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.

a lock and key.

the way you fit over me is a lock and key.
your arms like the sigh at the end of the world,
simple and strongholding and ohsosomething.

built like the bricks of the factories of my youth,
the ones that would tumble and fall during the
earthquakes we never got used to,

but you are strong and red and tall anyhow.
you, wrapped close to my body like the clothes
my mother sewed for me during the war,

though she died before i fit in them.
the way we turn together,
like the stars and the compass's needles

during the earth's switch from north to south.
(once we loved so hard the earth moved eight feet on its axis).
awake tight inside one another like bones

and the fractures of the desert during the spring rains.
pieces of my flesh break and crack and crawl
towards you during the night; the morning comes heavily

and with trumpets and i watch my jigsaw-body
fit itself inside yours in the purple and blue dawn.
(blue like bruises and the falling night).

the last of the amazons.

that's what my mother
called me as i was growing up.
literally, up.
up and up and up further and further skywards

like i couldn't stop.
towering, strong. dark hair and white skin
and strong white arms made to hold and fight and hate -
the last of the amazons.

and maybe my mother hated me as i crumpled,
as i fell, as the sky turned gray and eyes-downcast
and pressed me back towards the ground, back into myself.

i am not like the amazons not like the ships
and the wide seas they sailed, not like the strong tall brown women.

and amazons are not supposed to
drown in the taste of chocolate almonds and desire
or get swept away by boy-eyes and gardenias
and the scent of asphalt late in summernights.

and amazons are supposed to cut off a breast
the better to hold their bows and send arrows
singing towards the enemy, but mine are soft
and warm and heavy and made for a man to cup them in his hands.

orpheus and eurydice.

the first time i fell in love
(with you) i was waking,
peeling my skin from yours.

your eyes were half-open,
deep blue, but you were asleep
sun light coming

in on petal-soft feet through
the venetian blinds.
you were no orpheus,

to make the trees bend down
and whisper my name,
to climb the long stair,

to hang my name in the stars with your lyre.
i followed you all the same.
you looked back (once).

there were no clouds that day.