Dear Samuel
Another city appears in your headlights,
nomad. The mountains keep their distance,
arguing over who gets to guard you. It’s funny
to hear them rumbling like hot rods.
~
How does the plum differ from night, how
long the wait between lives? I was dying the
last time I saw you, and the first time, and this
time I am a sun dropping behind mountains.
And we and sky and plum and we. And we.
And we.
~
Today was awkward, as if pain were an
upward climb without toe grips or handholds.
I got struck first with waves, then particles.
They say the machine cuts off if you sneeze.
~
In another version of time I am similar to a
string of lights that change from hot to cold
and back and make me giddy with electricity,
which I take for granted in most versions of
time, even the ones I’ve lived through that I
barely remember, like this one, though I have
no way of knowing until this version recedes
behind another version, and I am left alone
on a beach, running from ghost crabs.
~
Before I met you, there was a place beside me,
tingling. Days would be symbols across a
dark. Creating code. Or something both small
and enormous, like the turn of a moon.
~
Now my spine implodes into cell and shadow.
One speaks calcium, collagen, marrow. The other
seeks revenge against the failures of science,
even as I read about your life back East,
where it grows cold again. We are both
amazed to be alive and shivering.
~
Maybe the New Year will be subtle or maybe
it will feel old. I don't care about the sting or
the drought or the way we enter the silence
alone. Where are we but close to clemency?
~
My bluing peaks, your steel-shaped sea.
Everything leads back to shatters of light and
star. The planet circles the dumb sun
cautiously, as if holding its breath. My bones
turn to crystal.
Coincidence Studies
I got my passport just as the year was coming to a close.
Just as all the ports were about to be passed without me.
Now I burst with energy that forms a needle on my head.
The flag that flies there is reported to have flown away.
(I would write about someone else if I could.)
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
Maybe
(There is always a flag but there is not always wind.)
Being friends with a piano is hard if the piano sounds flat. I’m
worried because I took mine on the road last winter. It wasn’t
that cold but what’s cold for a piano? Maybe my ear is too
sharp. Sometimes, when I say something funny, you ask
what’s wrong and I say: what do you mean what’s wrong, do
you think you’re the only funny musician in this entire family?
I can’t fold myself into a book anymore,
but I can place myself inside parentheses.
I can run a rope between two skyscrapers and walk over.
Photo credit: Chantel Acevedo