learning love.

love is work. love is terror, and beauty, and truth. love is crying because you said the wrong thing and waking up in the morning tangled with your love. love is never losing that sense of wonder in another person, and being able to lock your arms around them and hold them tight in a time of sadness. love is losing everything you've ever learned about yourself in another person. love is fear, and embracing it with two arms, and relaxing into its fear-body, letting the darkness wash over you until you get to the light. love isn't anything, but it's everything at once, all the moments and parts of the universe coming together, in you.

ode: at home with you.

at home, we begin
(i'm lost with you).
the first time i've ever felt home in this town
the quiet times, the evenings are fullwithyou
at home, our love begins

i'm lost with you.
quiet and easy love - handstogether
and blue eyed boys i like when you
shave the stubble from your chin and
the morningclean steals over us
at home, we contract and expand and

baby i'm lost with you.
and i pillow my head in the space
of your arms and collarbone, the madeforme
space and you reach deep into the green
parts of me i like when i can follow
your path by the trail of dark hairs

you leave the hairs you pluck from your head
and baby i worship you
i'm lost with you.

at home with you the shades are crooked
and there's always our clothes on the floor
but that doesn't seem to matter as the rain
comes in through the open window to make

my skin soft and cold because baby i
worship you i'm lost athomewith you.

longing.

often, i long for the simpleness. for the forgetting.
to shake loose from this and become (or rather, not).
for the returning, and erasing power of the sea,
of flight and to reflect the sun - becoming a moon, perhaps.
i'd like to capture the fading light in my fingers,
to paint the dapples of leaves on my skin,
to raise my arms in sky worship - grow roots, sink deep, drink water.

often, the authenticity of my life escapes me,
but these days, these days are the eu-catastrophe,
the bolt of lightning from a clear sky:
to drown in words and wood-smell on cold nights and snow on warm skin.

i never remember to set the grandfather clock
in the hallway of my mother's house and in the evenings,
with the setting sun, it begins to wind itself backwards.

love-being.

i always understood that perhaps you were not a god.

i never believed i was immortal,
but simply that your presence elevated me to the peaks,
to look down from the tops of the world.

i remember feeling hollow, scooped-out,
like love had stolen my collarbones and
i couldn't help but to stoop in and over myself,
like i couldn't help but to bow my neck
to the force i didn't want and couldn't get rid of.

and grass grew on the insides of my chest,
inhabiting my lungs and choking away the empty scar tissue
that threatened to colonize me.
and it grew and grew, fed by the rain of my grief,
sprouting out of my mouth and down into my arms
until i was a creature filled with straw,
fragrant and made simply for you.

i was easy to burn, all of my blood taken root in the soil,
my whole soul buried deeply
and only my fingers left to move feebly at your command,
a straw-girl. root-thin and see-through.

you were the long fall to the ground.

i shipped my love both ways,
to the sea and upstream like the salmon come to die,
as long as there was water and gravity to hold me down.
where the repetitions of the sea wore the sand into glass,
when i clothed myself in lightning-sand, mundane radiation

come down to take form,
like the angels who left the presence of god
to experience despair and the utter lightness of being,
the seraphim of melancholy.

a month of poetry - november 1, 2011: icarus.

once when i was young, i tattooed
the words of flight on my skin,
in the hope of wings.

the sun hid behind its low dark clouds and i began.

they grew as the leaves changed
- red and green and yellow and i found
the morning mist then in your eyes -
my wax wings were strong and sure,
and i felt the taste of your hands on
my back morning and evening.

i flew then, i did.

the low dark clouds buoyed and hid me,
cloaked me and warmed me and
my voice and yours twisted together
to reflect back upon me.

the nights were cold then and without rain.

i was the wind; the fallen leaves swirled among my wax wings.

and all at once, in the touch of you and the sky,
i knew the eternity, the forever-times of
sea and sky and the forests of redwoods
that had grown about my childhood home.

the infinite world stood as one beneath my wax wings.

the sun cowered behind its low dark clouds
and the moon was black as it turned away.

the sea stood still.

the world breathed and the sun rose, sweeping away its low dark clouds.

i was fallen. i was ruins.