i want you for your freedom,
for capturelessness, for capriciousness,
i want you for your opportunities:
give me an inch, i'll grow a mile
and we can walk it together.
if you are a piano,
all black and white keys and holding together
harmonies and melodies all on your own--
if you are two hands working together
and syncopating what you desire
for yourself,
give me the key and i'll create another line
to weave in and around what you lay down.
i am through
with the cringing and the crying,
i am wide open and waiting
for something brighter than what love used to be.
let me inside the gate,
give me the access and i'll give you creation:
from scratch, from sticks, i will build
a new instrument altogether.

if you have ever seen a soldier returning home,
if you have ever seen a mother get her son back—
you have wondered who sent him away.
if you have ever seen someone destitute get a job,
if you have ever seen the accomplishment of earning lower wages—
you have wondered who took opportunity away.
if you have ever seen a family move out of a shelter,
if you have ever seen the father holding new keys—
you have wondered what happened to their home.

the breadth of damage that has been done,
these past years.
who has sentenced my generation
to poverty, to lack, to dependence?
our mothers and fathers can't quite grasp
what it feels like to be young and vigorous and bright
and completely powerless.
we tell stories like our great-grandparents:
we use economics and emotions interchangeably,
we spend hours poring over how we have made ends meet.
the depression, it is more than money.

i am a writer.

i can hear her, quietly mewling in the bathroom, while the cat sits in front of the bookcase and tries to figure out how to dismember it. there is a solitude in the apartment that none of us could tame, broken only by her piteous little whimpers. i wonder if the doctor warned her it would be this bad.
the cat, having figured it out, paws her old copy of the complete Keats off the shelf. it falls open halfway along the spine, and he sinks his claws into the crinkly old paper. i shoo him off the dead lines and replace the book. she is coughing, heaving, crying.
she wrote her thesis on Keats, on the exploits of Endymion and the distance between those who love history and those who create it. academicians have loved her for her entire life, with the inexplicable fondness of rhetoricians who can't be moved for a younger questioner, troublemaker. she always asked why. with Keats it was the purity, the devotion so clear and clean, that attracted her. her own poetry is messy, rampant, explodes onto napkins at restaurants and the margins of her essays. but there is no purity in realism, or in the body—no doubt her next poems will reflect a deep disappointment in the mortality and physical weakness she's experiencing now. i tried to comfort her but, like me, she prefers to weather cheap pain on her own.
it rained all day, keeping her nausea down as she stood pressed against the balcony windows. palms to glass like she always is during the afternoon thunderstorms—she says the rainstorms are why she came here, and why she can never leave. now that it's evening the smells at the open windows are changing, from warm wet asphalt to cold damp grass.
i can hear her quieting down, and then she's standing in the bathroom doorway, backlit and wiping her hand across her mouth. a little moth in overgrown wings she looks like, in her too-large shirt and bare legs. she collapses into a corner of the couch, rubbing her forehead. when the light rain starts to fall again, she and the cat both look out the window and raise inquiring noses to the air.

the accoutrements of illness gather
like the flotsam of some grounded voyage
that beached on its own mortality:
the detritus that beckons you back into bed,
assures comfort in the status of being
something less than what you have been,
or could be. and the illness itself
hangs dim around the edges, curtains that blow
in the cool breeze of painkillers and the haze
that opens, sheer and soft, for more
delirium: grounded, floating, nauseous.
eventual health seems so far away
when every object screams handicap,
tells you to lie still and stay quiet.
it becomes easier to believe the landscape
than the body, with its queasy lies
and dead desires: the blood will still rush
when you stand no matter how you hope.

it sleeps like a tide inside the throat,
waiting for dawn or light to pull it from its trenches--
a hibernating creature, fattening on what sleep
and nutrients are provided, threatening
to pull from their home the last salvages of health.
with dirty, crusted claws it wrenches open sleeping sores,
leaves furrows where flesh was whole
and makes its own mocking mark in the recesses of the body.
the stitches begin to tear,
sutures being no match for what has been done here:
what has been ripped away is gone, and the finality of it
leaves no breath to ease the wound.

the body is such a
misunderstood thing, an inchoate message
of froth and desire and sweat—
confronted by the gravitational pull from
anyone else's mess,
we succumb and gain closeness.
all the verbs we espouse can't find traction
on the slope of physicality we build:
to play, to ponder, to touch.
in the dim coolness of a bedroom
there is no equality to be had, only gender
and the roles and rules we perform.
and your body,
with its broadness and solidity,
makes acts of surrender all the more delicious.
i keen for your surety,
that incontrovertible effort of appeal
and design, you make me weak
and feminine and glowing, all in one stroke.

there is rhythm in the city streets,
a beat that struggles up from under concrete
to pick at your veins with dirty fingertips--
and you, dear innocent, wander open-mouthed
wild under the open sky and
hemmed in by the height of the buildings.
all on your own you are stellar, astronomical,
orbiting the many works of men's hands.
with your own footsteps you build a tune
of pounding, searching, a trek
that might be months or minutes long,
letting the city grub its palms on you
till exhaustion and heat stroke threaten too close.
oh but the next day there is still more
to be found, more doorways and cafes and
more streetlights to shelter under,
more images of flesh and stone to store away.
the sun in its path cannot deter you,
can only provide the impetus to get up and out
and the light to see, to search
when two feet and two eyes and sweat
are all you have ever needed to be alive.

in silence we dread
what comes inevitably;
next week, old age, death.

inheritance

on this day in history, what i was is already dead.
an ancient evil rises, poseidon-like,
over my head and swallows all my
wandering waves of hair. the power that i had!
when i sang, the argonauts sank their ship.

evil breaches my doorway, an idea older than chronos:
he seeks my hearth, sits at the kitchen table,
perched like an overfed vulture.

oh, all the things i could have been,
if left to bear only this child and not this pain;
i am old, i am worn, i am grey, and my skin
grows dry with every passing midnight.
(what is it to mourn your own youth?)
i am a raging, sighing daughter of the earth.
when i sang, odysseus tore his flesh for me.

and this day, this morning, when you and i come in together,
is also known as a sunday; a day in cold midwinter that
does nothing, says nothing, is nothing.
your hand on mine, what does it signify?
we cross borders every day, you and i,
and it is in these crossings that i learned to love you.
i wonder where our feet will go tomorrow.

the rocks in the garden walls, holding back the river floods,
the stones building the arch of our gate,
the pebbles falling out of our pockets after we lounge on the beach:
underfoot and in between our toes and
rough against the grain of our skins,

i don't like the colors of the rocks
because they do not mix.

maybe after years of pressure from the earth,
maybe after eons of hot hot heat,
maybe after my inheritance is taken away
(the blood inheritance, the flesh inheritance,
my name, my body, my meaning),
maybe after there exists a brown little boy
who is an anagram of father and mother,
maybe when my narrative is given over to a tired tombstone
or someone else's sweaty palms—

my tired, aching song. all the change is gone.
the words are old, the methods ancient;
i could never sink a modern crew now
the way i sank the argonauts then.
for weeks i have been dousing my vocal cords in
lemon acerbity, alcoholic sting,
the persuasiveness of tasting someone else's mouth.

the old evil rises again, enters my doorway
and sits down for tea. he sits, sycophantic, with
his knees tucked into his chest.
he is all one mind, convinced by his own repetitions.
and this tea, on this sunday, is accompanied by my descant
pleading for reason, pleading for the power of
sight over supposition: because we all run red when injured
and today i am dressed in gore.

and this sunday, next september, every sundown,
these are my witnesses. these, and the song of my son
who is not yet born, and the lyrics that leach
power out of the old evil;
when i sing, history hums in bitter discord.
when i sing, the sinking hopes of sailors keen in the wind.
when i sing, all the granite and phosphate and limestone
and sandstone and obsidian of the world
rise out of the earth and run together
in one great conglomerate feast;
and my little boy kicks in my womb.