Bowerbird

Shall I grow daisies or delphinium

At the door, or would you prefer flowers

Carefully cut and drinking from a vase?
A hundred seashells from a dozen seas

Adorn the steps. I have captured the sun

In a jar, snuff it out if you desire

Darkness. Shall I show you all that shimmers?

A hoard of gold and silver, mere marbles

But I will stretch them to a braided band

If ever you should wish to wear a crown.

The wind like the fluttering of feathers

Chills me for a moment, you disappear.

Plastic milk caps, glinting foil, copper coins—

I was a fool to hope you could be fooled. 

Oubliette

My love, I called out but you would not sing.

Lanterns in my temple darkened. The moon

Shone crimson. No owl or insect was heard.

I lit a match beneath that sharp shadow.

I held it until my fingertips singed.

I quickly lit another. Nothing moved.

I was alone and had no grand desire

But your arms around me. Impossible.

I will not need to call your name again.

Light a match! Tremble at my blasphemy!

For I have made another one of you,

And I have imprisoned that one within me.

Shake Off the Dust

You can keep something on a shelf too long—

Batteries drained of blood, slack elastic,

Motionless clothes remembered by the moths.

Ink hardens. Paper turns to light, then air.

For all these years I drank my coffee black.

In some way it was like seeing her face.

I would claim it was all unbearable,

To suffer being replaced and replaced

Until the sky froze and the moon fell down,

But I can hear her piercing mocking laugh,

Her condemnation of cream and sugar,

And I so desperate for her regard…

If I am compelled to tell the whole truth

I craved to trade the sweet for the bitter.

Now those moments are a decade removed,

And almost all of that time spent without her.

The world entire was the point of a sword

As I stumbled through a haze of nightmare.

Why torment myself over a woman

Who discarded me and chose another?

The seven years expired. The sand ran out

And yet I stared into the emptied glass.

A coworker woke me with a question.

She asked if I needed a drink. I asked

For coffee. “Black,” she said with a wise nod—

Not the first time I have begged for a cup.

I stopped her. “No,” I said. “Cream and sugar.”
“How much sugar?”

        “Um, one standard unit.”

“How much cream?”

        “I suppose one will do.”

She handed it over. I twirled the spoon

And smiled at the sound of scraped ceramic.

I closed my eyes. I took a drink. It tasted good.

Grief

A little over nine years ago you called me in the early hours of the morning to let me know that Andrea was gone. Today I was working and going through my normal conversational script. I was nearly done speaking with my customer when I recalled that she worked in your office, just around the corner. I was just about to ask about you- I had been meaning to call on you and attempt to arrange to get breakfast or lunch or dinner or coffee.

So, that is how I learned that you were dead.

I remember saying “What?” and then I could not hear very well.
It seems it Happened in late April. A cruel month.

I had been isolating myself from friends
and the technological innovations of our age
because I had not been managing my emotions well
and I was not interested in inflicting myself onto others.

Can we talk for a second about how fucking stupid this is?
You’re gonna bust your ass for your whole life and become a dentist,
help out all these children, give them confidence and secure their health,
then die in a car accident? It should have been me.

If it had been me it would not have been a tragedy.
Not even a surprise.
The waste I am making of my life seems offensive
now that you have departed.

Remember the summer I wasn’t eating
and you bought me all those groceries,
with that sack of rice that must have weighed fifty pounds?
Why did you do that?
Remember the night in your room at college
when I was drinking vodka out of the bottle (don’t worry I will be more precise)
and I started narcissistically ranting
about how I was practically the culmination of existence,
with the finest intellectual and artistic tastes?
It would embarrassed me if I had the capacity for embarrassment,
to say things like that and live a life like I have lived.

But if I didn’t get embarrassed
why was I afraid to show my face in your office wearing my mechanic’s shirt,
and if I’m so smart
why did I convince myself that you wouldn’t want to see me?

I do not know what I am going to do with myself.
This is not the way things were supposed to be.

Devour

I was in a parking lot buying a box of your favorite cookies.
The Girl Scout taking my money said,
“Only one? You know they are cancelling the flavor this year.”
I briefly thought of getting more, but shook my head.

Twenty-five cookies later in my room,
shaking the crumbs and powdered sugar into my palm,
I realized I would have eaten them all
even if you were coming home to me.

Letter to Sarasvati no. 1

When last we spoke, old friend, you asked “is there nothing you enjoy?” I deflected somewhat and talked about drinking. But drinking was not a thing that I intrinsically enjoyed, and speaking of it in such a way was deliberately imprecise.

I wonder if, under normal conditions, many others are able to recognize and to doubt their emotions simultaneously. Perhaps they do not feel relentlessly compelled to do so. Oh, envy. What always attracted me to alcohol was its ability to manufacture feelings of authenticity. It allowed me to believe myself in any situation— in whatever I was arguing in favor of at a particular moment, in imaginary betrayal, in the value and clarity of my feelings, in the safety of an embrace, in the necessity of violence. The freedom of this confidence drew me back repeatedly even in the face of its terrible consequences, chiefly because being sure of what I was feeling was such a delightful and foreign experience when compared to my customary paralytic existence- euphoria with a hangover of destruction and disappointment. 

So to borrow liberally from literature and answer your question in a more honest way, I like the taste of coffee, the sound of a needle as it traverses a vinyl record, and the prose of Borges. Due to my preference for self-denial I had only one of those near my room, but I thought of what you said and so a few days ago I went to a store and bought a modern Victrola, then went to another store and bought what is a called a French press for making coffee (the first patent for such a design was, of course, issued to Italians) and whole coffee beans of Colombian provenance and a reasonably priced coffee grinder.

Now I sit in the morning with precisely measured dark coffee in a mug, Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 2 in C minor played by Cliburn and Reiner with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1962) on the record player, and I must confess that the morning is better with these material comforts than it would have been without them.

There is more than one path. Once I was convinced that I chose the journey that was appointed for me, and now I am sure that I was mistaken. The air of this early December is unseasonably warm and so I walked a few miles around a local pond in the hour surrounding sunrise. There is nothing in my life that satisfies my desire to exhibit expertise and brilliance- nothing I can do that someone else cannot do better. But if there was, would I find an excuse not to do it? I have been trying to get the results I want out of a broken machine, instead of attempting to fix the machine. Is it any wonder that under such a regime, my body and brain and I are on such antagonistic terms? What is to be done?

A Shelter

A flash of lightning impossibly illuminates the windowless room,
the sound of thunder lost in the deafening torrent
or eaten by the earth before it reaches my ears,
and you are here.
Is your hair the color of ebony, or is it silver now?
My wonder delays my wish.
The light fades, I lurch toward you,
your arms turn to smoke beneath my hands,
the serpent’s wreath of your hair mocks me as you flee my embrace.
I crash into walls, I scream your name, I explode through the doorway,
the rain soaks me to my skin, I shiver. You are gone.

I wake drenched in sweat
she is sitting over me
she says
“You were having a nightmare”
gets me a glass of water
dabs my forehead with a cool washcloth
acts like a good woman
looks down at my deep measured breaths
cautiously asks what the dream was about.
I tell her I do not remember.