Synonyms for “House”

1. Abode.  Any living space is space living. We are living above the Jiffy Lube and there’s a distinct smell of oil and rotting meat. It’s August and we can’t take it anymore. The heat is unbearable and there’s not much left in the refrigerator. "Did you look under the couch" often used jocularly in a mock-formal tone.

2. Apartment: A living space consisting.  Coexisting.  Conjuring. Conning. There’s a circling, a wand of grief sprinkled over the furniture.  You are telling me a story that involves figures I’ve never met. You are sure we went to a movie once then had coffee afterward.  We are of one or more rooms about it, a building of wills and emotions, a complex unit of two.  

3. Billet: Quarters in a private home assigned to shadows, to those photos of footsteps and military order; to “Anonymous.” You have decided to grow a mustache and look so much like your uncle that your grandmother holds out her hand and her eyes begin to water.

4. Boardinghouse: A house that provides. This is where I sleep with one eye open.  The multiple latches and locks are broken. The arsonist that lives below smells of burned matches, sulfur and never looks me in eye. He stares at my combat boots. ”Those are boy’s shoes,” he says.  We stand in the cramped kitchen, lean on the counter and watch the bagels quickly burn. There’s no cream cheese anyway; somebody used up the last of it. “Will you please not set this place on fire,” I ask “as long as I’m still living here?”  He doesn't answer but sticks his head in the refrigerator, rearranges the odd compilation of pickles, margarine tubs, something that looks like chutney, fiercely believing that if he finds the cream cheese everything will be fine.

5. Bungalow: A small one- or one-and-a-half-story house. The kind we dreamed about as kids.  We’d live in this bungalow with two or more rabbits, make Nutella crepes and learn to grow our own lemons. The bogeyman would be eaten by the Cabbage Patch Kids that guard the periphery and keep this land free.  We would eat cheese and crackers, carve art out of orange rinds, learn foreign languages.  Friends would come to visit but wouldn't stay.  “They live in a bungalow,” they would say, underlining and italicizing the syllables; rolling their eyes.

 6. Cabin: Originally, a small, crudely constructed one-story dwelling. One made of gingerbread or ready for graham cracker crumb paths. A place where ovens run too hot for comfort. This one has four identical beds; four identical plaid comforters. There is no antler decor anywhere. Often refers to memories we’ve left unassigned, amorphous.  The scratches on the bathroom door are courtesy of our first dog, Caesar. The comic books we carefully wrapped in cardboard boxes.  A watercolor of a boat that isn't. A vacation home may be quite large and psychically complex.

7. Caravan: A British English synonym for trailer. In Germany after a long day fighting with her boyfriend,  our mother takes off in the brand-new-just-off-the-factory-lot Volkswagen camper, leaving the boyfriend to fend for himself in the red light district of Frankfurt. We are exhausted and lost in another city, end up at a camp site that's not on our map.  Later, we hear voices, gypsies quietly encircling the van, discussing this or that.  My brothers and I are stock still, listening.  "Caravan camper...caravan camper... caravan camper...caravan camper” our mother repeats in a whisper from her sleep.  My brothers and I sit up all night, gauging the length of the shadows pacing outside our window, wishing we were back in America. 

Waiting in a Ruffled Dust

She tries to fill in this light, jelly jar thick gathered between the sycamore’s bare branch psalm and unfettered sky, its paint-by-numbers stucco blue, her hips rhyme the early risers down the block climbing into their daylight smiles, finding their pace. She ladders her dream, buffs the rough alignment of planets, stacks creek rocks for miles, forages sea and salt, sews fog into her pillow, then smacks the curb jumps the cardboard truck with its smirk and brake then the dumpster bends backwards like a stoned ballerina & there’s Patsy Cline slinking from the radio and he says you got to watch your lead foot. A lead foot he says. Snicker. As if some shotgun reply is in order & we miss our home. Candles burnt down to stubs, wild cards all but used up & this odd flickering on the outskirts of the story.  She misses the noon of conversation, pauses of another life. There’s still opening speeches, shots of clear tequila, the pleasing and unappeased, fitting into the mornings after. And we think of speaking, but it’s not easy to sound out. We wish we knew the spit-shined story,  its easy water and light wind, could sail our grey boats out of early morning and into the forever ocean but there’s a constant mooring, a stutter we can't explain. Let’s say we’re drawing the same breath, making the same eggs, and decide to shelf the unfinished business, give it room to name. Before the lights switch on, an outline of crows & telephone lines, cars washing down the avenues, sky in everywhere,

The Art of Escape

These are barely premonitions, the limits & labor of our everyday belief beginning to fray. Hush & the  boats return empty-handed under the bridge’s moth light.  “Never swim alone,” he says, and I dive into the dam empty-handed.  Coil your body into a rope, and rise above the water he says &  your life lifts underneath, condensed to steam &  sunlight. It hardly matters that this is the back window of our names, the receding implication. We keep coming back drawing a chalk line. The floor is falling out beneath us and yet here we are, Houdinis, a couple of strange birds, playing cheap card tricks, making out like its real magic. Take a card, any card.  

Tracks

He wakes with his fight itching in the afternoon, messes with the dials on the radio, can't tell if it's simpler playing old love songs than trying to forget. His sons and their irrevocable ghosts work the static, push their muddy silence against the roof of his mouth until he can no longer stay in their names. He wants love to thread stars, mend the family fabric whole, but it's late and a full moon waits in the sky, ready to wrestle him to sleep.

Grow wild down sour grass whistle road with a glass half full. It’s summer & we steal a boat, push off into the unwavering. The dam's been flooded, there's a history of forgotten homes, jagged foundations that cut our feet, make us bleed. This is our baptism into alone.

Caught in a June rain, my dress is muddy.  The car shutters and we pull off to the side of the road, fill the radiator. Later in this story there'll be a wrong turn but right now your buck knife shines on your belt like a badge. We have nowhere particular to go, the church bells have been melted down, evidence of home could be anywhere, even where the heart stops.

Rough Draft of Almost April

Down moon avenues  

conversations sag over satellites,

muddle the nouns.

 

We shred memory until noon

 take a break and then start again.

If you got nothing to hide it seems more like pride

rubbing shoulders with itself.

And the sycamores bloom

they keep coming until we cry.

Now our conversion is spent digging

the sky from our heads.

Down the road is covered in rain.

Early verbs in the punch card

Another hour paid for something

so simple.

Catch up with your quick slick hands

worn worm thought.

Weathers worn threadbare

all night rooms & floorboards

& under your feet you know how

it happens why love is wrangled

and wrestled, flung.

Untethered we pinch ourselves its true

the reasons why we came to roost

inside alphabets thin as thread

Sometimes it seems the birds have forgotten

and call the wrong number for hours

Taking pains to leave a song

that might never be heard.

It was the West

& more a blood bond

all the invasive plants that defined a childhood

now red tagged.

A scrawled fever, the flat taste in our mouths

is only a residue of hunger, its

disclosure.

Spillover

It’s too late for bed. Black ice warnings on the radio, the static skids and snows. A spillover of wind catches in our throats and our bodies move down the driveway, slightly ajar, stricken. Every day a bird falls from the sky; jays, crows, hummingbirds the size of overripe lemons.

Memory erases every footfall, the scattering of ashes under the coldest of Junes. Now it's time to make peace, but you keep waiting for another world to end and there's no old enemies left that will give you your last word.  Shake it off.  We weren't meant for memoirs, for sentences to move truth along,  to capture the ghosts. At night I sweep the kitchen floor, the steps to the driveway, streets and boulevards, all the open homes in America, sweep until everything is clean.

& love is here as the fish rise from the rivers and throw their troubles on the shore. Love, my arm and bowl, my muddle. Whatever we meant to say is left, dangling. Later, I hear you humming Vivaldi while warming your face in the sun. Those last notes, the four seasons hanging in the heat and then the violin's refrain as it reaches out and away.

Me & L.C. Try to Piece It Together

To pour water in the radiator
My dress muddy

To pour water in the radiator
Every three miles for nearly seventy

My muddy hem & the buck
knife on yourbelt  

we’re plainly on our own

Best laid plans go awry he said
& down the hill we hit a hornet’s nest
listen as the air grows rowdy
pissed

Sometimes a body can't tell
fiction from fact 
our bodies speak in tongues
babel
its own indiscreet hush

radiator's got a crack he says
no shit Sherlock

whether it be lake our memories lack
or forgiveness
we can't go back
no matter how we backstroke

Help me pull the boat out from the weeds

Heresy

It’s cold, early
& you brace yourself
when grief kicks in the tires
& glass flies
& drives you home
to its trailer
to watch the the sky
bend in two.

We don’t know where this belief
might begin but tonight the pool table looks
primed & we got nothing better
to believe.

Under the bridge the stories seem
smudged, tethered to heresy.
We refuse to map
loneliness, its topography & leaden cues.

How the mirror glances
converges at our hips & thighs.

All this slipping into place

to place ourselves. 
At night the needle
digs and the song
repeats our shipwreck
(you are so lovely)

Wilderness

We try to sleep
heat rising from the floorboards
a cat screeches
howls at the fence
as it goes up in flames

Heaven aims to crowd out
the blue sky of our mouths
We are all a little harmed.

People die. It’s true.
It happens and our grief
grows thick past the fences
past the strangers
waiting for a hallelujah.

On the walls of loss & lack
we break down to our elemental font
a fierce rattle of hiss & marrow
an impossible chant that has no tree
to lean on.

Love is cinched
from the impossible quiet
because it can because
our hearts are lined with ghosts
who polish their jokes
over the years until the punchline
shines.

You are walking somewhere
where the trees eddy
in such harsh sunlight as to make you
wince and you stop to roll a cigarette but
wind scatters your tobacco
and it's too much work to start
again and so you walk
the edge of the river
and the glass bottomed boats
gleam the surface of the water
like smoke.

I’ve come here really
to recommend flirtation
spill your secrets
make confetti of your death
your life
its circle of months
all the burn & tango
of redemption
your wilderness.

So Few Lonesome Places Left

Red letter egg. Hen prophesy.
When the minister loses his
cool & slaps the egg
from the pulpit to the floor
a double yolk splatters
stains his trouser's hem

The boys are anxious
for this to be over
their stomachs rumble
they kick the bench rail
one & two
one & two
until they are told
to quit fussing
sit still.

We are transients here
pass time by playing solitare
cheating ourselves
when it pleases

This might be our legacy
a shaky foundation
where no one can stand stock still
& where the shoes we've worn for years
leave our shins aching.

She glues the egg together
shell shards, calcite crystals
makes it nearly whole again.
There are pieces missing but
there are always pieces missing.

All the bad news no one wants
to hear is told anyway.
Like a query
never meant to be answered
when the asking was enough.

There's no remedy
to speak of
no grand epiphany
to swagger & square
no story that needs to be told
from scratch anymore.


The boys were wishing
they could go home
when the egg flew
from the minister's pontification
& two perfect yolks spilled out
next to their feet

Words haven't done their job
mostly &
alter saying
but now there's this egg
its double yolk &
a congregation waiting
to be reckoned.

Rift

I know the guttural urge
to walk the fog
confusing it for heaven




& rummage for
brothers that have stepped
barefoot from memory’s curb




~





Which brings us back to this fog
& the believers who shake
salt over their shoulders
like crumbs





An errand can take you anywhere
even into the woods
a bridge of mothers’ voices calling
through a flash flood
clearing a path
to better hear the names


we are all unsolved


bartering for faith with whatever
is at hand
hoping it's enough to keep us
at the table


he hides his head but doesn't sleep.
Her sprawled linen skirt
a lawn of honor
its parachute of air and smoke
gathered in the hem of his mouth




You know how maps recite
their borders
take on a language of ledgers
average in the floods the oil
spilt and spilt & all the grief on loan.




The facts of our lives are waged.
We throw down for a shot of whiskey
burn our throats sweet.



Who says we can only occupy one room at a time?
Pacific, we lay our debts on the table
the kisses and threads
the bad advice we gave so freely.



Love is quick like this.
we forgive ourselves
when the rent is due & pride's
just not able.




You've seen how fickle breath is,
are versed in satellites ways,
how they stretch the truth until
it hurts.

Open Space

She drags a cord of wood into your blood it burns for weeks. Months of guttural light, a blue smudge of flame where the heart resides.You find that long overdue library book & then, without meaning to she finds you on the street, crouched, a gun cocked, aimed. She doesn't know you would rather surrender & watch the orchard swell with apricots but the gravel carved into your knees keeps pain fresh, alive. Your fingers settle on an underlined page and retrace the passage but the vowels slip away.

You are left guessing the alphabet of her birth, the reference points that show no mercy and you're pretty sure the Polaroid's been faked, her history tampered with, but what's the harm?

You want to burn in orbit like Sputnik pushing earth's atmosphere.

I'm not ready for another winter. This one's dragged on so long my hems are black with mud & oil. I know you'll understand when I say my roots are growing out coarse, unruly & there's nothing to be done but wait it out.

Satellites hover above us, fill us with their hiss and tremble. We try to sleep inside their sibilance but today the water is slithering through the floorboards, buckling the planks & odd numbers rained down like a hand of wild cards, like manna, like a chorus of slingshots drawing back, aiming at nothing particular we can identify.

Still Life of a Refusal

1.
I was looking to win some money, coins sewed into the lining of my skirt to keep luck longing for the jangle of metal inside silk’s edge. My dice jumping on the table then counting out snake eyes, counting the mirrors all the smoke held.

2.
Words don't always mend time & secrets go to your head. There's no cure for titillation or keeping score. I’ve forgotten what it's like to glance in a mirror & have it not gawk back.

3.
Play this out however you want. Whatever beecomes of us. Shake out the grease and elbows, all the blown kisses, let them rise like steam above our heads.

4.
A compass mistakes conversation for a conversion points northwest as if I’d go there without a map or ammunition.These are dangerous days I’ve been told, less than blonde & resist their own shadows.
Even though I want to take sleep’s dirt road find what’s left of the neighborhood there’s something that loses shape.
5.
And yes, I understand what you mean sir though your reasons baffle me. Last night the whole sky hollered, trees sagged and the water rose up to meet the road. Did you not hear me knocking?

6.
At supper under white cloth conversation an argument started over the cod and mackerel. What exactly were they eating? Someone threw their fish knife, stabbing the Ficus tree just below it's lowest branch & someone stomped out, loathing dinners with the family, the predictable disassembly of a perfectly ordinary evening.

7.
We are all a little emptied, memory scrutinizes its attendants, wears the same shoes over and again
to the same old ball. Everywhere folks speak on tiptoe calling the gods out from under the car's exhaust whispering & whistling as if they were herding cats and pray for peace and love and rain and excess.

8.
We pace, wear a fine ditch over these floors, enter rooms and leave them without ever closing a door.
How many blue ribbons does it take to be declared victorious? We are convinced there are people out there who want to steal our money and our minds. How many ribbons does it take? I’m relieved the tracks lead somewhere. Expecting them to do otherwise is a waste of time. & the proof. All you have to do is break the glass.

Night Splints

We are having trouble
breathing but the boys in the pickup
keep bragging like shoeshines
The actress doesn’t know
where she left her house
leapfrogs into her neighbor’s pool
wading in the shadow of sight
it's all I can do to turn my eyes away from
her grief, her euphoria

flats of apricots spread out in the sun,
sulfur licks my lungs in such a way as to make me
queasy and wanting
something to squander all this sweetness on.

I’m having trouble breathing but the boys in the pickup
dull the air around them, unbuckle the books from their feet,
spit from their windows.

These boots are wrecked, mud covers the laces
where the clay kneeled with me confused
for an elegy

To go forward, like a bird over a cliff
winged from head to hip.
I saw the shadow fly from her mouth
collect on her brow.
There are trees that will never willingly move
their trunks carry
autographs and love letters
to the dead


The crow picks up the apricot and swallows
it whole. Bugs fly from her mouth
long oboe note of delight.
I figure its time carry my shoes
back home, wash the soles clean,
scrub out the lace eyes.

The woman sat beside a man and
held his hand without looking. Their fingers were
not clean. Their mouths, not sweet.
Apricots sat in a box beside their knees.
They wanted to go home. I could tell
the way they didn't say anything
out here in the open where anyone could see
there was more of
where they come from
I swear

These days working my boots
can get confusing, the ditches are growing
wide and thistles won't leave my hair.
There's not a station you can get out here
She says allow me snipping from my hair
the last of the the afternoons thorns.

My head makes memory out to be
a concert hall of birds bullying
each other over one lone apricot.
And tonight I pry the words from the branches
pull them out from underneath &
they keep spilling .

Lexington

Turtle wax and bourbon, summer’s lazy heat rises from the apricots and the bees, in yellow congregations, meander like footnotes to this day. At night dreams loop, aim to mend salt and blood, memory’s sticky arc. Thread our kisses through tendon and seam, who were we when we used to know? The old man’s jaw opens and a life weighs up. It’s already hot and I got nowhere to go. I might still be down by the dam, a rubber tire threaded through my legs, waiting for the water to rise.

Dear John and Andrea,

“There was a great mystery about love then.” ~ Virginia Woolf

Rummaged for my husband’s hand last night,
vanished under the surface of his breath.
Inside night's hush I think we’ll be all right
I go on dreaming.

Love's scrawl on every surface
coffee grounds on the kitchen counter
yellowed notes left on the refrigerator door
the other half of the sandwich left
for you
what we carry from room to
room

Beginnings lapse and stones
become seeds.
Maybe if we rouse the story from its river
we’ll catch the refrain, muffled,
telling us to move slowly
skate our doubts
out here in the open
trust someone will catch us
when we fall
because we fall.

Turn the compass upside down
shake the arrow loose
from its stem
let it spin
See where it takes you
& start from there.

Credible Witness

We wait, knowing it's just a matter of time before the crows return. Their cries jimmy the locks on the back door, make us irritable, punchy as dry drunks. We try to reason with them, but they don't make deals. In Diablo’s shade I make up prayers that might work in a pinch, fold my fingers into origami birds. Crows aren't scared. Their oily feathers grease the fence.

You know what scares me most. Piercings, green jello, walking through tunnels. I want my angels to come back but they keep jumping fences, knocking over the neighbor's garbage cans, hollering across parking lots. A bunch of punks. Sometimes I dream of lariats, hemp skirting air, lassoing my own army of birds. The crows are gaining a foothold here. They sit on the flat roofs and holler all over dusk.

It’s morning and the sky is stock still. Earthquake weather but the yolks are perfect, show no sign of breaking. Diablo is here, in view of everything. I’m not waiting for prayer to take hold, instead I’ll take the crows on their word, cut back the sycamores, expose their shadows for what they are.

Confabulation

Sometimes you sleep the last hours breathing all the night’s angles, day begins on the tip of a branch breaking. It’s too early for opera. Day & night the road is damp, anxious, drone of wheels as they slow to a stop. We begin by talking about the birds returning but it’s not the beginning of anything anymore. No, sometimes you fall into bed without remembering that even without a map, morning comes, resolves, revolves. You sleep the last hours with one eye barely open, breathing steam.

& yes, these are our fingerprints on the walls, our plans revolving in angles, semantics. We go to sleep on a branch breaking. Anything is beginning. Anymore is fractioned. Sometimes we work a different resolution, slow the truth on the road. Drone of slow wheels inside our heads.

There are birds in your neighbor’s backyard and it’s early, remember. A day in a neighborhood, a way to talk about plans. Sometimes we fall into bed on the tip of a branch. Memory without a map is the beginning of anything. Breaking open, the hours without a plan slow. Wheels revolve, an opera sounds, the fingerprints on the walls look like a map, like birds beginning. On a branch breaking.

Bow

Trouble swallowing this day in the mirror.
Underfoot, the cat sprawls the afternoon.
A shadow roped in, hazardous.
To get through with whatever means, imitate & sing our health.
Puddles branch out under bus tires, a thick slick in the air (dandelion), just trembling.
Maybe if we learn to pray. Make it proper, mend our blood.
This & that. The cat sleeps in a question mark we can understand.
Is not what I was looking for.
Like Alice I fall.
A living doubt. Pockets emptied & nothing’s funny anymore.
The daughter slams her door and the lights flicker then go out.
Okay. That’s funny.
Committed to (mis)memory oxygen reveals its importance here.
Dress with a hobble, rearrange our pockets to fit our luck.
Tap & sober.
After the story is dialed in the heroine will take a short nap.
Reveal the secret to her sensation
She dangles a verb out in front of us then takes it away.
Left branching, we twist balloons into thought bubbles.
Insert brilliant comeback.
Cast ourselves in enhanced light.
Reference is a moving target with a gun.
Just yanking your chain.
Fingerprints on the trees make it all seem possible.
Buckshot under our nails.
She stares down the cat until he blinks.
It’s a just war.
The sky is an unreliable shrine
A floor is just evidence.
A secret: vertigo is always likely.
I could live here, between steps, scour the dictionary for gist.
Directions are reasonable even if you can't take them seriously.
Figuring we are all goners is too easy a game.
Better to throw some cat litter over the oil spot and tap away.
I resist inserting a metaphor between black polished boot and sky.
Yet fully support anyone who does.
Secretly we hope for more, to make a nice introduction.
Something to bring home.
Hand stitched is how I’m feeling today thanks so much for asking.

List

Shower curtain hooks, ladder, poker chips, stilts. We list, catalogue the weather. Whether we are mustache trimmer, soldering gun, bouquet of flowers. Keep our hands busy. The problem with jumping at love is that it's easy to confuse the lover with their perfume. Squeegee, aspirator, hatchet, pillow & then crouched on a street with our bodies cocked and coarse, sentenced to itself, on what might have been. Ampersand, detonators, flood, timetable. Or we could talk football. Eat a cracker and talk cheese. Eggplant, balsa wood, dragon, milk. Did we want this year’s breath caught on tape or simply mean to log it in under an alias, get back to it when we weren't so distracted? Chinese herbs. Beets. Flax seed. Aspirin.

Wide Open Space

She drags a cord of wood
into your blood
& it burns for weeks
months of guttural light
blue flecks of flame

you find
that overdue library book
it's no surprise
& then, without meaning to
she finds you on the street
crouched
your gun cocked
she doesn't
know you would rather surrender
& watch the orchard swell with apricots
but the gravel carved into your knees
keeps pain fresh
your fingers on the trigger


It is not the way she planned to live
she tells you one day & you are left
guessing the alphabet
of her birth
reference points that show no mercy
You are sure the polaroid is fake
but what's the harm?

She doesn't like math
it's more of an accusation
than anything else though her frame of reference
eludes you & now like an
epidermal in the small of your spine
pain is shadowed & you want to
burn up in orbit like Sputnik
entering earth's atmosphere

I am not ready for another
winter. This one's gone on so long
my hems are black with mud & I
know you'll understand
when I say my roots are growing out
coarse, unruly
there's nothing to be done
but wait it out

Satellites hover above us
fill us with their hiss and rumble.
Try and sleep inside their invisible din
the numbers keep coming but won't
add up
they tremble at the end of our pens
& the water keeps rising

New Landscape Stagger

Or you might feel like sleeping
the day away

the cat chases a ball and bells ring
it’s difficult to miss something when it actually wasn’t what it was
church bells on tape
a voice blowing kisses through a telephone
a photo of Catholic smiles.

We’ve gone from singing into the abyss to just humming
kazoo moon plays this heart out
for my daughters
they smile and wave as if to confirm the truth of this
at night the men stand at the 2 a.m. exit
smoking and tapping their thick toed shoes
not everything isn’t what it seems
maybe they’ve just left their beers on the bar.
Students come on Fridays, late,
take up tables and shine for hours.

Who knows where the yearning comes from
makeshift desires built from sticks and stucks
from cliffs and imagined daggers.
I squirrel away their glances as if they were mine.

This land is wet, weeded. It glints on October’s red grass,
its relief played out in this domestic timbre.
Stars escape the margins of space
graze traffic, stare down buddhas and bankers,
they hedge their bets and ride the sky’s sleep
stagger deep into these hills.

Sometime Rattle

We are listing. The mountain is always in front of us.
Tented here in this sky,a catalogue of weathers.
Mustache trimmer, soldering gun, bouquet of flowers
stuffed under the bed, plastic and petals brimming scent
making our dreams dizzy, feverish.
Underneath the whispering I can hear
what sometimes rises, a sometime rattle and sometime
prayer. To keep your word you have to climb it
one rung at a time.
Try to keep our balance.

Mountains on the dining table
twitching of branch and wind.
We say our names not unlike
another try at reconciliation.

Traffic leaches from one avenue to another
how easy it is to disappear.
Your name not unlike another
said and then wrapped inside our trachea
muslin lined & oiled
we say the names not to bring
or necessarily to say.
Squeegee, aspirator, hatchet
& then they are standing on a street with their bb guns cocked.
They are standing next to muddy sting-ray bikes
pulling t-shirts over their blonde heads
shoving skinny arms through sleeves.
Record, repeat.

It tangles into cul-de-sacs, ponderings
where our hands steal through drawers
finger loose bills, bowls of change.
Reel, release.

Names push against the alphabet
resist collapse
the mountain doesn’t move
Did you mean
a naked body at ease or relieved?
Did you mean
a less formal term for elegy,
its gartered squeeze on our blood?

Armed with this clock
this years breath, consider
the stars & then the jets circling
cursive an accidental sky.

Bridge

Bridge 2008

Try to keep this house of cards intact. There is no way from here. Words stick to the roof of our mouths, reluctant to speak. Our faith isn’t durable after all, an unmarked cardboard box. The streets grasp our leaving and know more than we thought. Suspicious, we pack in the dark.

What odds out of our favor tipped south? She is standing in the hallway keeping the walls from falling. A storm breaks; I draw the last heart & concede. There is little to be saved from sticking around where you're not wanted. We wean our care in increments so small it’s difficult to measure.

Bridge 1973

Our geography is askew. This deck has only so many tricks. Houses appear from a distance but the olive trees no longer exist in this frame. Blow it down. I assemble a new smile for photo booths. Show my teeth.

Bridge 1968

It’s a summer of bruises and missing teeth. Her feet grow a size and a half. She can believe she’s not from somewhere else. The lemon tree grows a foot and a half. We are almost to September before we remember we are supposed to be gone.

Bridge 1970

South has plenty to say about his bad luck but no excuses. When his bidding gets out of hand, he’s forced to leave the table without a dime. There is no good way to avoid a premise once it’s been given. The orchards are thick with apricots, bees circle. The old man brings out his salt gun and fires. Belief is truncated, abridged. Hands fly up when the roller coaster is ready to fly; the wooden rails shake. Length is indefinite.


Bridge 1967

My father sits in his Pontiac convertible and listens to the war of earlier hands. I put one foot in front of the other and upset the opposition.

Bridge

My heart is waiting for me near a 7-11. This great predictability has been made popular with Americans. The hills tremble all summer, repeating the sequence. The smell of circles being formed keeps us circling. He tells us not to trust strangers but everyone calls home once in a while. The creek waters rise. We keep caring but the heart revokes its hand. A quandary of our own making, eliminating some of the luck of the deal.

Bridge 1970-2007

These are the flatlands, the flat line, our unfurling. You are obliged to ignore any unauthorized information gained from my actions. While you leave to find light the olives fall from the branches, names shed their coats and bid for sun. Distances cropped from photos show us standing on the same lawn, so much greener than the majority’s preference. We hang on until the end, the shade in our eyes written down rather than spoken.

Blur

We see it coming & the world turns its head, washes out the stars. Crumpled players; crude prayer. A whistle churns; I repeat the familiar. With no more than a spoon we dig. Imply words. Cadence dug out from some wilted alphabet. Let's get our hands dirty, maybe grow into these new clothes. Sky seems so far away from sleep.

Crack us open where we hurt the most. You can see how far away we are from home.

This story piggybacks on another, skims & teeters toward some difficult consensus .We never see it coming. Our spoons snap, birds pour out in bare refrain.