat with pollen.