city of destiny, part one / eleemosynary / i've had this dream before / center and cedar, under sixteen / heart / portrait of a young woman in portland / m.y.t.z. / city of destiny, part two / 1911 n. union / ocean verse / june / fox island / the things we keep, the traces we leave behind / fidalgo island
Wrap your grey collar around my neck;
let's button down our cloudy cardigan
pull up our socks darned with dandelions
lace up our shoes muddy like the Puyallup
knot our scarf sewn of grassy yarn
fold into our overcoat of misty ocean.
Here we stand on the parkway.
Our hair blows forward,
standing and swinging like cedars.
The sound of typewriters under green clouds
A ring of veiled faces watching silently
The bottoms of tap shoes sparkling
A mother straightening out her knee socks
Cherry petals on the dark grass
Disintegrating books on bedroom shelves
A dictionary of your successes and failures
Self-portraits I drew of you
A pair of worn sweatpants
An ellipsis and three parentheses
A symphony featuring violin and choir
Cozy dusks and afternoons
A flock of geese in the autumn sky
A just-finished novel about oceans
Time in small doses.
Here.
I give all of this to you.
i've had this dream before
had these green clouds sweeping
overhead
through forests but never raining
it froze in four shades
and then decomposed
into black and white
grainy flags stiff to the wind
i've had this dream before
exposed on contact
paper extractions
light
sifting through shutters
and bouncing out to
sea
pull the cord, pull it
let all the light in
let it fly out to sea
hit walls, disperse in fog
i've had this dream before
collect again, in the two inches
between water and cloud
concentrated in pink fire
from a family
watch on the shore
windblown hair
wool jackets usually
camera, red cheeks
shivery jeans
someones still restless
crosslegged on the grass
i've had this dream before
i
ive had this
Center and Cedar, under Sixteen
Behind me float
a series of ghosts,
steam from valley factories,
not so much white as the color
of illuminated night, with the
warmth of a body in bed on this
cold night.
Snow turned slush,
ahead flashing red and yellow,
two cars hit, a child carried quickly
to the hospital.
Exhaust from turn-lane cars washes
over my hood and out into the softly
fluorescing steam.
We stopped to look, we missed our signal.
My heart escaped my chest
and moved out to the coast
got a house on the beach
where his kids could play
out where the city lights
don't blur the sky,
and the trees don't weep so much
my heart sat on the shore
and watched the seagulls fly
he wished he were one of them
and he sighed
he went back home
(a dim lighthouse of emergency candles
and off season christmas lights)
he learned his sister passed away,
so he stopped, and I died.
all of this written on my hand,
like broken seams in old pants,
all of this written on my hand,
like broken
like broken seams in old pants.
Portrait of a young woman in Portland
At lunch, she walks around the block
and smokes four cigarettes, spacing them
exactly so she lights one at each corner
bent to the wind;
her shins relax in argyle, her thighs against
a denim dress, she knows who Clytemnestra is;
she smells vaguely like toast, raked earth, hyacinth, and flaky soap;
she fastens her burgundy hair with bobby pins.
She dreams of a wild Kerouac drinking with her all night, reading her poems in his thick Lowell accent.
She often emerges from this reverie to find herself in various places: in the L's at Powells,
or standing halfway across Burnside Bridge,
or under the eye of a blushing man in the cafe
when we see her, she has just awoken, standing with her hands uplifted to the clothesline,
hanging her ankles and shoulders on the line with her freshly washed undies.
Beneath everything that forgot
to shine,
between warm sheets like eyelids,
mostly silvery and simple
sleeping alone in glasses
on a steamer through Alaska,
in explosions of desired snow,
when the violin tells me to lose it
I promise I will.
Here we stand breathing in,
breathing out
breathing in the sweet air
of the world without time,
of oceans and pines
the sweet air of the wet leaves,
of inlets and islands,
the sweet air of lavender
of lust and youth
of moss and the brief bloom
of the rhododendron
of nighttime, on our backs
the sweet air of the spaces where the sidewalk breaks, leaving
only grass
of soundless barges in the soundless bay
the sweet air of chilly, humid mornings
of these quiet mornings, the quietest mornings of the year,
when something extra lingers of the night;
we breathe out.
we turn down our collar and unknot our scarf.
A clothbound book,
the songs that end my movie,
napping on top of the comforter.
Rain, slow, fast, streaking scenes,
playing with the windows,
a slow album playing and a movie
in the background, with English I
can't understand,
a letter to be mailed.
The love scene I just read and wish
I could live,
rain, slowing, halting.
Kids coming out to play next door.
The drying wood of the deck, chairs
with reservoirs of water and wet
backs,
Sliding glass doors.
All the cups of cold coffee;
and then,
and then,
the sun.
I pull off my shoes,
numbed toes.
We scream with laughter
on the brown sand,
scribbling "HELP!"
like we're on a
deserted island.
The mountains bleed blue
into the sea,
and the sky
sops it up too.
A kite almost ripped
away in the wind.
the ice-cream man jangles up and down
the nearby blocks.
sun slants through slits in the fence.
it's june, flung wide open.
i wear my sandals and pray for change,
pray for permanence.
i pick flowers for my belgian beer bottle on the sill,
and read irish poetry.
we will sleep together tonight
on the livingroom floor--
the carpets in our bedrooms
still wet from cleaning--
we will sleep tonight
without the aid of heaters or air conditioners,
pulling our blankets on only early in the morning to cover
our unconscious cold; and we will wake warm.
Because we're moving on
and we can't do this anymore
we meet the warm beach
with suits and towels and beer
skin sun-red, and each
peeling nose matters
we slap the water and splash
our hands tear through the surface
we are kids again without fathers
we are the sound of orange and blue
colliding
we are the rhymes and alliterations that
make poems beautiful
we breathe heavy on the raft
with our salty heads on each others' stomachs
we wave up the shoreline where
it's already darker
we're under a sky that bleeds indigo
we smell like the end of July
facing the radiating Olympics
we hook around under the
Fox Island bridge, slip past halved
lighthouses, around and around,
and back to the blinding dusk water
we watch the night take over the sky
the trees, the buoys
our faces disperse
we take our last photos
we are liquid in the palms of hands
my wrist hurts like it always does
as we cross back over the Narrows
we're moving on
we can't do this anymore.
The things we keep, the traces we leave behind
It's a summer night and everything flung wide open.
--Henry Miller
Tacoma fits into my notebook
quite conveniently
one-hundred seventeen
one-sided pages behind
a Henry Miller quote;
This is the city.
it begins where Alder curves into
South Eighth (soon to be the top corner
of the page where words begin)
from there it spreads,
sprawls and drifts
and I cast myself around it;
I unfurl like a net
enveloping
holding
the cursive campus that
claimed me these four years
the scents and tastes of parties
(they will linger in my misspellings
and unsteady hands)
the contaminated shores
where green glacial silt
meets blue bay
ferries that are ellipses
veins pumping into pure hearts
and all the fucking rain
south-spinning clouds and
west-spinning stars
quilted clouds bunched up
with down at the seams
trains that thunder and whistle to Portland
the colored pages with Spider-Man
who we all wish to be
unpruned branches that jut out into the gray
dusk, flexing and turning like fingers; they
caress the evening
hair Fitzgerald would've loved
a hundred thousand salty histories that
remember the broken promises of trains,
the pains of trans-pacific travel.
*
I envelop, I hold fast.
and at last I recoil.
I pull the city into my pores
Tacoma becomes my blood,
blood becomes ink pumping
finger to pen to paper
nicknames fill the margins
streets run college-ruled
the shadow of my hair
in the breeze is outlined
on each page like a flipbook
I'm an architect in reverse.
*
I make discoveries:
Tacoma is a crossword
Tacoma is a newly-discovered
heartbreak that precedes
the heart being broken
Tacoma is ten shivering toes.
it becomes possible to trace my history
backwards through quotes cited in MLA format:
You define yourself by the people you love
and that's enough. (Tweedy, 85)
I guess If I believe in anything,
I believe in the inexplicable. (Johnson, 73)
Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. (Eliot, 49)
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion. (Kerouac, 5)
Take it easy, but take it. (Guthrie, 1)
*
when I sleep, my dreams dot the i's.
this is where i want to live someday--
with a vegetable garden and a row of apple trees. porch, boat,
big chairs, old truck, guitar. a bluegrass radio station that
plays all the time--soft and slow in the morning, blustery and breathless at midday,
quiet and folksy at the magic hour (with maybe a break for a few whispery Microphones songs),
until it fades away with a last fiddle gasp before sleep.
we will smell always like sea air and grass, hay, dust, sunned cloth.
sand forever in our hair. skin always golden, warm, sea-salt dirty.
in the evening the silhouettes of your knees
will darken the picnic-plaid fabric of your dress.
