unperfect.

there are things i thought i would never forget,
like listening to them count the numbers and letters of your spine,
t-2, c-7, 45, 98!
and how the doctor smiled and looked at my boobs
when he told me you were in surgery.

the awful ugly human smell of the mortuary came with me into my car,
and i thought how stupid you looked embalmed,
how i felt nothing as they put you in the ground.
(i just wanted to go home and boil your fingers to the bone
so i could memorize the way they played over my skin).

i didn’t want to see the awful small things that haunted you,
like the pictures they took of the cracks in your teeth,
the scrapings of your flesh they took away and forgot to give back to me,
the long terrible rips in your jeans from the surgical scissors
they used to cut your pants off.

i saved the small intravenous needles that still had your blood on them,
blindfolded myself in the last remnants of your underwear,
remembered how you screamed:
an animal only just realizing it is going to be slaughtered.

i saw you laid bare.
after watching your heart beating in the operating theater,
i tried my best to smother you so you wouldn’t have to live another day.

sometime later, the doctors found me trying to slip my fingers inside your stitches,
so i could know exactly what you felt like before you died.



author's note: i am going to start adding notes to some poems i post, because some of what i write needs context. (i am also trying to post more). this poem was written almost a year ago, after a trip to the hospital, and edited this summer and fall, after receiving news of some of my colleagues' untimely deaths. loss is a theme i come back to again and again, but this poem is a lot harsher than much of what i have written about it. sorry if there is any discomfort or bad memories involved, but that is sort of the point. this wasn't about anybody in particular when first written, and it was a lot less creepy then, but the character in this poem has sort of taken on a life of her own. she may reappear. - n.

a compass rose/facing north.

days of onyx.
i remembered another of your amber dreams,
my voice, amplified for the worlds to hear.

terrifying: sadnesses, known to all.
your blue-gold bodies, red and electrifying.

i haven’t felt in so many years, in days, days
(do you remember what happened at the end of time?)

true love. mi amor.

day of onyx, night of jewels.
a map of the world.
nights of shining like the sun can’t sleep,
the north pole midyear.
borealis over manhattan.

in my dreams the wide blue sea,
filled with my salvation.
redemption.

there is nothing to understand.
i may be lost, and you found.

all my years weigh on me – the setting sun.
grace.
how little i speak.

cherry+blossoms.

an accidental cherry blossom bloomed outside my window once,
like me, out of season. during that winter’s snowfall,
something was lost in the translation between you and me:
we never said there were ways to make me stay
at home in front of the hearth,
empty.

i rattled in that place, banging from wall to wall,
listening to the clash of bone and metal,
cushioning myself with the petals of roses bloomed in a far warm place.
(you always bought them for me).

i lost everything in a smell of pines,
and long days with no leaves and
lacking something even to make a fire,
i picked the snow-flowers and ate the stems;
a modern girl and the wilderness.

short-waisted and long-legged,
i would rather have had hooves to break the snow crust with
and to stop the ground’s cold thorns
from piercing the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands.

i forgot to shut the door when i left,
so focused on my snowy blossom,

and the ice came creeping in,
building walls on your living room carpet.

you didn’t forgive me even after the ice melted,
sweeping away the winter flowers,
leaving stains in the shape of a betrayal.

glue.

there's an endlessness i never knew before,
white and white, an emptiness down the back of
my neck. i think i made you up and
lost you again, in the formica swirls and tables
edged with redwoods and the flakings
from the lathes of my fingernails.

i'm cracking, collapsing, the crumbling i never knew
before; i'd fall apart again, a pile of little mes
in the darkness under the soles of your feet.
i'd like to walk with you again, swinging our locked hands
but every step i take i crack, and break,

and i lost you again, me in cubes, defined by
plucked grass and daisies and raindrop squares.
there's something i’ve forgotten again,
waiting for me to pick it up and put it back in place,
like a piece of the sun just fell to the ground and i

just have to reach up and out and out.
remember why i'm doing this again.
there's something i've always never known, a missing that i've
had since birth, like i made you up and lost you again,

the sounds just aren't quite right when you run
the water in the bathroom, washing me off your hands.
i'd like to search and succeed with you again, double letters
and long nights when you put me back together again,
stacking my spine up one by one.

eden.

a boy, once by the river.
consciousness, adam,
consciousness and the company of a woman.

knowledge, once by the river.
the presence of gods and an apple tree,
nakedness and the apple tree.

temptation, once by the river.
green grass and
the lust for the unknown,
eve and the green grass.

the body electric/a tribute to walt whitman.

i sing the stars, the body electric.
i sing the supernovae that created my bones, my mind, my misunderstanding.
i sing walt whitman, i sing thoreau, walden pond,

americana, leaves in the fall
[leaves in the grass],
the long white beard of poetry.

i sing the song of the heavens, words, a thousand images.
i sing the summer, the winter, the autumn, the spring,
birth and death and thousands of souls rushing to entropy all at once.

i sing the long white corridors of hospitals
and the blood-dark passages of birth,
the first aching breath and the last words you’ll ever say.

i sing the pain of love, the longing
and the way the ones we love
are always the farthest away from us.

i sing the lightness of air,
the blue morning sky in California,
the way we can always travel west

[go west, young man, go west], our destiny,
and the long wide cold ocean.
i sing the far green country, a silver veil rolled back,

i sing the war songs of every country,
the death rattles of every last person,
the words of gods handed down to us and lost.

i sing the redemption and the day of judgment,
i sing oblivion and darkness and emptiness.
i sing victory and anger and revenge,

i sing humility and hunger and salvation.
i sing the morning and the evening and
the long warm gardenia night filled with murmurs.