I once hid in the closet
to be with my being
especially to be
unneeded –
how the sun erases all
the little stars, and
I was contained there,
or was it with pressure
how I filled with unsafe
words in the first life –
would the stones not
have shaken when I
began to yell - would
mom still have died
if she had stayed with me
and I had stayed with her
when she tried to come back
and said she was sorry,
too insincerely – would she
have said I wasn't wrong
to save myself if we
had one more chance
and do I even need it;
anyway, she told me once,
children ruin a person's life
only a handful of years
after she left
and nonetheless I thought
too often I was weak,
made like taffy, of push
and pull, sweet
and ephemeral, once
believing need must
mostly go unmet,
same her sorrow grew;
the cruelty she could
never look at too
closely without panic,
so instead, I tried to wear
my father's blue sweater
when I turned thirteen,
backside-front
like an armor,
hands hidden in the
too long sleeves
where nobody could
suddenly grasp me, and
she thought I was just
a tomboy, she would say,
when I began to do this
but really I had no idea
how to speak except
in these ways – a little
warm, but smooth
as a mirror
in every frightening
moment that followed –
having like a tree
in a drought drops
the leaves; I pushed
into my own roots
beyond any reach
every joy and win,
same all the little stars
grow bright behind the sun
when the sun does one day, dim.
Tag: survival
Surfside
A stone in the sand
dents me
at the edge of frailty –
I am of parts, jagged as
the coastline where
the tide pushed,
having gone far now
from the beginning
like my mother went
back, where waters were
warm, where the ocean
kept a song of us she
never stopped loving,
and she tried more than
many will need
having, on cruelty,
a softness she built up
and beneath it a knife
always ready;
sensing it there
held even in sleep,
the forced inattention to
giggle when she would laugh to
stay silent unless agreeing –
and I existed in fable
taking on too much water
and snapped as the rebar
too solid and needy broke,
and dropped in pieces
like every stone
left in places I felt free –
every bit of that old heart
except what gave purpose
left behind, grabbing
at leaves and sky, ravenous
feeling their immortality, their
constant warmth like
a mother’s love,
gone before it was gone.
Forced Evolution
The bus is late again
and sleep's been short
a tooth on the tongue
sharpened,
but hi, the weather x,
you say, and yes
to chocolate from
a stranger -
too sweet fluttering
the heart with its
refined sugar,
same how caught
on a train track
it raced and emptied
of self, knowing
how sleep snatches
in the long night
and never wakes,
but arrives
repeatedly into being
like every day since
as if an eddy on a wave
could change course.
So you let the bus
leave, made cold
and troubled
like a cobra poised
above its own center
on thresholds of violence
and mercy, and find instead
the warmth of a sunny rock
to count the petals
on clovers
in the weedy grass
could a crown of stems
beyond the ordinary
be made -
a root of self
tethered to its own
shaping - would this
woken dream, depart.
