some poems from the last twelve months

events have transpired

1.
My body is as much a temple
As it is a doorway
As it is a gargoyle on a doorpost
As it is dew on the gargoyle's skin
As it is a stone mouth snarling at nothing
As it is the nothing which graces
The snarl, the dew, and the doorpost

2.
It is oddly sensual how Spring reveals itself in
Geese and grackles, red-winged blackbirds
In the marsh, reminding you what air can be:
Not wicked with cold, not empty but
Fucking delicious.

3.
I can hear the torrential roll, not of breakers
But of brakes disengaged, endless acceleration
The tide coming in
And I think this must be that oceanic feeling
The psychoanalysts dropped
Dead trying to explain

There's a seagull on the chimney
Of the school across the street,
Crying even louder than the children and
My blood sugar is steadily rising
I can feel it weeping through the seams
Of my skull like fresh water
The window takes a little breath of air,
Lake air, crocuses, and quiet
Drowning joy

4.
Bright eyed monkey child howls with the train 
And "You're the only person that's helped
Me in all this, a thousand thank yous"
And chalk on taught hands —
There is no unromantic gesture
No twitch of squirrel's tail or twig on wind
— When I am falling in love with the world
I feel most like myself
When every window, mirror, manhole
Is a portal opening to more of the same,
To the fantasy of immediately
Peddling my body to the corner store
To buy some peach iced tea.

5.
I have to control my tongue, and my hands
They tremble with the unsteady energy of
A new desire, that can barely be spoken
Or if it were, barely believed, that
I want badly to be your sister
To braid your hair and to hold you, weeping
When you have lost something precious, and 
To sing when we have found it

6.
No matter the difficulty I swear
To balance coins on your nose
To brush wet clay onto your arms
To crush red berries on your forehead
And glue to your butt a donkey's tail
For Eros is a chimera
She brays for sweet apples
Trots not on hooves but my hands
And picks trees bare with your feet

7.
What meets your hand
Meets first: your skin
As soft as ash, and
Then: the shadow-soft
Shape of your fingers
Last: an angel of fire
Behind you, standing
Just inside your silhouette

8.
Until I am dead or a stroke takes my memory,
Until I have forgotten devotion,
I devote myself to what we have made,
What has happened, what is happening
In particular. This — 
Not to a type of happening,
Not one possibility among others — 
But this only Creature
Who will grip me until it lets me go,
Who has given names to the people I know
And put them in time with me
For us to embarrass each other with love,
To sing half-remembered shanties,
To juggle oranges badly,
And to hold each other's bodies
When a trick of history or inclement weather
Erases the bearer of a name we cherish.

9.
Far past reason, beyond rhyme
I hope you live a long, long time
But if you don't, that's okay
I will love you anyway