I’m Not a Palm Reader, but…
Category: Writing and Poetry

When I asked to see your hands in Florida,
I was looking at those lines on the inside of your palms
for a hidden translation of love for us.

I was looking for the crease where I was meant
to build a bridge with stones, maybe a tower,
like Babel, from the inside of you to me.

My hands searched yours to find the ripeness
of you soul. I caught your laughter in the palm
of my hand and it was a familiar pattern.

I think my hands
were born for this.

What secrets lie underneath your skin?
What love? I took a piece of you that day
and embedded it in the crease of my palm,

between my fingers. I breathed you in,
watched you saturate into my palms

Your soul sank into my creases.
Dripping, like slow jazz,
into my hands.

I searched for the walls,
ceilings, and floors. I traced
the lines to my new family.

I thought…they are here,
in between the lines around
your knuckles, I saw them…

laughing and loving each other.
I saw them—loving me,
In my silence

I held a piece of your life and your soul that
I planned to bring me home with me. I believe
our hands have mingled in many lifetimes.

Abundant in their roots,
why does the landscape
conceal our splendor?

I'm lost in my self today,
unlike I was for those three days
—my body stretched over you.

When our hands rubbed together
like two sticks, we started a fire,
and you walked through my flames.

You do not know
how I've cried for us.

Now I stretch out my hands
toward the sun in adoration of you.
How do I count the loneliness?

In some other time when
I had laid back quiet and young,
I'd wished for you.

Now that I have found you,
and we've breathed together
as one body, the same body,

fingers crossed, palms pressed,
and love stretched out in our hands:
I know, "I'm never going to leave you."

I cried when you
got on the plane.

As you moved from one place to the next,
I looked at my hands: chapped, small,
undiscovered, inhabited, and abandoned.

As I left the airport
I looked up from my palms
and carved you out of the sky.

I picked a place for us
and took you home with me.
Now, and until I see you again,

I will bathe in your palms,
making room for us underneath
a perfect tree in the Fall.

~ written 07/17/07

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The Poetry of Us
Category: Writing and Poetry

I
I know you worry;
I do too. That's why
I'm writing this poem
for us.

In a poem we can do anything,
so while we're at it, let's make
it a party—a celebration of sorts.

First, let's bring your white mouse,
Agnes, who died earlier this year,
back to life, and have our party
at her coconut house.

Look how easy it is to flip
her shell right side up again
and multiply the rooms.

Let's hang your photos on her
4" walls, add some cushions
and candles too.

Open your Moleskine, let's make
a list right now of people to invite:
like family we've neglected,
friends we never made, and,
let's not forget—the dead.

Poems can exceed limits
like that.

Here's the invitation I just wrote:
"Dear Loved Ones and Others, too:
You're affectionately invited to
a celebration of sorts at Agnes'
fiber igloo."

2
But first, Honey, I want
to pause for a moment
before the guests start
to arrive to talk about
that thing you're not ready
to talk about.

I need you to know I can add some
lines here, even a stanza or two,
just for you. You only have to ask.

Just say the words to free you
from whatever makes it hard
to talk about.

Or, if it's better for you,
I'll flip my pencil over and erase
a few lines instead.

Etch them out of the past
and there'll be nothing left
you to struggle to talk about.

Poems are editable
like that.

3
Look, now the guests
are starting to arrive;
it's everyone on our list.

My Grandma is here
but not her husband.
He'll stay dead until he can
tell me the one thing I need
to know which is "I'm sorry."

4
We invited
your real dad.
He's a poet, too.

He hands you a packet
of poems he's written
over the years for you.

"If only I'd given
these to you before
I died," he says.

And because you can
see the deeper meaning
in most everything,

so you know it's finally
the right time to show him
that film you made,

but didn't give him
before he died—the
black and white movie
about regret.

And as I watch it again
in Agnes' living room,
I'm thinking,

there are no accidents,
and I know that's what
you're thinking too.

5
Our future children
are last to arrive—
we have two:

she has your eyes
and he has my ears.

Which most people think is
strange after they learn
we adopted.

But, not us—
we never question
coincidence like that.

6
Now that everyone is here,
I've got so much to say,

but when all there is left
to do is speak-- nothing comes.

There are no words for this,
so I look to you for help,
like I always do,

as suddenly the lights glow
with a strange significance as
without having made a sound,

everyone knows,
even the mouse,
what I've known
from the start:

I have already
loved you—forever.

~ written in 2006

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Someone In My Bath

Naked,
vulnerable toes
over the white
curve of the tub.

Shocking,
how much hotter
the water is than
what I expected.
Who is lying:
my fingers
or my toes.

A clear line
runs thru me,
drawing the boundary
that I never could.

Bumps rise up on my legs,
claiming ignorance to
hot or cold.

I pull my knees
closer to my chest to make
room in the tub for you.

The faucet is draped in soap stains,
and it presses onto my
shoulder blades, while the
drain gasps excess water.

You remind me
of someone else,
who reminds me of someone
else, and so on.

I already know that you'll be the first to leave, you'll be first to step out
of this tub—you're always first,
and you'll just stand there, just like the others had
stood, on the wrong side of the white ceramic cliff.

I'll watch you sparkle, admiringly underneath the
vanity lights as you'll leave your water drops
on the same speckled tiles that others have.
I'll feel needed when you roughen-up your wet hair
with the towel that I set out especially for you.

As for me—I'll remain in the residue.
Smaller and discarded among the soap scum
and dead skin cells.

These are the things that you'll leave behind,
albeit deliberately,
so that I will remember you,
like I remember the others too.

It's OK; everyone leaves me
frailer than I was before
soaking an inch of murky water.

~ written in the late 90's

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Mount Vesuvius
Category: Writing and Poetry

There is smoke coming from the mountain and no word in Latin for Volcano. I'm on the chasm of change too. Just one more step and I'll fall like pompous stone. "The sun is gone," I'll say, breathing ash all the way to the ground after holding my breath for so long. I'll turn to charcoal like everyone else after the pyroclastic serge. But unlike everyone else I'll posture myself in a communicative way— gifting the future with an interpretable cast.

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I Expected Too Much from the Weather
Category: Writing and Poetry

"In the midst of winter, I finally
learned that there was in me
an invincible summer."
—Albert Camus

I'd write a poem right now if I wasn't
so damned depressed. I'd start off with
how I just stepped off a plane in Chicago,
and into a snowstorm.

I'd tell you I haven't seen snow in thirty
years and that such a drastic change in
the weather certainly means something
drastic is about to happen to me.

Like I'll start feeling better soon.
Perhaps by my next step, when I light
this cigarette, or first thing tomorrow.

I clear a water spot from my left lens,
another gesture for clarity, and slip on
my gloves, still waiting to change.

A lady dressed for the weather is trying
to hail a cab. How uncomfortable taxi life
must be. I wouldn't know which makes
me feel even less important.

It's easy to be depressed in Chicago
and pin my pained-face on the weather.
Unreadable, I could easily be mistaken
for happy.

Today, I helped an old man with an
umbrella in one hand and a cane in
the other open a heavy door.

Tomorrow, I'll part my wallet
and hand down a dollar to a
homeless woman.

These are the things I do that
degrade my own depression.

Look. It seems I've written a few stanza's
already. I must be feeling better and
entering that space they warn you about.

If anyone gets suspicious when I start
giving away my things, I'll tell them
how happy I am, but hope they notice.

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Humility
Category: Writing and Poetry

The sky bends over me,
timeless, weightless, and endless.

Tilting my head, I explore the stars,
who stubbornly withhold such wisdom.

My feet can push me, but so close,
where reaching out, I take one white dot

into the darkened pit of my palm,
and set it aside, then—I take another,

and another…until, I find my gaze running
up an older arm, reaching for nothing,

and I begin to miss them, out there,
in the Universe that has grazed my mind

beyond the possibility of forever.
Perhaps, I will spend the rest of my life,

reaching again to pick up
the unfinished project that
twinkles about my feet.

I tilt my head to the ground to find
my footing, but still no answers,
among these blinding pomposities,

where Gravity has been waiting,
like it does, precisely where I stand.

I shift my weight to make room inside
my head for all these things that I'm
collecting: the miracles and stuff.

But, I'm no bigger.

Which means, knowledge is
inconceivably small and intangible,

or,
I've learned nothing.

Still, one day, I might be mistaken
for something larger than myself

and never move again, while perhaps
some poor elephant balloons away.

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Good Advice
Category: Writing and Poetry

Grandma once said,
leaves of three
beware of me,

but I still came home with a rash,
for who has time to count when
clambering up a pine tree?

If I—while twirling the twigs
of my arms and legs around
an elliptical stretch of sap,

encroach upon a fellow climber
with white berries and three leaves,
does Mother Nature not oblige me

to shake his hand,
even if it is
Mr. Poison Ivy?

Grandma also said,
anything boys can do,
girls can do better,

and, if I was to shimmy faster
and higher than the neighbor's boy,
I had to muster all my heavy things.

So, discarding of them—
I set a pair of shoes and one dog
on the ground, beside arithmetic.

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Volleyball with Crazy People
Category: Writing and Poetry

1

The muscle beneath
my ribcage flutters like
a wounded dragonfly.

The nurse says
my heart is beating
dangerously fast.

She speaks like a
Spartan mother, or
a serial killer might:

It's fifty-fifty,
she says,
You might die.

And I hate her—
for making me
have to be braver
than I'd had to be.

The dragonfly
speeds up—startled
to be half-dead.

2

Twelve hours pass, my tit has fallen
out of my gown and and a psychiatrist
with a clipboard arrives.

Convinced, she says that I tried
to kill myself, and And I can't be sure
anymore, given the evidence:

the thick brown leather—
oversized, yet tight enough
to pinch both my ankles and wrists;

the regurgitated charcoal—
pooled in the folds of my gown
like inkblots;

and the indigestible grit—
coagulating in my colon
beneath the collapsed coal.

She unstraps my right arm
so I can voluntarily admit myself,
but first, I cover up my right tit.

3

For three days, I'll eat from white
Styrofoam plates with matching
and potentially fatal utensils.

Just another pair of sneakers
without shoestrings, bouncing
underneath the cafeteria table.

At dinner, a large black woman
sits down across from me—
and she moves like a sloth:

A creature whose cage
I'll revisit to marvel
its lack of progress.

She seems parental too,
so I decide to rest my head
on her breasts later.

Perhaps, she will nurse me,
even raise me all over again.

I'll squeeze her index fingers,
taking my first steps, but never far
from the sound of her slippers
shuffling behind me.

4

She gathers her food into one large mound
(mashed potatoes, coleslaw, pudding,
whatever else) and pours milk on top,
prodding it with her fingers.

When not busy making slop, she reaches
into the air for invisible things
that for all I know are actually miracles.

Whenever she catches one,
she tilts her head like a puppy
above her empty palm as if

confused by the disappearance
of a bone held in the other hand
behind someone's back.

And she jumbles her sentences into
what I believe is scrambled wit and
genius, just mixed-up like her food
so that no one else will want it.

5

Today,
I play volleyball
with crazy people.

I reckon I am one
of the crazy people of whom
my new mother is the sanest:

She's not like the guy who opened up
both wrists for love—abandoned
each time the ball leaves his palm;

or the others, uselessly angry,
hitting it harder than any
sane person would;

or me, I lean
out-of-the-way,
still avoiding things.

6

But when the white ball
spins over the net toward
my new mother,

she reaches into the
air as if for another
invisible thing.

Unlike us—always deciding
first what will happen second
—she expects nothing.

Posed, arms outstretched, ready
for something new when the ball
slaps and bounces off her hand:

Amused—she tilts her head
and giggles above the sting
it left in her empty palm.

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A Stretch of Cotton
Category: Writing and Poetry

A hand-sewn nightgown
and stretch of skin fall over
the plaid couch as if lengthened

from perfect folds with the flip of
a wrist—like two white sheets ready
for the respectful pull over her head.

Plywood panels run up the walls,
the same background in family
photos that hang on the same

plywood-paneled walls,
and now the backdrop
for her deserted scalp.

Her eyes are moist and recognizable
but drowning in the swell of her cheeks
and forehead, as if an ocean

has filled the space between her skull
and skin, stretching away the comfort
I once found there.

I unwrap her loose package of bones
from a bottle of red fingernail polish
she holds by her side

and place her sepia-speckled palm
across my knee, my split-ends
framing the endeavor of hands.

I pull the shiny bristles the length
of one fingernail and leave a wet trail
of bubbled red lacquer.

Her eyes turn from behind puffs of skin
as a gospel record sings its dusty song
across the living room.

I return the clear plastic stick
to the vermilion vial
and repeat.

In the foreground of cancer pills,
a glass of sulfurous city water,
and saltine crackers,

I can almost hear the rattle
of her Singer revving in pursuit
of another long hem,

and the anti-climatic
throttle at a turn in
the McCall's pattern.

The clank of metal; the pull
of cotton; the snip of thread;
all silenced—

as if stuck in the subtle pause
of pulling green, white,
and yellow

heads of pushpins from fabric
and returning them to a porous
red tomato.

Her lips fall over the nude nubs
of her gums as her tongue runs
like a cotton ball over the scabs.

I lean closer, expecting: Don't forget
to do the dishes and bring the clothes
in before you go.

She swallows, smacks, and her lips
shatter: You have pretty hair, she says,
promise me, you'll never cut it.

Her fingers move the tips of my
hair as I search her tight face for
a familiar wrinkle.

I promise anyway
to the stranger on Grandma's
plaid couch.

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How Close We Are
Category: Writing and Poetry

"Put your hand on a hot stove
for a minute and it seems like
an hour. Sit with a pretty girl
for an hour and it seems like
a minute." ~ Einstien


I know the earth has
such a space to cross
to give us just a day;

I know a soldier is only
as far from war as he is to
someone else's decision;

I know it's a miracle
for the sperm to ever
reach the egg.

But, I'm not afraid of
how far we must go!

Einstein said, the minute
is longer and the mile
is shorter for a man

on a moving train
than it is for his friend
at the station,

meaning that time moves
differently for some than
it does for others.

What I'm trying to say is:

Let's continue into the next mile,
fall into the next emotion, and
reach our nearest point.

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