(This is for you, Sweet Mama)

This is for you to come and rest your head on my shoulder.

For you to find a safe place, warm in my beating heart.

A small escape from yesterday's mourning.

That tiny place you can curl into me and know today will end.

A new moment and memory will begin.

You have the wisdom of the ages and the beauty of the sages.

You wrap yourself in your dreams of seaweed and grace.

You see out of stained glass eyes and touch with pierced heart and fingers.

The cross on your wall serves to keep you on this earth.

Your head and mind and toes soar far far above.

Hands and feet planted firmly upon the roof top of your dream.

You ask when this pain will pass and when you will be able to breathe again.

You heart is on fire and Leonard Cohen is knocking on your door.

You light a cigarette off of the stove and step back to watch yourself
open the window and climb out to your own ledge
and throw your head back and scream
"my day has just begun"...as you spread your giant wings and cross the sea
to home.

april 1992

In the sheets
my feet and leg wrapped tight around them

Staring at ceiling, counting car lights that pass
Hopeful for you to drive by, slowly, pull near to the fence
Turn off the car, slide back your seat
Open your window, your ears, your heart
Feel the breeze and me within it

I imagine your cold hand on my face
How you bite at your bottom lip
What it feels like when your palm puts pressure on my forehead
and you ask me if it is okay you are here

Holding on to the sheets I make room for you on the bed
Can taste beauty in your kiss
You hold me close to you, my nightgown twisted up around my hips
your hand like an envelope around mine.

I hear the porch light go off and the door lock
I heard that they sold your car today
to pay for the funeral and the arrangements
I wrap tighter into my bed
Hopeful my breath will catch in the night
and you will take me with both hands
and pull me into you.

I look out and down, as though I will see you coming toward me,
your hand extended as you pull me toward you on your cloud

What madness there is inside of me
what terrible burning lines my skin
from my cells and my nerves to my mouth
Every part of me is pinched tight
Closed off to my thoughts
my blood feels cool to the touch
My hand is unsteady, my cigarette no longer lit
my spirit, no longer is burning

Take my time down the winding stairs
making every step a lifetime of waiting
a moment that I seize from myself
a pause that keeps me balanced, assured,
tilting toward the sun I light my cigarette

I leave to go to dinner, taking myself by the hand.

You leave me starved,

deprived of those things one must be provided
with to keep their pulse and their heart from falling
inward upon itself.

Your hands are white, pale like a breed of horse I once saw,
in a child's picture book. Drawn with the same pale hand.

Your veins are wise and thick, cutting through your arm
like a deep cut through you, a river
fast and full and rushing.

Pushing and pulling with it all the grief it stores
below its fierce and blinded water.

Reach up, take the branch that guides you
toward the bank that is filled with mud and weeds
and dead thoughts
hibernating from your soul.

You lead me to a place that I am able to hold onto,
not for my dear life
but for the life that left me long ago
passed me by
like a reed drawn downward to your sand and
to my dark beneath.

You give me a golden apple to suck juice and life from,
a snake to make a harness from,
a grain of your sand that you promise me a pearl from.
You tell me that I am starved no more.

It is you, you say, you who has no arms to touch with
you who has no teeth to sink life into or slip through
streets and gutters with,
you who cannot but wade through your own fits and stir
upon your own madness.

A gift in kind
for the ones left behind
and we make our way
so we may leave a space
for those who are blessed with living.

why did I wait to hear you on the steps
I felt as though I could not move,
imbalanced and unsteady
and holding on to a past that you have sworn to me of tides and secrecy

I feel the distance growing
through my chest and the cold place where my shoulders meet
and bend into my back
where the bones touch together into a wide ache

I walk along and hold the wall
supporting me as though an extension of my skeleton
I feel my breath change, shallow now, weak

You hand holds the elevator door open
you look through the hall,
there is nothing,
this spirit has left me
only with love do we linger on

I am watching you now,
watching you as though you are a house on fire.

Full on sirens and burning up to the sky.
Taking my last violent coughs of your smoke.

My eyes and face are hot and burn.
The house collapses on me.

I reach out, to try and catch it
and hold it to my chest.

You have grown on me,
a far away smell
a cigarette on a train
an early morning walk through the mist
something gone forever
and sticking to my bones

baring myself into you, your hands
firmly around my wrists
slowly lowering me into the earth
onto my back like an offering
like making peace with our past
[like pieces of a past]

I hold onto you like light,
a single droplet of blood
in the smallest palm of my heart
stretching into your ache
and you, into me, awe watch the sun
take its long strides across us
pinned to the earth
a pulse left unattended
left unattached
left to bathe in side eachother