There once was a girl

who fell in love with a man who was kind and gentle, like her father.  He held himself like her mother, strongly, but could float with the gentle curiosity of her brother.  Polyglotic like her grandmother, and spiritually sinuous too.

The girl was young and had dreams, many of which stirred tirelessly in a waking mind.  On the first night of summer, a dream of quite mistakable reality occurred, in which the man came to the girl and taught her to speak to animals.

They entered a strange world together where tongues only talk in truths, and so when she felt brave, she asked him why he taught her how the honest speak.

“Those who love each other become incidental mirrors.  They’ve been just like the other all along, but not until they meet do they grow infinite.”

And a lucky thing it was.

they spent months with no idea

and then

through some strange pattern of glances

silent ideas

stories carried on stale light trickling through cracks in the glass

they became

fascinated

The Girl in the Blue Paisley Shirt

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

look over there

seconds sweating

threats of heat

 

prayers for rain

 

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

heat notwithstanding

eyes pinned on you

around you and anywhere but

 

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

feels a pinch of

needles-fingers cross

knit palms into fist-full haystacks

 

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

had this dream

not once but twice

you sketch her with your eyes, dim-voiced

lie like a closeted atheist

 

she prays to gods with the kinds of ears we’ll never have names for

 

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

thinks like freeform desperation

and she kicked you under the table

so the meter could evaporate on your mind

wrote a letter to sort into lines

that she could sign to clarity

 

the girl in the blue paisley shirt

walked home from where you are

concrete binding feet

ringing with a barn-sour wish

hark back to how it just might feel:

 

you’ll never mean the way she hoped

then goes back to unknowing the difference

Excerpts from “Letter to a Wonderful Man”

April 29, 2013

Today was the last day I’m guaranteed to see you for a while.

I **said a nice “goodbye,” but** I meant instead some things I couldn’t say.

I’m a fish out of water when you’re around.  I’m a temptress with no traction.  I’m a girl who wants to know a man.  If I only had a tongue, I’d be a siren.  And that’s painful enough, but on top of this: even if I were brave, if I could wear sandpaper on the soles of my shoes, if I could enunciate, I would still have far too much respect for you to do it.  I will never force you to know how I feel, or to subject you to the consequences.

Still, that’s not what I would have said.  But I do think it’s important to say how immensely I respect you.

In my head, the milliseconds festering with all the heat and shame and longing and wondering that I spent months burning away like a nervous neon bug zapper – those are what made me walk away.  It was a “Entrance, line, exit; finish it” formula, since those are among the things I most rehearsed for you.  It was sad for me to say goodbye, and worse that someone’s yet to invent a tuning fork for sincerity.  Was I too professional?  Not professional enough?

I look at you and I see someone beautiful.  I look at you and I see someone smart and kind and accomplished and ready for more of being alive.  I look at myself and I see someone hungry for living, doing things amongst real people with active thoughts.  I look at myself and I see someone who has so much love and appreciation to boomerang out into the universe.  I look at my surroundings, and, while I’m grateful to be where I am – incredibly, incredibly grateful – I look at you instead when I need to think of where I want to be.

…

I worked really hard over the past couple of months to shake you off. … There was the time I realized our shared appreciations of Christopher Walken and Bob Ross.  Then there was the time we found out we come from the same town. Then there was the time we talked about having almost gone to the very same college for the very same program.  Then there was that time you told me you play **the violin** and specialize in electronic music.

Unattainable.

So I had to work really hard to get you out of my thoughts.  Most dangerously of all I had to try to mute my curiosities – as much about life and the world and myself as they were about you.

Then I stopped.  I caught a glimpse of your hands once when you **leaned on the edge of my desk.  ”I can’t believe you’re a musician, too.”**  I won’t pretend I don’t think you’re extraordinary.  I won’t pretend I’m not proud to be the kind of person drawn to someone who thinks and acts and carries himself like you do.

I’m convinced it was you who snagged me that whole thing about “achievement,” which could only ever be due because I try to prove how good you are.  One of the biggest problems I’ve had with myself all along was the idea that I was either an obligation, a part of a project, or both.  Objects.  No traction.  No agency.  Absolutely none; and nor did I want it.  First off, I’m terrified of you.  Second, I don’t want to break the glass you sit behind.  That space on the other side belongs to you.  So instead I made myself a mirror of what you do.

You are kind.

You are smart.

You are gentle.

You are patient.

You are generous.

You are committed.

You care.  A lot.

That’s why I learned so much from you.  That’s why I’m excited about moving forward.  That’s why I remember to feel so wonderfully fortunate to be in a place where people like you happen to be.  I’m empowered by the possibilities that await me in a place like this, with people like this.  You did that for me.

Of the universe in which we’re the very same people within a very different situation, I am completely envious.  But that’s impossible.  We are the people we are because of all the little fragments of time and place and timing and placement.  So I tuck back under into a cycle of thoughts and emotions and frustrations, feeling all the better about trying to lay them down in letters.

I hope that someday you know that I am in love with you.  Or, better yet, how beautiful life looks with people like you in the world.  I hope most of all that you know that you are wonderful.

**Sensitive details have been changed**

Tether

You are the best attachment

When your heart untethers me

When your heart unknots down the center

You are my lovely tether

Postscript

You are a stationary zephyr.

The moon gets tired faster

And we all get old eventually

 

You are a stationary blinking of imagination

Blinking light off the metallic surfaces you share

They were always slightly reflective

Though there were moments when I thought the pulsing underneath bled through

 

You sigh light off your temp-sensitive skin

Temporary at the maximum gravity you pull gravitationally

And everyone around you folds inside their questions

Your light sighs “good will” off your skin

And the enigmatic evils of every gorgeous creation swirl secretly

Unbeknownst to me

Sharpening their teeth with shaky fingers

 

Blinking light

My fingers shake when they hold it

To keep it here but not to hinder it

Like a journal entry I’ve forgotten whether true

I’ve given you the power not to want me

Because I have too much respect for

The things that hang off the dust

swaying in the light that proves you’re in the room

I’ve always had too much regard for you

To keep you somewhere in my range of breath

But not to waste you, weigh you

or

Subject you to my breathing.

 

Between my lungs is a place you have to choose to go

Declare it destination with the understanding it’s vehicular

A hot air balloon strumming four second marches

Desperate not to cool down,

Singing wolf and crying lullabies,

Beating reasons on shaking fingers.

 

I’ve pinned myself underneath each

And behind each nail are names I’ve never learned.

Demi-God

We come from the very same place. The rills that wear a shimmer onto your skin all twist around a space for fingertips.  I wish I’d had the courage so to touch you.  Your nose is speckled with wells for weather; you shape the air that winds up through your lungs.  You blow smoke into my eyes and wells for weather blacken under spots of passing lifetimes through the glass and dimmed down sky.  We come from the very same place.

I made a point of watching you on the first day.  I knew I could make you love me because I wanted you to love me.  You may have never loved me but back then I seemed to know you would.  I enjoyed being foolish but your business was to unwind my stubbornness.  I unwound you in my sheets and the smell of your calm brushed around my skin like sleep after long, bright noise that scrubbed at my reasons to rest.  I will never resist you.

You tore at me the very first time like I was something to be accounted for in the formulation of a conscience.  I liked you very much and so I asked you to keep at it.  You breathed different after this and I moved your hand to where it counted.  Then it was done.  We came from the same place.

I killed you several times and after that I let you murder me.  We taught together in the dark of things that anyone would be hard-pressed to quash.  We were a sandcastle building sand. We were history for infants.  We were a dictionary for the very first word of God.  You embraced me like I was the only thing keeping you from death.  You embraced me like to be alive was sex.  I will never resist you.

I thought hard a couple nights back about words that I could write to make you cry.  My memory is suffering but I think if I told you stories about my heart in sharper tongues you might get cut and fall out onto me.  I’d like to think I’d do the same, and while certainly I’ve tried, it’s my only real anthem that I am in love with you.  I see you.  I see all of you.  I see all of you and we come from the very same place.

I see you.  I see you as a piece of dread, complexity, of violet.  I see you as an orb of gray, impenetrable.  Suppose that I am black and gold, suppose that I am white? What then?  I see all of you as little as I care to.  I see all of you and I will never resist you.

What if I were good? What then? You know so much. I am silence.  I want to learn.  You are quiet. I want to be spoken to and you know so much.  What if I were good? What then? 

I am silence, you are quiet. You speak and I hear more than you’d ever say.  Teach me because I am young.  Teach me because I love you.

I love you and we come from the very same place.