A blade of grass touches her face:
a tiny hand through the fence
reaching out.
The sun turns yellow, brighter, white.
Show and tell me what you know.
I said we have a garden growing, let’s not let it die
standing outside.
The water poured down and I took a walk,
let it fall over me to keep conscious, stay alert enough
to notice the mailman moving between the houses and his truck
and back again.
I’m going to take a shower alone.
We wake up early in only grey light,
I cut your hair and you go.
Look at your hands when you miss me.
Today I stood in front of the mirror holding
scissors and cut my hair straight across.
When only three days before I was sitting down in
the shower it’s a cause for celebration to be standing.
She once told me, I wrote it down:
There are many ways to live.
We were together in a car, you had a camera
and I wore a candy ring as we drove through the
neighborhood. At a stop sign I glanced out the window,
watched a woman grab a cake and balloons from her car,
saw a banner fall and unravel down the driveway.
There aren’t any words to describe the ocean that haven’t been used before. That don’t seem obvious. It’s strong and vast and deep and wide. But everyone knows that. I guess what some don’t know is what the ocean does to people. I’ve seen people go there every day and stand in one spot, the same spot, and just stand watching. I’ve known people who live five minutes away and never go. They have an intense, inexplicable fear. They think it could pull them in—just like that, reach to the shore and with the force of a world of electrical currents take them away. But they have to live close, they have to be aware and around so they know they can resist.
Scatter; surround me, forever alive, forever well.
To be at once in a space and occupying a space are two disparate acts. Women know this, we are told this from birth: take up the least room, apologize if you’re too much—no extra skin spilling over. Ask a woman to move—I’m sorry, of course. Block her exit—I’m sorry, excuse me. Trip her—I’m sorry; I’m so clumsy.
She tried; she kept walking in an airport, refusing to be the one to move. She got hit with briefcases and suitcases, glared at.
She found me and tired, we moved to the airport church, where it was silent and empty. It had rows of blue cushioned chairs, a yellow light shining on a podium at the front. We stretched across the seats and slept, waking only to catch our flight.
If I only had a
ritual, something to center & calm
my nervous heartbeat
my nervous head.
You lie on my chest:
I hear it so fast.
In Florida a lizard crawled a fence
near your grandfather by the pool.
A plastic flamingo stared as I dove
in.
The old orange tree died, you know. We planted a new one.
The sky was colored blue, then grey, then
rain.
With words and books and everything on death
there is sometimes nothing left but complete and pure
focus, forward movement, no regret or sadness or
nostalgia or anything but me and you
right now.
With the turn of your head I’m happy and present, able to reach
the quick blackness of sleep with dreams of the Atlantic when I was
sixteen (or was it seventeen?) and craved the warmth of the hot sun.
I burned my skin on the sand, I stung my eyes with saltwater.
There were two goats greeting us at the Haitian village,
a crowd of children dusted with sweat and dirt.
We fed them candy and on the way home
outstretched our hands along the sugarcane fields,
knelt beneath the low hanging sky.
