Listening

Think of me
as swallowing all that you say to me.
I will take your words into my open mouth,
taste them,
feel their shapes, sharp and flat as river grass.
I will envelope these blades in my body
and they will be no more.

Bohmerwald

Even though I miss you, I'm better off missing you
than with you while envisioning
what I thought we could be.
I'm better off with others,
many filters for my fractured
sense of unity.
When your words are barbed wire,
and your skin is too distant to touch,
and the skin of your arm is this cool,
and your eyes are cold,
and your voice is invulnerably male,
I crave the middle distance
of a day without you.

In the fragile middle distance
of a room behind closed doors, I listen in
to conversations
when you don't know I'm there,
or when you've overlooked my presence
like so many times before.

On your way home late this evening,
I'll be singing under water.
As you wander in the darkness
I'll be passing through the glossy wooden

hall. You turn the handle
of our heavy wooden door,
but I'm already sunk in shadows
in the green room, Bohmerwald.
Behind the forest's door,
the middle distance calls.

The Wolves of his Words

June 2010

18'' x 40''

Mixed media on canvas

As If it were Yours to Give

May 2010

48'' x 30''

Mixed media on canvas

Twisted Conversations

Fragments of aching loneliness echoing down the hall,
when the only one who can comfort me is the one who won't,
when the song is right but I can't,
and my voice is clutted with words I'm forbidden to speak,
and my limbs are crippled with places forbidden to lie.

His voice down the vacuous hall
is calling,
and he wants an answer,
and I have dozens,
mais aucun n'est l'un qu'il veut.
Old story.

'Are you okay?'
It's alright, I'm only singeing
and the noise is only burning
from your voice acrosss the yawning
chasm deep into my throat
where words float, encumbered, in potentia,
and I'm sinking into sleep.

I'm not sinking, only drowning,
lying face down on the sheets
my mother gave me. She embroidered
tiny flowers on the pillows.
This quilt my parents' wedding spread,
frame my father built
from rescued parts. It's not enough.
These close familial charms
will not protect me when his arms
are all that can keep the wolves of his words away.

I need an apotrope.

Green Medusa in the no-man's land
of the middle rooms, the only rooms
where we can meet.
In all others I search for you and am lost.

In yours I am a child.
In mine, an exile.

Watchers

Eye draws.
Eyes draw me into your line of view,
your lens sight where I see you clearly
or as clearly as can be
between the wishes of hand and eye
and another blank page flaring white at noon
in the sun
over Phillips square.

Page as pale as the whitest hijab
I've ever seen, strolled by me,
and a woman all in blue beneath.
Electric blue silk,
and the river rises from below
to swallow the square and the ankles of all who stand
or sit on the edge with our legs dangling
in the lake we haven't noticed
rising slowly, lapping steady
north of every old high water mark
of floods from seasons past.
The waters rise. On every back, on every collar
blue is cool against our skins, and even higher,
when your mouth is open wider.
Let it in. Open wider,
and let the river in.

Photograph

This is a camera's click, a
paper's flash,
a lens flare,
and your face is no more, my dear.
Your closed quiet face is no more.

This is the blotted
page, the mottled
stain, spreading fast, ever still on the square
of illusional silverprint locked in a drawer
where I once found a silverfish scurrying dear,
and I once lost a lock of your hair.

This is a number, or seven.
Odds are even
now it wouldn't fail to reach your ear.
When the meaning isn't ---
and the past is a deafening cadence,
there's enough time between us for silence.
Enough is behind us for --- .