On the Seventh Year, I Remember my Goal of Forgetting

I reduce you. It is my goal. Your figure becomes smaller as the calendar drags forward. I see the distance grow between now and then - I allow its size to eclipse you more and more. Today you are smaller than yesterday. Tomorrow you will be smaller yet. I take my hands and push all swirling moments onto a line. I throw you to the back of it. I smother you in seven years. There I will not see you.

Dawn

i cannot sleep.
my shoulders crumpled, the bed is a stiff body
an old husband i do not love, i am no wife. i take off my rings
to wash my hands. i take off my clothes
to wear the bedsheets, nothing. turning over, over,
awake still, and the well of night
drying up,

i sit and rock back and forth
the mattress speaks, frustrated with me.
my feet touch to the floor, and i hear
the grey screaming it has, the groaning sunrise, tired of itself.

how quickly one fantasy is punctured by another

saturday night riding up grand avenue with our knees
joints greased with liquor, we shared a vision of the possible past
we shared a vision of the body in pain.
my body. his hands pulling at my left side.
scratching and pulling as though trying
to undress, to interrogate,
he found me with his teeth and pulled again
asking questions by hand:

how quickly a fantasy is punctured
like a vein. a dream of blood vessels bursting
across his face
a vision of him, helpless
he was too weak to take me down
so i have forgotten him

I am not good. Not a good, not good
I will not give you my fists, my palms, I will not hit you
I will not forgive, I will not be patient

I will not fall asleep

Excerpt

You showed me, "This is where I do my laundry," as if I might have cared. You shoved money in my pockets to send me home, turned your chin up in the cold, and told me you felt alone.

i lost my joy in
absence, mixing colors for the black
of their shadows. two lovers i've had
for two months, both gone
and the thighs above hips
and the hair on my face
i would push back from theirs
i miss
knowing myself in the flesh
of another, you puncture me like
a needle to the back,
you weigh on me like
the feeling of falling. but i
am not falling, just
building pressure under the skin
two strangers have kissed
that is no longer mine.

i have never eaten anything by the heart

New York the canopy
Portland a cave

pacific ocean

this is what the earth looks like when it starts sinking
rocks smooth round like bald heads
they aged and lost their hair at sea
i am a baby
arms hanging over the edge of my cradle, land,
feet poking through the beams
ankle-deep in foam
i want to ride the waves out so that i can expand
appear in the ocean like its breeding season and i am everything born
it is, and i can see the rain coming at us, proof
that the earth is sinking
but the sea is rising

a pomegranate is a heart
i eat it like one

Chapter I: Loomings / Of Politics & Art

Response to Chapter I: Loomings of Moby Dick

and Of Politics & Art, Norman Dubie

____

Men in open boats suddenly found themselves posted

like sentinels all around town.
Floating in Manhattan’s Southern vestibule
an empty room of sea tempestuous and grey
staring to the Island as though pausing before coffin warehouses
here more crowds where nothing will content them
but the extremest limit of the land. Are the green fields gone?

From lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,
inlanders all listening to the pure God-rendering voice of a storm.
How in an almost calamitous moment they would
get nigh the water as they could
so sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
peacefully in one moment belted round by wharves
as Indian isles by coral reefs.

yesterday i read through old journals and found a pair of pages
that don't connect anymore. i could have torn them out. you
are a new book. in my hands i am balancing a new lexicon
like the unfolded corners of a cut diamond.

hold them -- my hands --
i don't want a witness, i want
you.

do you always start with the eyes?

i held your stories in my hands the way children hold frogs or birds
thumbs gentle touching their necks, feeling their nervous
pulses. how they beat past mine quick the way a skyline flickers
in the distance. from my perch atop a bluff. in the damp grass
with a bottle of wine and cold cold skin, how the night comes
to spell out the last of winter for me
in the vapor of my breath, its
february, not may.

this week i heard our eyes rhyme
and it sounded sweet, but you used a word
i didn't understand. my thumbs tapping
on your neck, i didn't ask the meaning.
i'll be sounding the vowels for days.

3803

Smoke looks different on the horizon than it does on the news.
and dust on my father's clothes
I didn't know what I was seeing, I laughed
tracing gravity with two pencils on my desk,
they drew the blinds on the windows but not

on the television or newspapers

or the sky thick with two hundred and twenty stories
on shredded paper. I had never read them.
Almost one thousand three hundred and forty-four people
were trapped burning on the top of the world
in less than a minute
and I was asked if I was alright.
I was asked to leave the room.

What did I know about war?
my mother wanted me home.

Leaving the hills at dusk, Sunday

Can you believe the half-moon
on this half-spring night?
And the stars -- I can count them with my numbers
and sound them aloud -- pendants
in space crisp as the air on my tongue.

My fists in my pockets,
I taste that God the anchor of reality
weighs nothing.

we have built a dock of sand

island of many hills

the stone has been poured. cracked.
pile together in puddles. salt makes patterns when the snow dries. a growing moss of pounded newspaper. i saw a reservoir in the sidewalk, it has been drained
there is a shape under the planes of gray, there was a beach, a marsh, a leaf

behind the tile tunnel and beneath the slab, there, not there

yesterday they poured a second cast, a third, a fourth.

corridor

notes:

leaning and wheezing number one bus:

sound of brooklyn dawn

two days ago i followed route 26 and watched the earth open up. warm springs. pavement on an ancient trail, a reservation. basketball in the shade of a cliff, white crosses and flowers on yellow earth, a low fence on a massive incline. we own this. rocks. horizon tumbling into clouds, disappearing.

blinking and rolling route 26

emblems of my worst

Ginger tea,
jars on the sill,
flowers

Marine Park

There is a park in a southwestern neighborhood of Brooklyn where the grass is taller than you and the mosquitoes will drain you like a capri-sun. Marine Park. When I went there in the summertime with my best friend we walked around the pathways, chasing butterflies and searching for large birds. The sun was setting. I could see over the entire park to the buildings in the distance. It was the buildings that seemed more like wilderness to me.

your eyes were the loudest things i heard that year