Boy in the grass

Lightning charged the soil, he had told me, made it rich

and lying open for the till and plunging fingers.

Storms ripped to the roots of long grasses,

made them stretch deep through rocks, worms

and arrowheads, longer than each dry blade.

In a yellow stretch of prairie I explored his form –

muddled-colored eyes wide, wild

and helpless, shorts around his ankles.

Mosquito clouds and power lines split the air

with dull buzzing songs.

Even then I was remembering him, red shoulders,

fresh smell of sweat and hot wind.

And a maleness to the smell, alive-ness.

I held him in metaphor. I fed him to it.

Dangerous to mix up the real, flesh

with flanks of hill, sunned arms for red rock.

But that is, after all, natural,

to confuse, infuse bodies

with bright fragments like broken porcelain –

a sharp piece of song lyric in her room, long

past midnight. How the profile lined in white streetlight,

rain falling, reflects – as if between two mirrors –

splintered wet blue nights, fingers tripping down

forever unrolling keys, each note sweeter

and more mournful than the last.

Yellow and hot, the afternoon

was every afternoon,

laughing on my knees in gold-lit heat, high grass,

summers I was younger. Floating sparks – Oh,

poor loved bodies, pumped to bursting,

others’ impressions pressing in,

filling in the outlines.

Something bucked inside me, buckled.

Broke, on his slack mattress, in a white room.

But that matters less than when I took him

in the grass, in my mouth. My knees

pressed dirt hard and I felt it, or imagined

I felt it – fierce and electric, a burn

slicing through skin, deep.

Past metaphor, past memory,

into earth warm and waiting.

When you leave (or: I like trains way too much)

When you leave, always leave
in the dark. In the pre-dawn hour
of orange-burning, humming streetlamps

you will drag yourself down
blocks of silent sidewalk –
yours. Not quite empty,

but filling with everything you know
or imagine about whistles, arrivals, you
with your suitcase and your dizziness.

When you rest at last, rest
on a southern-bound train.
The car rocks, and you pretend

the way you pretended, a child
reaching for sleep, that the mattress
was a raft, the room an ocean.

Rock now, through dreaming
and black country. Wake up
someplace new and strange, a stranger.

Another work (whine?) in progress

Dawn didn’t break like a clap, just gradual gray, then day.

I came halfway to life with it, armed at the train station

with stones, water-warped notebooks,

half-eaten candy, condoms and no toothbrush -

meager evidence of life on my own.

The 8:20 express ate still air with a shrieking mouth.

Traveling from my parents’ house to the city, I always hang on

for the boxcar yard. I have pinned my heart

to its peculiar perpendicularity:

boxcars’ rusted right angles, power lines dissecting the sky

with ragged clouds trailing from the lot’s asphalt edge.

All laid bare to steel-hard sunlight, and safe

in the idea that things are sorted, transported,

get there. That the world streams clean

down a silver streak of track, clear

points at either end, open to be understood.

The past six months have been a Rube Goldberg machine

that clicks, whirls and hums with a logic too large,

too complex, churning out events I know nothing about

except that they happen. Real things

fracture, fragment, skew: a man in flames,

black-charred skin by black newsprint. Friends I knew who

flared, burned out, fell. The same gravity

clings to all questions – why I can't balance my checkbook or

keep my apartment clean, why I can't speak

to strangers, or clearly, or at all

sometimes, why figures recede on a dark-growing road,

why fucking feels like breaking

as if the hymen were a heart, or why

I am scared. The aisle filled with elbows

and unknown commuter faces, closed.

I pushed and leapt off the train, watched it lurch from the station.

I called my mother. Come back, come get me.

Safety and strength are solid things, hard as pebbles

but as easily lost. My plum heart shrivels.

I cried in my mother’s car, in anger, in fear, for the train

rolling out, without me.