There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.

The first god I remember was a Santa Claus god, who you only
turned to around Christmas time,
who you tried to butter up, and then got mad at if you didn’t
get what you wanted.
That didn’t make sense. I knew if there was a god, he could see
through us, like we were made
out of cellophane, like he could stare directly into our hearts
the way we look into an aquarium,
like he’d know what was floating around in there, like he might be
the one feeding it.

Then there were those people who used god to threaten you,
saying you better
be careful—god’s watching, like god was a badass hillbilly
sitting in some cloud
with a pair of binoculars, a cotton candy beard, a six pack,
and a shotgun.

Then I saw people who had Jesus’ name on their bumper sticker,
like he was running for president.
And sometimes those people with Jesus on their bumper sticker
would cut you off
on the freeway and give you the finger, which is very different
from lending you a hand.

Then there were people on television, dressed in weird clothes
and scary make-up, swearing
they had the secret to god, like god was a keyhole and their eyeball
was pressed to it, and if I just
gave ‘em some money they’d let me look, and then I could see god
just hanging around in his boxer shorts,
and though I liked the idea of spying on god, I began to wonder
if the world would be a healthier place
if the Romans had just put up with Jesus and let him die of old age.

And then there were the football players, kneeling down in front
of everybody, thanking god,
like he was their best friend, but then they’d jump up and spike
the ball, yell I’m number one,
and I’d be confused, because if you’re number one, then
what number is god?

Then I saw politicians trotting god out on a leash, like a racehorse
they wanted to hop on
and ride to the finish line. But if they lost it would be god’s fault
and god would be the donkey
they’d pin all their problems on, and that was very nice of god:
to be both a race horse and a donkey.

And then there were those who said you better be good on Earth
if you wanna get into heaven,
like heaven was the United States, and Earth was Mexico, and angels
were border patrol. Like when you die
you sit in a parked car on the outskirts of heaven, the engine idling,
your soul in the back seat in one of those kennels
used to carry small dogs on airplanes, as you listen on the radio to all
the people you ever wronged testify against you.

And then there was the church which was like this cafeteria, where
they served god to you on these very
un-godlike plates, but I wanted my god pure, and not watered down
by human beings, so I just had one of those
catastrophe gods— you know, the one you only turned to in an emergency,
like god’s the national guard you call in
to clean up the earthquake of your life. So I got drunk one night,
drove home, passed out behind the wheel,
woke up, going sixty straight at a brick wall, slammed the brakes, heart
banging like a wrecking ball in my chest,
staring at death’s face in the bricks, close enough to see we had
the same cheekbones.

Now I have a god who’s like a mechanic who can fix anything,
so when I wanna chew somebody’s head off
like a saltwater taffy, or amputate my DNA, or open my wrists
like windows that have been painted shut,
I just put my soul into a box, like a busted computer, and haul it in.
And he never asks to see my paperwork,
or says my warranty has expired. And I walk out feeling better.
And I don’t care if he doesn’t exist.

My friend Derrick says love is the only war worth dying for. But every time I say, “please come back”, I feel like I’m trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack, and God knows I can’t go out like that. I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity. Our lovers’ necks are so soft. I lost my head so many times. I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry. Still, I drink so much in my sleep, I can’t sleepwalk a straight line to the guest room or collapse, hang so heavy inside her lungs. 

She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat, each word limps into the air. We are gone, she says. And I am no mortician; I have no idea how to put make-up on the dead. I have no idea how to unerase, so I just puddle at the door, my face looking like a deck of falling cards, like everything’s been playing me. We tried so hard. But when I said “give me a ring”, she thought I meant a call. Now I haven’t had her number for two years. We’ve been saying how many times are we going to keep cutting these red flags into valentines. You know, all those wars we fought have turned our shine into rust, we can’t even touch each other’s hearts without a tetanus shot.

We can’t begin to remember how we forgot there is no shelter in the womb. The heart forms long before the ribcage. My mother swore she could feel me kicking weeks before my feet formed. That’s how hard my heart beat — and it still does. They say the womb is where we learn love is knowing the cord that feeds you could at any moment wrap around your neck. I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window to stare at the road to tell me she has nothing left to tell me, we are done, carrying our level heads in our tornado chests.

For the first time, I know she is right. As the dawn, after our first date, we were so young, and I hadn’t written an honest love poem yet. I hadn’t met anyone I could fall so hard for ‘til the night we kissed on our skateboards, she teased me for going so slow. I said I never want to catch up with the letting go. I want the plead in my throat to forever anger my spine and the seams of your slippers, love, even when the dove crashed through the window, even when our friends said, you can call it love, but you know Einstein called himself a pacifist when he built the bomb.

When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.

I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirtysome times, ‘cause I didn’t want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I’d always find them.

The day before I left, I remembered a story her mother told me. She said, Andrea, when Heather was a little girl, she couldn’t fall asleep without tying a string to her finger all night long, she’d give that string the tiniest tug to make sure I was still there. And I’d tug back. That was love. That was love. As easy as that. Sometimes. Sometimes.

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry ‘hello there, Anne’

I will meet you again in the future. It will be 100 years from now. We will be evolved. We will be larger. We will be gentle with each other. When I try to touch your hand, my hand will feel like water. Your hand will feel like a fish. We will be evolved in different directions. We will be so gentle and evolved we won’t even be able to lift our glasses to our mouths. We will just sit in a bar, looking at the glasses, and being incredibly gentle with each other. You will gently slap my face. I will gently say something cruel. We will gently torture each other, not saying any of the things we’ve been thinking for the last 100 years.

We will not say, ‘I’ve missed you,’ or, ‘You look good,’ or, ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

We will be too futuristic to say those things.

There will be mobile phones made of water and seeds, 1 millimetre in diameter.

There will be children that look like shrivelled dogs.

Every thing ever will have a slot to put money in, and when you put money in the slot the thing will vibrate.

There will be tinfoil, inflatable shoes, and holographic statues of the cast of Friends.

Everything will be okay.

The sun will be burnt out – it will be like a black floating acorn – and it will be dark in the bar, and I won’t be able to see if you are crying.

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

(Source: greatpoets.livejournal.com)

One day it will vanish,
how you felt when you were overwhelmed
by her, soaping each other in the shower,
or when you heard the news
of his death, there in the T-Bone diner
on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts
of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.
One day one thing and then a dear other
will blur and though they won’t be lost
they won’t mean as much,
that motorcycle ride on the dirt road
to the deserted beach near Cadiz,
the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,
his machine gun in your belly—
already history now, merely your history,
which means everything to you.
You strain to bring back
your mother’s face and full body
before her illness, the arc and tenor
of family dinners, the mysteries
of radio, and Charlie Collins,
eight years old, inviting you
to his house to see the largest turd
that had ever come from him, unflushed.
One day there’ll be almost nothing
except what you’ve written down,
then only what you’ve written down well,
then little of that.
The march on Washington in ‘68
where you hoped to change the world
and meet beautiful, sensitive women
is choreography now, cops on horses,
everyone backing off, stepping forward.
The exam you stole and put back unseen
has become one of your stories,
overtold, tainted with charm.
All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergs
come summer, the small chunks floating
in the Adriatic until they’re only water,
pure, and someone taking sad pride
that he can swim in it, numbly.
For you, though, loss, almost painless,
that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter—
Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and you
just interested in your date’s cleavage
and staying out all night at Jones Beach,
the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.
You can’t remember a riff or a song,
and your date’s a woman now, married,
has had sex as you have
some few thousand times, good sex
and forgettable sex, even boring sex,
oh you never could have imagined
back then with the waves crashing
what the body could erase.
It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,
the story-fodder,
everything you retrieve is your past,
everything you let go
goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,
in cahoots with thin air.
The jobs you didn’t get vanish like scabs.
Her good-bye, causing the phone to slip
from your hand, doesn’t hurt anymore,
too much doesn’t hurt anymore,
not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumping
on your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.
You understand and therefore hate
because you hate the passivity of understanding
that your worst rage and finest
private gesture will flatten and collapse
into history, become invisible
like defeats inside houses. Then something happens
(it is happening) which won’t vanish fast enough,
your voice fails, chokes to silence;
hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.
Every other truth in the world, out of respect,
slides over, makes room for its superior.

—-

I cried reading this.

The Father’s Guns

After her father died they found nine guns in the house. Two in his clothing drawers, one under the bed, one in the glove compartment of the car, etc. Her brother took their mother out onto the prairie with a revolver and taught her to shoot. 

The Bird

For a while in Topeka parrots were very popular. Her father was given one in lieu of a payment and kept it with him at all times because it was the fashion. It swung above him in the law office and drove back with him in the car at night. At parties friends would bring their parrots and make them perform what they had been taught: the first line from Twelfth Night, a bit of Italian opera, cowboy songs, or a surprisingly good rendition of Russ Colombo singing “Prisoner of Love”. Her father’s parrot could only imitate the office typewriter, along with the ching at the end of each line. Later it broke its neck crashing into a bookcase. 

The Bread

Four miles out of Topeka on the highway - the largest electrical billboard in the State of Kansas. The envy of all Missouri. It advertised bread and the electrical image of a knife cut slice after slice. These curled off endlessly. “Meet you at the bread,” “See you at the loaf,” were common phrases. Aroused couples would park there under the stars on the open night prairie. Virtue was lost, “kissed all over by every boy in Wichita”. Poets, the inevitable visiting writers, were taken to see it, and it hummed over the seductions in cars, over the nightmares of girls in bed. Slice after slice fell towards the earth. A feeding of the multitude in this parched land on the way to Dorrance, Kansas.

First Criticism

She is two weeks old, her mother takes her for a drive. At the gas station the mechanic is cleaning the windshield and watches them through the glass. Wiping his hands he puts his head in the side window and says, “Excuse me for saying this but I know what I’m talking about - that child has a heart condition.”

Listening In

Overhear her in the bathroom, talking to a bug: “I don’t want you on me, honey.” 8 a.m. 

Self Criticism

“For a while there was something about me that had a dubious quality. Dogs would not take meat out of my hand. The town bully kept handcuffing me to the trees.”

Fantasies

Always one fantasy. To be traveling down the street and a man in a clean white suit (the detail of “clean” impresses me) leaps into her path holding flowers and sings to her while an invisible orchestra accompanies his solo. All her life she has waited for this and it never happens. 

Reprise

In 1956 the electric billboard in Kansas caught fire and smoke plumed into a wild sunset. Bread on fire, broken glass. Birds flew towards it above the cars that circled round to watch. And last night, past midnight, her excited phone call. Her home town is having a marathon to benefit the symphony. She pays $4 to participate. A tuxedoed gentleman begins the race with a clash of symbols and she takes off. Along her route at frequent intervals are quartets who play for her. When they stop for water a violinist performs a solo. So here she comes. And there I go, stepping forward in my white suit, with a song in my heart.

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

—-

This poem…

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)