We arrange to meet in some cafe to work
on our writing, bring
perfect blank notebooks brimming
with smooth thick sheets
and brand new pens, virile
with ink.
You say - a gray-hair woman, wispy
and sunglasses, long scarf -
elegant, her favorite acronyms
line up, they would die for her.
Or the sunlight turning the trees' silhouettes -
keeping us half blind by the beauty
of an ending day,
the chill wind speaks the language
of knit mittens, / Green, Green, the city / is a jungle
of...
some guy sitting near us, with a
growing bald spot
and an empty notebook,
rubbing the pages against each other,
the corners ever-so-gracing
Seduced --
(by the dog in the front seat of the SUV -
learning to drive.)
I'm not a blank notebook, though,
I've been rewritten so many times
and my pages thin, torn in parts -
so this writing is a fallacy
and may it never be read!
(I'm working on my novel).
-----------------
I had a vision of you,
bright orange and jaws like a tree
waiting in the water
(for me to count the stones).
you swallowed sea shells
to get closer to the sun,
to spin records late at night.
I hope you do not feel your life
so long. I hope its moments
are brief and eternal
like this sunset and the memory
of rain.
(of rain, of rain. of rain.)
---------------
There, carrying keg on broad shoulders, dark tan below
your eyes. There carrying plastic grocery bags, caught up in
your shoes. There carrying a phone and two books, breathing quick
in your breast. There carrying your whole life, house piled on house,
an SUV, two kids, a dog, your husband, and a briefcase with
some stranger's initial, your footsteps sink into the pavement,
You are a Titan, the sun rises from your ass, and when the
day comes, I will take my orchids to your grave, place stones
there, all caught up in letting go of
all I watched you carry.
-------
you live such ordinary moments
in a house I can't keep clean,
profound like oceans trapped
in sea shells, too heavy
to be braided into hair.
Cat hunts bugs; dog stares.
How did this ever get
so important, enchanted as we are
by cinnamon, by rose.
(but skip, if you will, the fennel.)
Rain falls from the sky and right into me -
my open mouth, gushing and
bubbles from my nose.
The poetry of silence is
deafening as a car passing
and the obliging water moved out of the way.
They say we're moving towards chaos.
I disagree.
Order will be the end of us,
when, finally, everything is exactly in the right place,
the universe will end.
