Kitchen Table

March 2002--Published in 2002 in Touchstones An Art & Literary Magazine

The sun sets
into bruised
purple,
hiding in the midnight morning
of white tumbling
inseparable.
His feet are bare
and he is singing—A love song to her.

Blowing out the candles

I wish yellow could color
my mind clear of blue, ocean
cold eyes. I wish the echo of
my trust breaking, splintering
into slivers, jagged and rough
could find its way out, from deep
inside my skin. I wish for warm sandy beaches,
for the California sun high in the sky,
for waves crashing against bronzed bodies.
I wish he didn’t look deep into her eyes
as he pressed his lips against hers.
I thought the god of the desert would save me.
Instead, he gave me his spot on the cross.
Both betrayed with a kiss—Jesus and I,
and red my heart bleeds, the only sacrifice offered.

A Walk With Annie

April 2, 2002—Revised 2/3/05

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split. I wake in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me the best they can inside my quilt.

Language dissipates down,
down until the cycles
of nature
vivid in season,
vivid in time, bloom.
Will we?
A thousand choices ago;
One a lover, one a friend.
A thousand chords on a guitar strum the soft sound of your
heart beating
as you hold my emptiness in your arms;
pale lifelessness
buried in shades and shadows of flaxen.
Deep pools of black fear poured over ice grow cold, cold
as the artic frost in the long of my eleven year winter.
A thousand choices ago;
We were strangers then,
strangers that walked side by side as 98 autumn leaves
fell in the October that only God knew was ours.
Do you remember last night?
Do you remember? Dillard asks.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God.

My November myth,
my Greek tragedy plays to the glowing
amusement of the sirens as I hear them whisper,
it is time.
Time-
time-
time-
time stretches out like a road, jagged and
unmarked.
You build me a mountain,
a mountain with a cliff overlooking
the ocean sands where I have lingered
in silence.
I feel your hot,
sweet breath against my skin as I turn my
face from the truth.
And if we jump together;
what of us then?
Will we break against the rocks below,
will we shatter like
glass against the waves?
Will I survive the fall,
or will I wake up shipwrecked on our
island alone,
the color of charcoal still staining my white linen?
A thousand choices ago

A Little girl mute in some room at Fletcher Allen, drugs dissolving into the sheets; a little girl with her eyes naked and spherical, baffled. Can you scream without lips? Yes. But do children in long pain scream? It is November 27 and no wind.