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We didn’t even say good-bye in person.

That’s not what people do anymore,

face facts.

Only once his hand cupped mine in a movie

as I held into his elbow as I had

on walks

so many walks

so many.

 

Men I have known and

loved and kissed and

stormed away from and pulled off my feet

begging to stay

and all the drama that comes with

finding fault in others and not yourself

in your twenties 90% of the time

is so far away from me now.

I am so far away from that now.

 

I simply reread a few letters until I couldn’t take it.

I cried in my shower.

I let them fall more with two friends

but no longer on the shoulders of strangers.

 

Even in meetings, it’s barely mentioned

except as a blip in life

and a chance at sanity

“being honestly disappointed sober”.

 

It’s far harder than it looks.

 

I try to think of things that had the capacity to annoy me later.

I keep coming up empty.

 

This fella got under my skin

the way all of the old City does.

He was my dust of home I can’t shake from my hair.

We never kissed

We never made love

We never lied, just hid a little out of fear,

we never deceived, except by accident finally spilling a little salt

saying “Maybe I wasn’t ready for this”

saying “I wasn’t, either” when I actually was.

 

Something happens to the men who move here.

They trade in their spines for comfort

a fruit loop lost in its own bowl of orange milk

stuck to the walls via the law of adhesion

never pulling away to joining the others gathered in the middle

a lone loop fearing the spoon-capture more than the loneliness.

 

But, his spine / my heart was still intact.

His heart / my spine simply was not.

 

When I close my eyes and think of him,they instantly water.

I can’t picture his smile for longer than a second

as memory is already receding.

But that boy got something out of me I was unaware existed in there.

The ability to simply Like someone.

 

Just Like.

 

Nothing more.

I liked him.

I didn’t love him.

 

Oddly, it hurts more.

 

The darker side to “Like” is it’s like any potential

you see in a kid who just won’t use it.

You ache and beg for them to do more with it.

“Like” sits on the couch stoned

eating brownie edges out of the pan

scraping for whatever’s left,

so long as it’s less work that getting up to go make more.

 

“Like” can be a dismal form of acceptance cuckolded neatly in a lie.

“Oh , I like him”

under most conditions

really means,

“I can’t say love or they’ll run.”

That’s too stereotypical for me to lean on...and yet.

 

Look, runners. I took off my track shoes long ago.

I don’t chase anyone anymore.

I may ache or pineor do the usual bullshit

until I get recalibrated

and move on again.

But run to you?

Oh no - that’s for goats in winter to

sidestep treacherous walls to

find forage dangling above them

gaining momentum for a leap

that unwitnessedoften leads

to a desperate death.

 

I simply liked him.

 

Hearing his voice reminded me

of long hot days in the Cities

of the colonies

I still have several amends to make in.

But for a brief bit of time,

I was liked back,

by a man from the place I call home.

 

That I liked as much,

if not just maybe a little bit more than him.

So, it feels more like the City rejected me,

the City is saying good-bye.

And for There I open my closet

to find my cleat

sunder piles of the past

waiting.

 

Something happened to me when I moved here.

 

They dangle

caught on my fingers

the knotted matting

of shrunken heads.

I stare at them in the stitching

where their eyes used to be.

 

What’s courage worth without a backbone?

To what home do I run?

 

 

 

 

Degree of freedom





Hunger and confusion are in the hulking abyss
port-locked on the side, motion mounting.
I rest my black enrusted hull against
the pier, mooring until cleaned, filled, and ready.



I sweep the night against the channel runs
it is not so silent stirring kicking for hours
occasionally tying up a strap from a jumped boot
or an entwined seal engaged in the iron petal.



The heart of a dragon beats within me.
I troll against black waters. Manmade,

but in the end, I am the Master.
I put my nose in the water.
With a yaw
I take down the yare.



I saw the reef and its coil
(The curl, the coral, I saw the reef)
and felt nothing but freedom.
Now they're unbound, released
to live again as (underwater) houses for the hungry.













Firing at turkeys sadly missing

Study on Michael Kenna's Kussharo Lake Trees -7, 5, 4, 1, 2





 

I.





Up the walkway rooted on walls

five plain pieces. Dehydrated, unmyleated tree

stretching over snow, over water.

Black from white lifted into view, silver solution
forming into knowledge and sight.



In the gallery I wonder if this is what it must look like
when god peers down the heaven tube,
hazily vignetteing the sides into woman's womb
where the first nerves are formed.



Writhing out and          how the branch sides and lifts
breaking from              up the grandfather's back
              the center cell body
the axon - a trunk of wiring to make man move or cry
piss or swim
walk or collide
feeling each of it all



A geriatric, hampered tendril holds over a bay of snow.
It no longer feels cold. It has become it.
Branching, twisting terminals stop in blunt bulbous ends
no longer communicating.

A single nerve planted in white firmly adrift.

 

Signaling faintly anyway out a over cold-cracked land

 

move

 

 

                           and waits.

 

 

 

Five years later

 

touch me

 

 

 

                           and waits.

 

No mated set of receptors reach across the abyss.
For how long has this been unrequited?







II.







On top of the acreage crown in New York
we wind through a deer-pushed path
where the shale and the limestone have mollusk shells
buried and reversed
deep within
2000 feet above sea level.
Don, too old a man to have a crush on
and dad
and a black dog and raccoons.

and me
firing at turkeys and sadly missing.

I was excited at the appointment of being present to the hunt.
The kill was another matter.

​

 

Taking my son to the woods to track a deer,

to compose yourself and keep the rifle close to the maw,
never playing with it or pointing it at what you would not eat.
To bring fire from one match,
then none.
To survive the cold inside snow.
Field dress a four-point buck.
Here's a where the job of Man or Woman dissipates
and it becomes parent and progeny.
We are not the top of the food chain.

 

We're in it.

 

 

 

We keep walking.

 

 

 

Over here is where I did everything but
with my old high school boyfriend.
Over here I shot my first rifle,
shearing the scalp off a woodchuck.
The sputtering animal had to be finished off
put down by my stepdad.

It's not the fear of the kill in the wood, in the wild.
It's the suffering.

I hate for things to feel pain or to suffer.
To watch the mashed bean innards sweating from the beetle, writhing,
twists up in my choke.

 

 

 

But I love survival.

 

 

 

Seeing the breath of it cling to the air ready and white,
as from caribou,
as from boy holding rifle,
as from top of tent,
two breathers huffing while cutting fur from muscle,
picking out buckshot burned meat,
stuffing organs into snow-chilled tins for another stew
a rabbit turns on the spit outside
as my son, wiping his eyes
between tears of sadness for the animal
and joy because we did this,
we can do this now,
jokes
          - don't forget the carrots, mom.
             I think he would've wanted it that way. -