19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
VII: 2013
I left home awoken
all limbs and eyes,
boys scribbling along the swelling of my lower lip,
boys writing love songs along my breasts and beneath my chin,
boys whispering sound upon my collarbone, words canned as rusted tin
I was beautiful but indifferent, the stars frozen teeth above me, splintering
What they could not understand, until I met one who listened, actually
was that my heart, a heel halved, chaffed under the obvious
such as story-telling or gift-giving or re-arranging of hair and midriff:
before him, boys' words stiffened like clots and cloven dirt.
What those who chased me had not realized was transparent as ice,
I was unbowing quicker than thought, arranged.
Euclidian geometry, horse brushing, stanzas left on the shelf:
if the moment met man or a twinning turned right,
my heart could be drawn up without fret or slipping away.
not needled words or cast aside insurances, cadavers or complicated plots
only something lucent, touch
an ear to my story,
a waiting,
the many who had failed to see or
another I
who failed to allow their missteps and markings.
Rune upon the light and lacquer the box, after this.
VIII: 2014
I came to him because he noticed I was listening
silence replacing the easy algebra of words and winks
only later I noticed the parts of him, long in the limbs.
hands reminding me of chicken bone, knotty elbows, flesh de-feathered,
the color of mottled hen and meat-stamp blue
finger tips like a tree's rings, the forearms all goosebumps and wind-scars--
not that he was old but that he wore his geography on his skin uncomfortably
carried his heart in his mouth like a caged sun
carried shadows along his outer edges,
slow buckets of hope in his strides, running tendons along sidewalks.
Here was a man unafraid, and I fell
in love with the back of his palms
and the way his back recalled my grandmother pouring tea.
His spine, her bending while humming and careless concentration.
I had taken him into my arms long before i took him into my arms:
barn lass, horseshoe, bridle, looming.
He, though he did not know at first, had returned me home
after such a long journey and I watched him,
I first wrote him along the lines of my wrists,
and memorized the way he fell toward Earth when he walked by me,
and around others as Icarus toward the sea,
only not of fear but audacity
the looseness of love from which he tumbled.
And I knew then that before his shadow and his confusion
I had caught him before his bones broke fully
and winters and summers would rearrange carelessly before
his bones would splinter in front of me,
phosphate and calcium, as if my own.
Mended what was left poured from the netting
later leaving black nylon wet with sea brine on the rocks
and we became there alone in the dunes
one.
