So That You Will See Me

So that you will see me
my rhymes sometimes shed their skins,
become shadows on warm stone.

Adornment, tiny cymbals
for your thighs, juicier than plums.

I watch the skeletons of my verses from so far away
that they forget me to follow you.
They become stray dogs, begging for scraps.

At night they sleep on your porch,
they twitch in their dreams of you –

it is all your fault that the silk of my hair
does not cover them, that they have fallen
out of my mouth.

When I did not know you, they crept up onto my couches.
I grew used to their slumbering heads heavy on my breasts.

I want to teach them to speak on command to you,
I want you to understand
the lolling red tongues of their language.

Leashes clipped to their collars tug them away.
The scent storms under bushes excite them to ecstasy.

When they sniff at the crotches of passers by,
that's me, in disguise, oh, sorrow, not you,
not you, the worn jeans

of strangers, their empty pockets. Come back,
come back as though you had always intended to,
with a stick for a gift, a green ball, a bone.

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from Night Music, "Love and Sorrow"

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​Birds

How many of us most fully exist
only in the minds of other people?
Our mothers, who knew us
inside their bodies, our fathers
who held us wobbling on bicycles
and had to, finally, let us go.
The siblings who pushed us and plead
accident, who laughed as we fell.
First loves, first lovers, who held us
as beautiful arrangements
of scent and skin and lithe limbs
and bones only shallowly buried
in the softness of yes and please
and yes. What happens
when they are gone? Alone
in a room we might disappear,
though we go on living, breathing
an air no one will remember
for us, loving the birds whose wings
are too slight to bear our heaviness,
who know us only as dishes of water,
as infinite mornings of scattered seed.

forthcoming in Poeming Pigeon, Issue #14

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