in search of

It smells of perfume and the heater is blowing when I wake.

The dark varnished foorboards are cold

and the house is empty save for paul’s coughing.

Outside, cherry blossoms line the edges of the street,

dropped in the near freezing over the night.

Jung tells us it is respectable to imitate Him

But harder still to live the life of our beliefs in the way that he lived his.

I am practicing prayer on a cold spring morning out on the roof,

Holding nothing for granted.

I work 12 hours carrying food and drinks, paid borrowed

Money on borrowed time, rewarding luxury

For positioning and caught somewhere above the middle rung

For an unexpected 44. With a tray of drinks,

Leaning over a black metal chair to press the elevator button

With my elbow, I blink in the buzzing silence.

“where is spirit here?”

Here the talk of children and 5 years from now rings true.

Here there are whisperings of abstract portraits and band practice,

Of parties and vacations.

Something sacred hums through these bodies, I feel it

When I hold them close.

I bike home and the air is cool, darkness settles over reflective puddles,

And the tires spray a dirty mist behind them in an attempt at history.

What dull, heavy truths lie beneath these vinyl coverings,

What strange conjurations of meaning support the fabric of these lives?

Storms take a deep breath and so do I, cordially inviting the leaves I know are green,

The 2x4’s that make up the raised beds at the neighbors; we can

Reprioritize, we can sip wonder at any moment.

I am beginning to play with the veil rather than let it cover my eyes.

Is that the beginning of a solution?

5 years ago he went to jail, how long before that was he still a kid?

2? 3?

I drove him to the same house he grew up in on Delancey,

where his girlfriend waited outside.

Something weary speaks out of him, but his smile is young and unsure.

He has other people make the drops now.

If I go out for drinks later, I should give him a call.

We roll along- 2015

In the morning,

On the verge of Christmas work week,

I wake  to the slow grinding scrape of metal

Asking not to be geared into metal—

A house is being built.

A harder part of love is letting go

Of your control over what it was—

That it could be broken without always having been broken—

That it could have changed you without that always having been its aim.

The lime tree reaches into the winter light

A bare lilting of stiff neck to the sun.

Where does this tree gain the strength

To ceaselessly tend towards something so far and unattainable?

{3 weeks worth of living in a small room}
{bowls of lentils} {the gin soaked orange rind in the bottom

of a negroni glass} {a menorah with 9 waxy spines} {and books}

somebody somewhere is inventing something that will change everything

for them. A harder part is clopening.

Staying until close and yet still arriving in time to open.

Exhausted, used, no life in between, out of necessity,

That if you aren’t there in the morning you might never

be let back. I wonder if it is my house

undergoing such pain, Shingles shuffling off

to splatter on the ground like rain.

If the uniform is not clean, if the apron is not pressed,

If there is no wine key, if pens run out of ink, if the kitchen is closed,

If the liquor is missing, if your shoes are untied, if your calves

Will not move, if they find out, if they find out, if you can’t

Find out what they want, if they need more time, if you forget, if

You remember the wrong times, if nobody will work with you,

If nothing is clean, if you can’t let yourself speak, if you’ve mastered it too well,

If you’re tired, if you need to let go, if somebody else needs to be in control, if they need everything to stay clean, if it wont work no matter how much you return and try and turn over in your sleep

There was a wedding in iowa, where the corn grown

Tall in summer in fall was sheared and you could see from the marks on the ground

How it gave itself. How sure it must have been.

Jacob smiles a wry smile full of homes 

and quiet afternoons and children, full 

of decision and resignation and a single future, 

not the many extending refracted from himself the prism, 

but the one he wants looking into his new wife’s

thousand colors.

The harder part of what will be

Will be is allowing more than fear.

More than what it means if I was wrong.

More than what it means if she was wrong.

More than losing.

With everybody gone and 60 hours of work ahead,

I strangely want to see her

before I plunge into a new life no longer

pieced together by the stones I needed to run away.

Something is shifting, something more

Than fear. The grey sky flat and scalable,

The mountains singing, the rain on the way,

Friends family hundreds of miles calculating lives

With the things they want in them.

And this ground is solid, though the feeling is

Everything can razed to the ground; the slow clicking

I hear

            as I rise from bed is

 a

                                                 house

being built.

thoughts on love 2013

There isn’t a bit of this that makes sense.

The backlit sunlight sheltering the lip of the bit of open roof where he sits

Sipping Maxwell coffee out of a mug with his fingers laced through brass knuckles

And then suddenly the image buckles under its own weight, teaming with movement as if filled with the kitchen cockroaches, it shifts out and then under

Subsumed in the wave of the past

A year before you would not have recognized him.

Alternately numb and fire, he spat venom at anyone to take him at his word or call his number.

His words were double edged: as much as they cut

they revealed
so people began to wince at the deep ruts inside him of which no one had ever heard.

Now on the new roof there is poison ivy

It says be careful.

On the door there is nothing painted

It says do not forget.

On the floor there is dust

It says you can never start clean.

On the ceiling of his newly furnished room there is a bulb-less light

It says you must bring that with you.

Do not mistake this for a proclamation

Or a description

And most of all, God forbid, for a story.

Though it isn’t true,

please, this cannot be mere coincidence.
His hands were the same size as mine

And his fingers trembled when after four years,

We finally put them together.

Standing in his unfurnished room,

The light hitting the floorboards just so,

The window covers fluttering in the absence of windows

He lit up when he said we had the same color eyes.

Love is neither easy, nor difficult.

And it is not a journey.

The one thing he moved with were books,

Overflowing their boxes, books

Making up the furniture, books

But not a bed, books

And nowhere to put the light, books

And not enough bookshelves, books

So that he was afraid to walk into a bookstore,

That kind of books.

The sheer amount inside a man can be frightening.

My love came and held him like a babe with her words

Loosening her lip so it would not curl, she spread her

Arms to catch the overflowing out of him and when he was done

She gave it back, so much he was hungry,

so much seeing it I was ashamed and thought:

this isn’t for another man to see,

this vomit, this beating heart, everything

he wants to be him, he has tried so hard to put it inside

and now it is all out, all out

in front of me,

and in a new city, alone, he stands suddenly emaciated

a man who might terrify the world with his intellect

and seduce it with his style,

he stands shivering while my love wraps him up

in the embrace that I love so much and know so well

and welcomes him to his own home and invites him to begin again

picking the pieces of his insides and placing them back in position.

On 2ce he saw his own grooves, he said

The pavement opened up

In yawning mouths, the cracks, teeth, rolling

Forward, his whole body becoming stars so that

Too fast his light pouring out, speed making vacuous gashes

Too quick to fill, quantum foam bubbling through, but always there,

His eyes suddenly magnifying towards the holes in everything—

And the only thing to save him

Was Jacob treating the whole thing like a joke

Asking him to tell the future—

The perfectly silly question

To distract him from the crackling inferno of the past.

Love is not a song

Or a phrase,

Or a person in the apartment above you slamming on the ground in a wild dance.

It isn’t the wind in the trees

Or a good job

Or the pills that smooth out the lows and also the highs.

It isn’t a new city,

Or freedom,

Or even the future.

It eats you up, because it is something foreign you try to make your own.

Before me, he had been in love with her.

It gives you a fever because your body tries to fight it.

It takes your food and your drink, because it lays claim to them.

It shows you your own holes and does not allow you to look away.

It says “I am here. You think I am the holes, you fool,

I know. But I am here.

Here, I will give this to you. You are the holes.”

And when I listen to my love’s breath quicken as she whispers she is close,

I forget the words that echo inside me,

Though then, with him in the next room,

They ring more quietly true than any other time:

it is only a moment we overlap like two slides which allow no light,

Vaccuum together, fitting as perfectly as any man made object can,

The Absolute suddenly about again,

Alive and in the flesh,

The magic of systems aligning,

And all of a sudden alone does not mean alone at all

But of course you know what love is.

Though I have closed myself

When your brother’s kids woke up

On easter Sunday and they thought they had

The run of the house—watched from above

By proud momom in a nightgown

--When they played the abc’s

On an instrument they did not understand and we could hear

Them banging and singing gleefully upstairs as your father

Yawned with a camera in his hands--

When I woke in your highschool bed

to see the sun warming your skin

The soft fold of your head into your neck into your shoulder,

and your eyes, so blue about to suddenly open—

when your father said “I don’t believe in heaven,”

and I thought I sure as hell believe in good places.

when you put me inside you in the shower,

Arched your back and opened your mouth as you looked back at me

but we couldn’t come because we had to get ready for church--

When I saw your brother in all black,

Stepping in the door after a cigarette,

Weary haired and hot, and avvy shouted “uncle nick”

And stumbled over with arms open,

literally fell into his arms that

Were mysteriously, even to him, cast open.

When the day grew hotter and we went to your grandmom’s church,

Pointed out all the tattoos we could see

And smiled at the pastor, our coconspirator

When we thought of all the ways we feel about how he rose,

When you leaned your head on mine and curled your arm through mine

And our hands didn't quite line up so your fingers traced my veins

When we carried tulips in full bloom in each arm

Passing the ones who had raised their arms in praise

When I turned you down on the bed with the windows

Open on your green lawn, spread you out like a map

And plotted what was mine along you with my lips—

When the family descended

and we couldn’t find each other

on the carpets or wood floors

and I saw you in a blue dress

making the doctors laugh and talking

about retirement

when we were dragging tables together to eat

and you caught my eye and we went very quiet

and let the conversation hide us—

When you said you were proud of me in front of your whole family

Even your grandpa who watches fox news religiously—

When we found a place at st pete’s village in the sun

And lay out on a big rock with only the sound of running water and each other—

When we came home together to west Philadelphia

In the lazy almost summer streets,

with the men out on porches smoking

And calling out to women, and we

lay together with the windows thrown open

and I wore blue jeans and you ran your fingers

across my chest and through the kisses

I began writing this poem as you,

and you never fall asleep, fell asleep