The Evolution of Relations

I don't know the town where I was born.

Playing House

I stood in the 9x5 kitchen washing a single dish like a doll in my very own game of house.
The bedroom's decorated with a parasol of paper, bonsai, and paintings made from the hand of my very best friend. Same song on repeat,
it's always the same. I am the same
tiny girl
squirreling away clips and inspiration, chords,
delicate melancholy riffs that shatter sadness like an icicle dropped.
That liquid/
vapor/
solid,
it's all the same.

long, long, long

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWSFdIAEUU

twenty-one-cent stamps

We wrote postcards to each other, you and I, and sent messages on wisps of wind.
Our secrets pressed against dreams and wove seamlessly into moments evaporated by the sun.

You may have forgotten, or failed to feel, the kisses sent like pollen down the coast that pressed in breezy afternoons onto your profile. We wrapped each other like ace bandages around injuries from unrefereed games, those antics of youth.

May I make a request?

Can you call me Bloomberg? Bloom for short.

Track Star

What I would give to make sense
of the shadow trailing behind
a formless form,

the one attached to fingertips
this hand cannot,
though I wish it would,

wrap itself around. A barrel chest puffed
in opposition of the universe.

microbes

breath

breath


breathe

love

Upstream, Uptown

On a lark I pressed reply. With the way we're plugged into email through devices and dings, it seemed unlikely that within twenty minutes no one else would write back. I gave it a chance and sent my name back to the staff member sitting behind the address @92ndStreetY. Within minutes, a response: "Congratulations! You have won two free tickets to Monday's reading."

I went from work and met the evening with anticipation. Authors Francisco Goldman and Roger Rosenblatt sat on the legs of the X that marked my night's plans. Up the East Side I traveled, past the Whitney and just below the butterfly garden, to a solid brick building on the corner of Lexington. Up the stairs beneath painted ceilings, the walls paneled in honey wood, I sat.

What loss they spoke of: A lover, a love. The muse that evening a woman of thirty lost to this world. Transform your grief. Think of the one that sent it to you, she professed to Rosenblatt. His daughter was taken, Goldman, his wife. Both mourned their separate losses to a crowd, mostly female. What loss is not shared? "I feel as though I pollute others with my sorrow," Rosenblatt confessed.

What emotion does not travel? For years, I rode on its currents, was swept by its gales, and all that I felt rung loudly, pierced the void of silence as if I were an instrument played by the gods of fate and time and consequence, their child.

And now, on windy afternoons, they ask for improvised song. I trade lullabies for safety. In every heartbreak, beauty intrudes, Rosenblatt promised.

You know that feeling you get, a rush, a literal surge of energy and the feeling of possibility from hearing new music? Or walking down a street you realize you've never seen before?

GOD
if I could travel with musicians
wandering up and down for all eternity.

I dreamt of finding a silver spoon


made of tinfoil. It was beautiful nonetheless,
though it crumbled easily.

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme–
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

- Robert Lowell

Tweet for Freedom

tell me lies, clean world.
wrap me in a consciousness of blindness, eyes turned away from the imprint


of a face in the mud.