thankfulness--3 year 3rd edit

Thankfulness

Enough of sad poems

their walks home in the cold

With wet denim sticking down--

the gritty details of a

Specific situation freezing crystalline

Like just so much (enough) sad prettiness.

We are in the time of year now

When anything you leave outside will freeze.

In my backyard, bordering the vacant lot overgrowing

no fence, is a very hard mug of coffee

Congregating with the stiffened fingers

Of dollar store gardening gloves

(so ready to dig into the warm, labial dirt)

these things (and more)

noone would ever steal.

I see a woman out there

killed by my departure,

the ghost story of whom I like to tell

like an old war story where you do horrible things

made somehow glorious in their grit

and the sterile light let through

by the absence of the shadow of morality.

And more, ambition is a frozen horse—

A no run underground river—

the remains of an unfinished ice rink—

borders ill defined, content murky.

Still more, there is a novel,

beneath a pile of dead leaves

beneath snow which will

 be covered with wheel spatter

and feral cat piss.

The pages, if you could ever read them, would all say

something about how all things end the same, they do,

they never change their faces,

they go and leave you the same.

Those pages bleeding across and rotting unreadable

would’ve been better use for hot, young hands

to tear at in a room with a bed and post-coital detachment

in order to feel some— anything at all.

We are in the time of year when

The rest of the years drags behind

Like the heavy words of a sentence begun

In a language you no longer understand.

Halloween stayed with you

because you didn't put candy out

Because you thought  the kids might freeze

The way lobster’s boil

in their orange and superman and dresses, football,

Swords, guns, drawn out into the cold like mice to a bit of peanut butter.

Dark, dark, too dark the thoughts that come this time of year

at 3pm when the day freezes and you hunker down

To ponder by seasonally dead trees a dead love, a dead book,

And Where you might go that isn’t outside to get a cup of coffee because

For some reason you cant find your mug anywhere

At this time of year.

Tis the season—

On the first night,

The bar was 2 empty 3 hours before

The first woman came in with

4 piercings in 1 ear,

none in the other—

said, I have 200 dollars.

They rolled in like fog so

I couldn’t even smell

The numberless pieces of warm injeera

carried for miles in total.

One, blonde hair,

Wolf-at-the-door-moon eyes staring up at me,

Waited patiently for her check,

Waited to say a coy phrase,

Put her number on the back of a receipt

With a bad tip

And told me to call her, come over

After work.

My boss, drunk in the corner,

Darkening down into a wrinkled suit,

Catches my eyes in his teeth

When I am trying to close out,

follows me into the kitchen

To shout an incoherent question about my character.

I have learned not to ask what it is.

And when I come home for the holidays,

dazed curls of damp, disheveled hair

lie in wait,

Sizzle as every question

Becomes “How are you?”

(“how”, god how, you don’t have the money

to get a car, so how, on earth, on earth indeed)

And the visible signs of decay

Read right to left on faces

Suddenly red with brown liquor.

In the mornings there,

The whole day aches at the sides

Like it ate too much the day before,

Or like it is still starving,

The hours passing through undigested and unused.

Either way, it never learns.

Enough. Now,

two women ask me

What do you want?

What turns you on?

As if they are the sky on either side of the tree in the backyard

Which for something invisible

Waited until the third story to begin growing branches

Into a wild sky.

The biggest tree in the cemetery,

Whose branches arc over stone to run

Down the grassy knoll of the war memorial,

Delicates in the background of

A winter walk—

The blond mother, nose ring scar tanned

With mittens, wool hat, north face, over-large

Seldom used boots clunking beside the paws

Of a sweatered cockerspaniel.

breathes the law, the one

law, the one about Black Friday

until it disappears to look like air.

Where is the boy who loved her?

It took 6 years out of high school to forget him,

And another 2 to remember

And now 25 beside him to forget again.

I am realizing now, it is tomorrow

I am afraid to climb.

Either the arms of this great brother will break

Spraying graves with sunny chips

Or the houses around will gape

And call the police

At a grown man

Swinging, howling

Like a wounded animal

At the cold face of the suburbs.

Nate is back in the Prius,

Waiting hum-lessly by the corner

Where the great tree which caused accidents

Used to stand. now I can see him

Banging his head against the air

Over the mound of mulch.

For him, every song will always

Be a killer. How long can

The high of childhood last?

In a precious hour we had,

He told me an epic of the grocery store

And how he found ee cummings grave

On the border of Somerville. I don't know

How many times he’s died.

Sometimes I think- far more

than he can come back from.

Years

mean nothing here. Over and over,

Mike will bring a can

to his lips- That's ryan’s, that’s jake’s,

That’s Andy’s PBR Mike,

Frown becoming smile without a move

But now it is about how music

Is past communicating,

Now it is about the days with VPIRG.

His eyes turn in, his neck

Cradling his head

Just above the rim of the glass of Canadian club

Like a swallow skimming the surface of the water

Trying that desperate takeoff as night falls.

It has been six years,

And somehow still

The hand on my thigh excites me

Despite beated entreaties of woe,

Memories of sleepless nights on the floors of strangers’ dormrooms

Waiting for her to come out of the bedroom with a Persian man,

A jewish one, a— Somehow, still, she is on my lap again

Six years later to smile sadly the same,

Tear up the same,

Paw frantically at my zipper the same.

Paris is colder now.

The whole world, I know,

But didn’t you ever think of a lover in a café

Casting about desperately for a foreign man

To give her a story?

Didn’t you think forever

That she was telling a story about you there?

That every kiss on foreign lips

Was a word in a secret language she was learning

Just to keep secrets from you,

 the languages you’d learned 

unable to open that gate by where

the cypress trees pray in whispers.

A thousand languages in and still

You will never learn the one of your own heart.

Not the one I know, dear.

I’ve been there much more than Paris,

Which I remember as very cold.

I love my laptop,

But it has given me lullaby deficiency.

Today, I am remembering lullabies

to friends. Yesterday,

It was the salvation army man,

Ringing in the cold

Out in the cold, his ears red

And aching with want

For that comforting hand

To pat out the melody

As he fades out of consciousness.

We heard it the same,

Coming from a tv just beyond the mall’s entrance

“with ro-ses,, a-round you.

Close your eyes,” that was something.

All my friends melt when I sing

The me nobody knows

My mother taught me in my hospital bed.

It’s as if for a second, again,

nothing will ever be cold again.

it is thick with wet grey

outside. Father is driving.

He turns my seat warmer on—

Like always.

Ahead, cars drive to a blurry precipice,

bleary red eyes blinking

anxiously with the pumping of breaks.

The old bricks of boston lean

Over, crumbling for a view in.

My father is a man who has learned my mother’s song.

He will never cut down an apple tree.

He tills with memories of week long bicycle wheels,

And she waters with tears.

The heat on my ass feels like an argument:

Come home, it says.

I’m on the squeaky dark wood beneath

The wood beams in

The old house a walk from

The screeching ocean,

My ass red and bare.

“Don't. be. So . wild.”

I am the only quiet thing.

Slap, creek, swoosh, slap,

Father breathing heavily,

Almost laughing.

Even when I take a bus here,

Eat here, sleep here,

It is a place

I will never come back to;

It is a word in a language

My tongue has grown

Too large to tongue.

The warmth is uncomfortable.

Glancing over with his hands

At the road he reminds me,

You can always turn it off.

How long in a school of sales

Did he spend learning to make

The ones he loves comfortable?

How long until it was common sense

That to take care

is to provide:

Shelter, warmth. everything.

This whole damn town has got its act together.

I see the eyes of past lovers hanging out of mailboxes

Like bleeding letters, leaning like wounded birds.

Consummate, unconsummated, this one leaving,

This one left, all sharing a rainslick beauty

Which, seen from the outside,

Makes me sick out of a window,

One of my first nights drinking, I nearly died beneath

The wheels of my mother’s van,pulling out

To search for me, huddled with asphalt,

drunkenly crying,“why

is the universe doing this to me?”

When the world feels like a coordinated attack,

The first thing I always do is my breathing exercises.

I am in this moment. This moment is perfect.

I am in this moment. This moment—

You alright, bud- He asks

And his point, well taken, is this:

                                    Why would you torture yourself

With discomfort when you could put that overactive mind

In a vat of use, get a car, get the house, get the wife, the life?

Last night, Molly was

Not kissing me at all,

Not making love to me

At all, just whispering:

Stay stay stay stay,

Why wouldn’t you?

Afterwards, 3 am,

15 degrees in the suburbs,

nothing felt it had to move,

even the earth was convinced,

stars frozen,

so I ran up and down the street and shouted

until I saw a light come on.

There are times when I am desperate for just an inch.

The windows fog

And father defrosts.

I take my hat off.

He drives me to the bus

To my ratty apt.

From his big house.

He offers still

To pay for a plane ticket down the coast.

Stepping out, a cold rain

Punches my face—

No open hand.

For a moment, the blood

Rushes to my cheeks, lights flash,

And the street runs with rain—

Everything in motion.

The hug lingers, his ll bean clinging to my wet jean.

I say: thanks for spoiling me,

And he says: come home so

I can do it more.

And I turn around already cold,

Hungry, in a rush

To make the bus, smiling and

Walking in time

With the forest of rain

Which is rapidly soaking my ass.

Thank you cold, thank you for the pain.

Thank you lovers, thank you for tongue.
Thank you old house, thank you for memory.

Thank you cemetery tree, thank you for forgiveness

And hands.

Thank you cold, thank you for the cold.