If you breathe in, and lift your right leg up,

foot resting on your inner thigh, knee pulled right

perpendicular to the earth,

and balance on the left;

if you raise your hands in prayer

and take them to the heart;

if you breathe deep, as if

going beneath sea water,

if you, bow your forehead down like the willow,

if you, like the dogwood,

are brash and bawdy in bloom,

if you, are heavy with the salty and sticky

syrup of the sandal tree,

would you give birth to it:

and exhale this thousand and one suns and moons,

your mouth a temple, your body the branches and silvery bark,

is it the sun that moves you,

or is it you who moves the sun?

draft one

We grew up.

Sleight of hand would make us
the imagined, the polaroid
of me laying side by side
with you, water logged.

Ceremony of smoke burned
and wished on. I was afraid
to breathe.

Ceremony of this yoke of
union. I did not dream of
leaving you alone.

It threaded me. Through the molasses
night. The water beating down.

Dead sail laid cross the shore,
so pretty now

and moon, it was you who cut
me, this gash of kindness,

unexpected downpour, I could
not describe it perfectly

and so I wept. Have you ever wept
because you were so happy?

It found you forsaken of bread
for birds, or things you had hoped
would be yours by now,

ask for nothing.

But trinkets you will wear around your neck
to remember.

To forgive yourself for being hungry,
and having bread,
and not sharing it with the hunger.

We’re driving on a backroad,
somewhere upstate, late night.
You were telling me the story
of a ghost of an old woman,
who appeared to travellers
on nights just like this.

We stop the car, waiting,
heads of magnolia bowing
nearby, heavy with spring:

we snap photos. I don’t remember
who it was, who was standing there
beside me then, who I was writing
so many poems to, calling you by name.
I don’t remember now,
the face, the songs playing on the radio,
how old we were, or why-

Does it matter how the memory came about?

Should the playwright choose to use
sense-memory to captivate her audience?

Is it a better way to help the audience
understand the memory of how it feels?

I don’t remember who it was who placed their hand
on my back and told me, no, this wouldn’t be the one,
no, this wouldn’t be the place, the memory to take
with you, but the warmth of his hand on my back,
and how it held me, the smell of those white flowers
giving in:

earlier, clementines sat on a wooden table,
ripe, the peel loosening from fruit.

We will half these. We will eat in silence,
admire the necklaces of birds trailing around
the necks of trees trying to find rest.
We will barely touch hands
as the sun sets.

I think it’s the space in between
that makes an artifact
so memorable not the memory
of the artifact itself.

after reading a headline about a murderer found, and then bumping into her family member over a cash counter buying coffee

It’s a haunting: how undecided one feels
about snow. Haunting how it
covers your shoulders and erases
lines between things.

So I am quiet as quiet does, silent with it
as silent does, while the birds come in flocks
mid-day, and I don’t have a camera to photograph,
just now, how beautiful it is.

It breaks my heart every day.

Someone pulls the trigger,
and gets written up in headlines
by the people who did not know her
the way her daughter did. But yet,
she killed a woman at midnight.
no one expected it would come from her.
Violence beyond what violence understands.

Does it come to us in neon?
Signs we have to design
to stop us late in the night
when we are walking alone with it-
this: lack of faith that requires
electricity. That requires some kind of
god to say…

Who writes the roadmap, of how it’s supposed to be,
how all of it makes sense, in the presence
of snowfall:

Is it silence and burials in silence? Things we
cannot take with us in death. Who will
tell the truth in the end?

And what about the love that carries us?

Is it just in, hearing the story, that stops you
on the roadside, to take note of it, to feel
sadness in, I wish my mother had understood me more,
or I wish someone was there to help me when I
pulled the trigger, I can’t believe I bought coffee and couldn’t
console the woman on line who said, I knew her, she’s my niece.
I have to fight to save her daughter.

And somehow, walking away with it, days later to say,

But I didn’t know her I’m so sorry, I…

I wish she had found a god, and

to say, I wish I had it: some kind of answer of token in:

the world offers it all to us: in snow.

in the dark, winter glossy,
tempting the silver on trees,
writing white on white,
disappearing, this ink:

what makes flowers bloom
on my grandmother’s hands,

she’d be proud of me, today.

And the pinprick of my manhattan,
and the way the tide of it,
rushes over you,

And the birds, line up when I sleep,
and I tumble and turn into them,
their glossy wings remind me it’s home.

Iris flowers on the roadside, and the
pepper wings of crows as they lift,
the mountain I curve into, late fall,
the swish of leaves in wind, I wished
I had showed you then, how beautiful,
all of it could be.

Silver, the water
I wear, I stream down
the mountain, past the steeple,
past the place where they bow,
they bow, oh how they bow,
like heavy blue flowers,
cornflowers, color of the silk,
in my hair, in love with nothing
but the movement, what falls behind,
is the tremble, your hands,
the branches I catch in,
when we were young,
we folded paper sail boats
and raced them
downstream.

is force-light,
barefoot,
slow motion,
camera,
over mood,
so blue,
with oceania,
with constellation
mouth,
with strike
and stroke
of lightning,

is feather foot,
falling from trees,
is beneath it sitting,
in shade, and knee deep
in yellow, they are flowers,
hands are triumphs
of birds, and lift,

oh the lifting, lift me so,
this quiet, it is clocks and sleep,
with dreams who wake from dreams
at night, i see, us all, pearl-bellied,
flocked and still like the lone bird who

knows it’s different, and still plays
videos in slow motion for colors are
emblems of how we feel, we wear
like sparkling, the water,

beneath all of it, the tree,
and is it silver, muttled with
talking, and quiet, it is so

here inside of masterpieces,
why are they all hidden in museums,

and here you and i are speaking
bells, paris, behind us.

It lights far off places,
I’ve memorized in air.

I wonder where it happened first?

When should I have had more courage?

Perhaps in front of the Botticelli’s
in Florence, perhaps morning
at the Ganges river, the yellow
bells ringing in certain death.

Perhaps it was counting
the 26 enlightened buddhas
at the Bodhi tree, perhaps
hiding my face in the white
silken scarves of the oracles
in the himalayas, as they lashed
their blazing swords through air,
frozen with fear.

Was it inside of the lodge
when my breath was lit
by fire, sweet grasses,
should I have gone
home then? Should
I have let this fear of death
take me?

Was it then I was afraid the most?

I must sketch this life again
to find meaning, make
the drawings clearer.

The hand most like the butterfly
I saw sweep orange into this
afternoon’s blue, blue air.

Tempting to stay so still,
breathless, wanting to capture
it somehow, tell someone somehow,
I found something perfect.

The Italian robes of the saint,
I remember so well preserved
in a glass case, still lush
with undiscovered frontier,
if we never came home, would

we not have lost it?

What is the sound of one hand
clapping?

Ask again. What is the sound
of a tree falling in the forest
if no one is listening?

These sources of light help me
sleep.

How should it, and it alone
keep me, light me, home?

One thousand birds follow me through the trees. Through redwoods, and willows. Through palms, and birch. Through the branches of olive trees, the firs…

One thousand birds call to me: with their cloud blue wings, their wings made of red fire, their incandesent warbling, prophetic, speaking the tongue of morning, melodic gospel, they sing me church songs, and I wear a dress on Sunday.

If you want to come meet me, come meet me on Sunday. I’ll take you to the church with a sign that says, “hope.” Birds line up on the steeple there.

If you still want me to be your best friend, write me a letter and send it in a locket around the neck of a bird.

Swallows and swifts, orioles and blackbirds, sparrows and wrens and rushes, seagulls, terns, hummingbirds and quails.

Make me a dress made of the feathers of a dove.

Consider the art of attracting wild birds: offer feed, shelter and water. Consider birdhouse, nesting house, seeds to spread, flowers, shrubs, and trees to plant.

And come meet me, come meet me on Sunday.

draft

Like pearls slow falling from a string.

List of the drift collected from a recent trip to the sea: rough oysters of our hands halved, pearly fish curled in a staircase of white bones, watery arms of seaweed pulled apart and sprawled in a languid mess, paintings of waves heavy with the thickness of white, sky flat with blue, harvest for pearls left unfinished, in a rush-

is this half of me pulled with violence like a pearl from the deep?

Wasn’t it you who was afraid of darkness?

So I go it alone. It will sleep me down night after night. Sleep is for dreamers, and dream I don’t, for distance.

I’m already here:

washing the marble floors of the temple with milk. Asking it for forgiveness.