Transferring Poetry

The flurry of poems that came before this post are from another site that I was paying to host. I've transferred them to this one to prepare for that hosting to expire.

Have You Seen Me Lately

The Universe is Expanding: III

We’re sitting on a beach,
and I’m staring into the fire,
the heat is blistering my cheeks.
She’s leaning back and watching the sparks join the stars
as they burst from the wood in dry snaps.
Waves collapse onto the beach,
limp and weary from their journey,
and a pair of motorcycles roar to life,
their thunder tumbling down the sea wall
and dispersing into the bay.

We’re burning wood we found by the parking lot,
all salt-stained white and gnarled,
and we’re sitting in the smoke, blown on a wind off the water,
to keep the flies away.
We brought wine, but the bugs got in it,
and the low tide reeks like a corpse.
I remember the Cape is dying.

She doesn’t talk like she used to,
and I try not to interrupt her thoughts
with tidbits of quantum physics
that I’ve gleaned from my book.
She used to talk, then she used to
run her fingers through my hair
as she listened with an air of interest,
and now she just idly strokes the back of my hand
if I lay it close enough to her.

I dreamed that we were laying just inches apart
but couldn’t touch
as our bodies stretched away into light.
But we stopped telling each other our dreams,
and I believe that’s for the best
because I never have been able to lie
to her.

We don’t argue anymore, and I know
what’s happening–
I’m not stupid,
just in love
with an idea of someone.

So she watches the stars now,
and I watch her now,
taking in her curves all aglow
in the pulse of firelight.
I try to mark this moment,
try to make the smell of smoke,
the rustle of wind,
the murmur of waves,
the sight of fire reflected in her eyes
indelible to me.

But I’ve been here before,
in a thousand hours we’ve been apart,
and all I ever really recall
is the burning of my cheeks.
I could move further from the fire,
but it will just die down soon
anyway.

If We Were Gods

We stand outside time,
where every when is now.
Make pronouncements,
make love,
kill thousands
just to hurt each other,
as if we were gods.
The usual.

He tells me again we need gravity
to know where we’re going.
We are careening about the universe,
nebula to nebula
in this galaxy and the next,
all at once.
I say that makes me sad,
it makes me think of falling into something,
infinitely.

He counters that he fell into love with me,
and he doesn’t mind that he’s always plummetting,
headlong toward some singularity
where all his paths converge.
Which means, of course,
all his paths,
even the ones on which he hates me
because I cheat on him
or mock his lack of confidence in himself,
and even the ones on which
he never met me at all.
He explains all this dismissively,
a single point may be intersected
by an infinite number of
lies.

If I fall infinitely, am I falling at all?
This is despair.

I skitter off to another star,
swirling my skirt with a giggle,
and he follows.
My hair flows around me
like a comet tail
and my face is lit up by the sun.
We dance around ourselves,
we build planets,
we set them spinning.
We make life and invent an end,
something fittingly catastrophic,
before diving into a nebula
where we clutch and roll each other
in a bed of star dust.

In due course he rips out my heart
and hurls it into space,
out of sight for a moment
until it blossoms as a supernova,
all blood-red and radiance.
We smile and our fingertips touch,
tentative, as we share our first kiss again
and an evening mist settles on the grass,
soon to be morning dew.

We are careless in our age,
and this is jubilance.

The View from the Edge of Time

stare at the candle
unblinking
the flame unwavering
weezer somewhere on the speakers
electric memory
a faded whiskey burn
the walls fallen away
the moon through the blinds
reflected on passing windshields
clouds spread into air
tree shadows raking leaves
collecting lost things
what ends
what ends

a breath

a thin trail of smoke
unwavering
the tip of the wick glows
pinpoint

The Promise that You Made

One night, after we finished,
and we lay entwined the way I love,
he told me, “No matter what happens,
no matter what we do,
someday the world will end.”
I think he says these things
to startle me,
so then I’ll feel his body against mine
like it’s his promise to me.

What promise, I don’t know.
I think if I asked,
he would tell me, “That I’m here,
this is now,
and it may be the last here,
the last now,
that you and I, or you or I,
will ever have.”

I think he would mean it
in a good way.

But these promises fill me up,
they build inside me
the way thunderheads bloom in silence
on a humid summer day.

And I can smell it, that copper in the air
that surrounds a storm, that rises
off the asphalt as a mist into the sky.
That smell
is all around me, in my sheets,
in my paychecks, in my car
and in his shirts.

This is not
the thing I dreamed of.

It’s as if with every promise he breaks
my heart
because I know no matter what happens,
no matter what we do,
someday I’ll have to break his too.

I think he says all these things
to startle me,
but I don’t think he realizes
just how they do.

The Universe is Expanding: II

One night, we will look up, and there will be no stars. We will wonder why we have to be alone. We will realize that, at last, the universe has expanded beyond our sight. We will see no longer the forlorn gazes of the stars. They have put the lights out on us, we will think, just when we were getting started.

A Silhouette Against Starlight

On his knees, he prays before the precipice
of twilight, a vastness he yearns for
but cannot comprehend,
with his hands cupped in his lap,
lank and weak and slack
while what remains of the edge of the world
dissolves and slips into the black.

He prays for wandering worlds to come and fill the cavity
that has eaten away his face and ribs.
He prays for comet tails and pulsars,
for a solar wind to sweep him off that ledge
like a pillar of salt and sand
into what he dreams must be eternity,
where he might rejoin the stars.

A Meditation on Faith

The first time her heart was broken, she turned to God. The second, when it seemed as if the world were folding in upon itself, sinking into a singularity the size of a word in a thought of a jealous mind, she turned to the stars. From both, she sought truth, or something like a whisper of it: a fleeting affirmation breathed into her ear on a humid summer night, so that when she spun her heart would tremble to find that he was not there, and yet–

Centered

The universe is infinite,
and yet, it isn’t.
It curves inward on itself
the way our reasoning does
when we are so sure that we are right
and we prove to ourselves
that we have been at the heart of it
all along.

Escape is,
therefore,
unimaginable.
Freedom,
unattainable.
A new course,
nothing more than
a tangent of impossibility.

If only we could see.
What is there,
beyond this infinity?
What is there,
where there is not even nothing,
where there is a lack of lacking,
where there is neither love nor hate,
no greatness of joy or deepness of sorrow.

Oh,
who we would be,
outside ourselves.
Who we could be.
Who we could
avoid being.

The Universe is Expanding: I

I once thought
you could know someone,
always,
the way stars feel each other’s gravity
from those careening around the center
to the most far-flung, forlorn
wanderers where the galaxy
dissipates into the deep.

But you
insisted.

We’ll go away now,
tearing
holes in the fabric of space
and rippling forever through time.
I have already lost
your starlight.
Your pull,
shadows of fingers
brushing through my hair,
lingering,
lingering,
lost.

Billions
of stars, and I am

alone.

We’ll go away now,
this is how everyone says
it must be.
Our universe is expanding,
after all,
so what is love really anyway.

Faith & Reason

I do not believe in your soul.
I do not believe you will be
forgiven.

I do not believe when you say
I love you
you know the first thing
about hate.
I do not believe you can know one
without knowing the other.

I do not believe in teeth-whitening,
in social-networking, or in marriage,
because I do not believe
in masks.

I do not believe anyone whose employment
depends upon pleasing me.
I do not believe in photographs,
informants, or stump speeches.

I do not believe you will ever know
what happened to Amelia,
how the dinosaurs died,
or why the Big Bang banged.
I do not believe you will ever know
the correct questions to ask.

I do not believe in zero
or infinity
because I do not believe in God
or metaphysics.

I do not believe there will be anyone around
to miss the stars
when they all go out.
I do not believe
we will be here long.

But I do not believe we have it
all that bad
because I do not believe
in second chances.

Look How Far We've Come

She tells me she's hurt herself
so no one else can
ever since she was little.
She has a way of shrugging off compliments
like the black silk nightgown she looks
so vulnerable in.

We meet at our apartment after work,
six o'clock, darker
that when we last saw each other.
We don't think of meals;
we think of conveniences.
We think of how many more hours
before we must surrender.

I wrap myself in our sheet and comforter
and feel the weight of her lying next to me.
I dream that she cries while I sleep.
I dream that we live in different places.
I dream that I am falling around a black hole.

We used to talk about our dreams,
the ones we fabricated in dorm rooms
and long car rides.
We tell ourselves we're lost; we say,
we're just kids, but don't worry,
we'll get there someday.

Just look
how far we've come.

Fireworks

We were summer dreamers
sitting with our legs together
as the sky exploded
scarlet, gold, and blue,
and the air beat our hearts.
I watched her face light up;
her eyes shimmered with dying stars.

Later, when it was over,
they tore the carnival down
and abandoned an empty field of yellow grass.
I never thought we'd forget
the press of our legs,
even as we went for long walks
to separate places.

Splash

I suppose you can make anything poetic
if you give it the promise of future meaning,
even falling, a dive off a board,
a head-first acceleration until your body splashes
and the water flees
into everyone's open eyes,
or the way a building collapses,
with acceleration and bodies and fleeing
and everyone's open eyes,
because even though they know what's coming
they just need to see the splash