February 2009
20 posts
I will miss you, winter
I will miss you, winter, my sometimes-love, my always-heartbreaker, heart-taker. I embraced your tears of snow, your drops of slush, your cheeks with rarely rose-red blush of sun. With trust I anchored my heart at your cold harbors, and now receiving it again, I pretend to be happy.
For spring.
cloud
I swim in a sea of sapphire. I puff through swaths of cotton candy. I dash through corridors of cobalt, sashay through reams of cerise, float in actinoforms of fuchsia pink and falu red. And while you dash for your camera to capture me—I will die, disappeared into droplets.
the good girl
She’s a good girl. She wears the barrettes her mother made, pink with dotted flowers, her name in tiny white script. She calls home Sundays, she wears heels only on weekends, and when the rascally boys come into the store she checks at, she never looks them in the eye.
the duty
She knew her duty. It began with sunset. She would walk out onto her grand porch, with the grand columns and the grand rain gutters that her quiet grandson had fashioned for her, waiting until there was but a lump of buttery sun remaining. Then she would begin to sing.
voices
You have it so good, it told him, more a feeling than a voice. He knew it when he found a love note in his lunch, when he saw Vega brightest in the night, when he watched winter at his window. Darker voices came whispering, but listen he did not.
the easy to please king
There was no castle. There was no crown. The damsel was not in distress, the stars were not aligned, the knight’s armor was a curious rust color. There was, however, a hill with a view, his old horse Jangles, and a place to sit in the shade. He was pleased.
it would take a weekend
The days were endless. On Mondays he mounted a new offensive, bearing the flag fluttering to the front of the company with fresh courage. On Fridays he lay himself down weak with war wounds, trembling beneath his flag turned blanket. It would take a weekend to make war again Monday.
the good morning
We used to watch the sun come up on the lake. At the end of the dock he would appear, first two pink irises looking upward, then orange looking outward, then yellow looking forward. His bright glance would skip across the water. We’d meet his eyes. We’d say good morning.
the forgetting
I will forget everything but the soft kisses goodbye, the bright earnestness in your eyes, the way you held my hand with your thumb over mine. I will forget everything but your girlish laugh, your head in the crook of my arm, your perfect ankles. I will forget everything but.
the exosphere
He fell from earth to heaven, losing the dirt under his fingernails in the troposphere. At the stratosphere, his muddy shoes eloped. His few scars burned away in the mesosphere, all tears fled from his eyes in the thermosphere, and the exosphere cleared his soul of veritable cobwebs of guilt.
love, backwards
Your hair was blonde. We drove away. We broke up in a parking lot. You’d tell me good night, I’d text you good morning. Our first kiss was in a park between two pines, the cold coloring our breath. We met in the light bulb aisle. Your hair was dark.
the hope
It was the bright star by night, the white moon by day, the warmest curl of breeze in cold air bouquets. When he was sunk in the waves of his worst moments, it was the lighthouse blasting beams from the shore, waiting for him to wreck upon the rocks.
so simple
Everything used to be so simple. We’d meet for lunch at Einstein Bagels on Center. You’d get the Veg Out, feta pine nut spread on challah, I’d get a Bacon and Cheddar with chocolate milk. We’d quietly watch the cars pass in the rain. That’s how so simple it was.
the tree on the hill
There is a tree on a hill. Its shadow is a column of darkness that slips off the slope like a dark stream. The sun turns it like the hand of a clock, ever spinning, quickly slow. I walk within its heavenly revolutions, each turn turning me anciently younger again.
the flock
They were an orchestra of wings conducted by an invisible hand, sweeping across the canvas of clouds in bold strokes: now lighting on a tree, speckling the leaves with feathers, now bursting from branches, confetti against the gray sky, now tossed in the air like wedding rice, never coming down.
the key
At the end of delicate wrists they bloomed, skin ghost-white and unwrinkled, thin and french-tipped fingers nervously tugging at the gold-rusted, skeleton-smooth key that hung from her graceful neck, framed by the subtlest of collarbones and watched by two chips of blue eyes waiting for me to make my move.
the ghost
It wasn’t until the powder blue sky had been swept away, and the blackness was laid out in its place, and the skeletal hands of trees clutched the fabric of a million stars, and the streetlights were electronic cyclopes lit up watchful overhead, that he came alive, dead no more.
the ledge
Come down from there. We’ll watch the sun come up over flapjacks dressed in syrup and butter. We’ll watch the grass scurry from the wind over little sandwiches gored by colored toothpicks. We’ll make eyes at the man in the moon over a chocolate mousse. Only come down from there.
the carousel
He turned, like we all turn, with the seasons, with the wind and sun in his hair, snowflakes on his tongue, the pull of summer. His face turned dark, grew old smiling, laughing, crying. This was where he held hands with his first love. This is where he let go.
long sleepless night
He couldn’t sleep for words. They slipped from under his eyelids like tears, pulsed beneath his translucent skin in tangled veins, slowed his heart to stopping. He woke up to write, but they scurried away like ants, floated like butterflies, burned like distant lightning bugs in his long sleepless night.