These matroyshka days, they don’t progress but nest one within another, like waking dreams or dreams of waking— And just like that it’s morning, again, in this, some city, unlike others, but also mostly the same, a dawn, a limbo, drinking coffee and trying to name things— this is a Thursday, and this is my home.
As if anyone could prize this happiness away! You’d be better off trying to pry away a snake’s fangs– sometimes it seems as if you don’t even know me. I can’t be shamed– this hunger is holy.
1. When we are far apart I carry you around like an ache in my bones– bright as the promise of rain ringing out in the callus of a long-healed fracture. 2. When we are far apart I think of you so often that my other thoughts cast shadows– 3. Also when we’re together.
And then a disembodied morning floating among checkpoints flight conference luggage flight each clock telling me it’s some different time and none quite right and suddenly it seems so apt that lightning only wants to reach the ground it’s unsettled up here interminable and tempting me to strike without warning I’ll call you once I land
Still no rain outside in little Italy tablecloths flapping like loosened sails– another night falls into red glass lamps a subtle storm shy lightning no thunder only distant sirens and a mournful tenor sax– even with all this I am not really here but am air myself a wind a song unable to be in a place without something to hold me there– someone to see someone to hear
Alone in this hotel room any city could be outside the muffled lives next door could be anyone’s lives the forecast says maybe a tornado tonight flooding in the lowlands even this fails to rouse me from the crisply-made bed I am just waiting for a word my heart laying open a palm outstretched
(One more for the road, and still no seagulls!) The tide also ebbs, this gray slack dawn taking me to O’Hare, to the blue line, the Magnificent Mile– and yet already, a distinct impression of lack. Although Lake Michigan is tremendous under storm clouds— afloat or from dry land, it drowns out the shoreline, the day, and necessitates a more pioneering way, dead reckoning, finding the wind and marrying one’s course to it, HOLD FAST— […]
(waves, no seagulls) An undertow is a steady offshore-directed second-order flow, i.e. it is proportional to the wave height squared. Meaning: No wave can arrive completely without also leaving. It will always contain some percentage of its own opposition, no matter how it tries to keep it down. You are a physicist, and so of all people should understand compensation, that a wave’s nature is intrinsically antagonistic, and that any assumption of linear behavior, at […]
(The ocean poem is dead. Long live the ocean poem!) Oh what havoc a hurricane can wreck, loosing stairs from houses, houses from stairs, lifting and carrying away years of construction to some arbitrary location and then burying all the roads. Of course, the map is not the territory, and this is not a poem about the ocean, it’s just, this time I am certain as a storm surge, and so also irrevocable— it’s like […]
(continuing on with the ocean poems in response to this business–) You tell me about Oaxaca. I tell you about the Gulf, and then we talk about how we both almost moved to Hawaii, once. Maybe we would have met there, too, you say, as we survey the skyline’s tines from out across the bay. It’s strange, how language tries to make distinctions between bodies of saltwater– they all commute, or aren’t we proof? […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 