Cartography
You’re all the way across an ocean
(blue like your eyes aren't, salt like the beachglass I found for you),
which makes you one-third of the world away from me
and neither measurement feels
any the smaller,
any the more breachable.
Your skin snagged on mine,
darlingest, is the appropriate distance.
I want to map the green delta
of the veins inside your wrists and elbows,
want to camp in the sunrise-flush foothills
surrounding your nipples, want
to hike the bony ridge anchoring your back, want to swim
in the salty lake of your collarbone's notch.
You are my native land,
the first place I have ever been where I have not had to learn the shapes of the coins.
Here, the embarrassing stories of my childhood are folklore,
and the word I whisper into the sharp peak of your hipbone
is the tongue of angels,
all sibilants and singing hisses, the language of the divine.
(My imaginary friends live just up the river of your smile.)
Everywhere is foreign now, everywhere
where you are not,
even myself,
because I am not you, no matter how much
I wish to slip inside your skin,
find out what it feels like when I touch you with intent,
as opposed to just finding your skin momentarily under my fingertips.
The difference is as minute
as the distance between your mouth and mine the instant between kisses
and as important; there are many things
that, I suppose, are objectively more important, more valuable to human existence,
but I am not a journalist.
I am free to use simile, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, alliteration,
aposiopesis, to describe you; but I don't think I'll bother. The bayou of your bones,
shoulderbladed mesas, are what I want. I know the landscape I'm stumbling toward.
Giving directions would be pointless – no one else can read
the map etched on the whorls of my fingertips,
and no one else has a passport to the country
of your heart. I'll ask only
for a ride to the coast, "drop me off at the exit,"
head east into the sunrise,
singing nonsense under my breath, watching the road ahead of me
flood in crimson and rose,
and I will turn up on your doorstep one day,
your borders opening as I fall into your arms,
jump off the mountain and tumble into your valley.
Soon as I can, dearling, soon.
Confession
I built her skeleton in my imaginarium.
A fantastical arrangement of muscle and tendon,
her body was a quantum thing.
Schroedinger's beloved.
I arranged her veins,
her lashes,
chose the color of her eyes to match
the branches of the tree outside my window.
I used to believe there was nothing under her skin but wings.
If you cut her, she would fly.
Elegy
I have been trying to write
an elegy
for my grandfather.
This goes against all I have been taught:
my mother, his daughter,
is a teacher of English.
I have grown up
among the slippery definitions
of poetry.
An elegy is a lament
for the dead;
specifically for the beloved dead.
He was a man of many talents:
he was an artist of no little skill, he was a good dancer.
(jesus he was a handsome man)
He is perched in his wheelchair
on the other side of the dining-room table,
but he's as gone as if he'd been tucked in his coffin these ten years past.
He isn't in that waiting coffin. He isn't here.
Whoever I am not writing about is
gone.
There is no one in that wheelchair,
carbon and oxygen molecules, iron blood, organic chemistry working,
or not working.
How am I supposed to write
a lament
when all I want to say is --
I wish
you'd died long ago,
back when we'd have grieved.
I can't mourn him now;
when he finally gives up the ghost
and becomes one himself, I'll be relieved.
No more worry that I'll have to watch him
be erased from the world
like one of his paintings doused in turpentine.
I'll finally be able to paint the doorjambs in the apartment
that his wheelchair has scratched and dented;
until he goes, I can't fix anything here.
We're waiting for him to die.
We don't say it,
we aren't so heartless.
I wonder, though, which would be crueler:
the heart attack, the fall down a flight of concrete stairs,
and the living, pulsing regret at the things left unsaid, undone.
Or the long, drawn-out, wish
for release, like the last exhaled breath, for ourselves
as much as him.
We're all trapped with him in that wheelchair,
strapped in, and we can't get out of it now,
can't escape it.
We've all become my grandfather,
subject to his increasingly-frail body,
attuned to his pain and frustrated by his inability to speak:
to say goodbye. Mozart wrote his own funeral requiem;
but I'm not Mozart, and I can't write
an elegy for myself.
You’re all the way across an ocean
(blue like your eyes aren't, salt like the beachglass I found for you),
which makes you one-third of the world away from me
and neither measurement feels
any the smaller,
any the more breachable.
Your skin snagged on mine,
darlingest, is the appropriate distance.
I want to map the green delta
of the veins inside your wrists and elbows,
want to camp in the sunrise-flush foothills
surrounding your nipples, want
to hike the bony ridge anchoring your back, want to swim
in the salty lake of your collarbone's notch.
You are my native land,
the first place I have ever been where I have not had to learn the shapes of the coins.
Here, the embarrassing stories of my childhood are folklore,
and the word I whisper into the sharp peak of your hipbone
is the tongue of angels,
all sibilants and singing hisses, the language of the divine.
(My imaginary friends live just up the river of your smile.)
Everywhere is foreign now, everywhere
where you are not,
even myself,
because I am not you, no matter how much
I wish to slip inside your skin,
find out what it feels like when I touch you with intent,
as opposed to just finding your skin momentarily under my fingertips.
The difference is as minute
as the distance between your mouth and mine the instant between kisses
and as important; there are many things
that, I suppose, are objectively more important, more valuable to human existence,
but I am not a journalist.
I am free to use simile, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, alliteration,
aposiopesis, to describe you; but I don't think I'll bother. The bayou of your bones,
shoulderbladed mesas, are what I want. I know the landscape I'm stumbling toward.
Giving directions would be pointless – no one else can read
the map etched on the whorls of my fingertips,
and no one else has a passport to the country
of your heart. I'll ask only
for a ride to the coast, "drop me off at the exit,"
head east into the sunrise,
singing nonsense under my breath, watching the road ahead of me
flood in crimson and rose,
and I will turn up on your doorstep one day,
your borders opening as I fall into your arms,
jump off the mountain and tumble into your valley.
Soon as I can, dearling, soon.
Confession
I built her skeleton in my imaginarium.
A fantastical arrangement of muscle and tendon,
her body was a quantum thing.
Schroedinger's beloved.
I arranged her veins,
her lashes,
chose the color of her eyes to match
the branches of the tree outside my window.
I used to believe there was nothing under her skin but wings.
If you cut her, she would fly.
Elegy
I have been trying to write
an elegy
for my grandfather.
This goes against all I have been taught:
my mother, his daughter,
is a teacher of English.
I have grown up
among the slippery definitions
of poetry.
An elegy is a lament
for the dead;
specifically for the beloved dead.
He was a man of many talents:
he was an artist of no little skill, he was a good dancer.
(jesus he was a handsome man)
He is perched in his wheelchair
on the other side of the dining-room table,
but he's as gone as if he'd been tucked in his coffin these ten years past.
He isn't in that waiting coffin. He isn't here.
Whoever I am not writing about is
gone.
There is no one in that wheelchair,
carbon and oxygen molecules, iron blood, organic chemistry working,
or not working.
How am I supposed to write
a lament
when all I want to say is --
I wish
you'd died long ago,
back when we'd have grieved.
I can't mourn him now;
when he finally gives up the ghost
and becomes one himself, I'll be relieved.
No more worry that I'll have to watch him
be erased from the world
like one of his paintings doused in turpentine.
I'll finally be able to paint the doorjambs in the apartment
that his wheelchair has scratched and dented;
until he goes, I can't fix anything here.
We're waiting for him to die.
We don't say it,
we aren't so heartless.
I wonder, though, which would be crueler:
the heart attack, the fall down a flight of concrete stairs,
and the living, pulsing regret at the things left unsaid, undone.
Or the long, drawn-out, wish
for release, like the last exhaled breath, for ourselves
as much as him.
We're all trapped with him in that wheelchair,
strapped in, and we can't get out of it now,
can't escape it.
We've all become my grandfather,
subject to his increasingly-frail body,
attuned to his pain and frustrated by his inability to speak:
to say goodbye. Mozart wrote his own funeral requiem;
but I'm not Mozart, and I can't write
an elegy for myself.
