Love Poem

Love poem,
written backwards right to left,
filed into the edges of your teeth,
tattooed on the ridge of your spine.
It shows in the filth
under your fingernails, proof we tried
to plant something lasting,
Miry, like we never got our solid
ground.

Love poem,
Braille bumps in steel,
because you never learned how to be soft;
I thought I could teach you to look
with your hands, but Braille rises instead
like goosebumps: my skin,
every time you tried to read me. Sight left you
blind.

Love poem,
war paint streaked down your parley flag.
I sent no messenger, came alone
to capture your castle, to set my flag
above yours. All’s fair in love.
And war: your love poem in the drums.
Battle is joined, my love, our armies have forgotten
speech.

Love poem,
sewn into your shroud, with stitches
like tears, like tiny seed pearls.
Carved into the granite,
your tombstone as unyielding as you, implacable,
eternal, like the words you promised,
like love was a white dress and I was queen for a
day.

Finifugal

I ate my dinner cold in front of a computer screen, hard at work on nothing. I could have sat on the couch with a warm dinner, but I was too tired to stand and wait for the microwave to spin for 60 seconds, and I decided cold dinner was better than waiting. The house is quiet, except for the drone of the washing machine on spin cycle and The National playing from my computer speakers. My parents are out. Night is falling earlier, a sure sign of autumn coming. I can feel it in the morning, brisk fall fingers creeping in under the covers. The sky is bluer and fresher, a real autumn sky. 

I am tired from nothing. From trying to pack memories into boxes and not run loving fingers over every piece of paper, not read love notes from five years ago, not spend hours reading my old journals. I am tired from stacking a sixth box on top of a fifth one in my mom’s art studio, from rifling through my high school memorabilia and knowing that it has no place in this new life I’m creating. The problem is, I remember where every object in my room came from. The rock that my new host father picked up on a beach in Denmark for me and wrote the date, place, and Love, Klaus on as a memory. The childish hair clip made from fish scales that we bought when we lived in Grenada. I was eight and didn’t realize the enormity of where I was and how I was living, the “rich girl” in comparison to my schoolmates. We had a car: that was wealth. The little fold up paper sign reading “Hannover” that my friend gave me when I visited her in her German hometown; the same day that I accidentally ordered a Tequila Sunrise instead of a virgin Tequila Sunrise and didn’t notice. My memories are all bound up in things. I couldn’t tell you about specific moments off the top of my head, but I can tell you stories about every object that you give me. It makes packing up hard. What’s important? What’s not? I’m a book person. Packing books up is the hardest.

“I want to save these for my kids,” I insist, clutching some of my favorite series protectively to my chest. I reluctantly give my cousins my Little House On the Prairie series, the first series I ever read. I was three and my mom found the set in an antique store. My Chicken Soup for the Soul follow on top of Laura Wilder. I stubbornly resist my mother’s suggestion that I give up the antique German set of books we bought at an antique store. “I haven’t read them yet,” I say, my voice growing in volume, pitch, and defensiveness. I give away a lot of books. I mail one to a friend. These books are old friends. I hate goodbyes.

 I didn’t know what I wanted to write about when I started writing, but I guess I wanted to write about goodbyes again. And packing up and growing up and all of the up, up, ups. I’m heading up, there’s no other option. 

“Damn, you’re really committed to this,” one friend commented, after hearing that my room was being cleaned out so I could go to NYC next summer to live. I want it bad enough. I will move heaven, earth, and anything in between to make it happen. So it’s two jobs in college, and maybe some freeloading, and lots of looking, looking, looking until it happens. I was raised in a household where if you wanted, you did. If I want a car, I buy the car, I buy the gas, I buy the insurance, I pay the loans. If I want to move to New York City, I find a way to get myself there, I find a way to pay for groceries and an apartment. I find the job. I find the internship. That’s always how it’s been. 

But it’s the right time. I’m perfectly alone for the first time maybe ever. And alone in the best possible way: I have such a great support system all around me, with friends and family. But I’m alone in my head. I have a vision, a clear-cut, cold vision of what I want. And there’s no one and nothing there to stop me.  I am my own person. My grandmother’s wedding ring winks on my right ring finger. It’s slender gold, with six pinprick diamonds set in the band. It’s beautiful. It’s also the first ring my grandfather was able to afford when he got back from WWII. It’s the one she wore every day. And that ring reminds me of family. And friends. Letting people in and letting people slow me down. I know myself–there are some days when I see myself in ten years, eating a cold dinner in front of a computer screen, working hard at work, putting her family and friends in second place. I don’t want to be that woman. Someday I want to move my grandmother’s wedding ring from my right hand to my left and leave it to my granddaughter when it’s time. 

The nights are getting longer. It is almost scarf time and hot tea time and apple cider time. Comfort time. I don’t know for sure where my summer went. I feel like my long nights disappeared suddenly and I’m puzzled as to how dusk comes at 8 pm now, instead of 9:30. Like I’ve been sleeping my summer away, lost in working dreams and waiting tables. Just work and sleep and some play in between. 

But it’s the goodbye season, time to move on to new things and new adventures. A different landscape and different people and new work for me to take up. Someone once said we have to say goodbyes to start hellos. 

Well, hello.

Multiplication

Somewhere down the line, I outgrew
you, like the shelves of stuffed animals lined
up in my rose pink childhood room. I packed
you away like them, with hugs and kisses,
put you in a airtight, sterile box, labeled
with a fresh black Sharpie. Carried you
down two flights of stairs, close to my chest.

I can’t keep you,
like a security blanket, well-worn and known.
It’s time to stand on the sidewalk alone, waiting
for that school bus to come and take me
somewhere new. My room is blue
these days and I’m still learning the math of one
plus one equals two. My sums have never come out right.

Math books say
that one is the building block for the positive
integers. So it all begins
here. Build a strong foundation on one,
and then multiply. Times two
only comes after you’ve learned one
times one.

It’s almost the season of changing colors,
changing skins, like I’m made of snakeskin.
Autumn breathes a blessing like a breeze
sweeping vibrant leaves away. I still hold you
in my safest places, in the sweep of my eyelid,
the crook of my elbow, but it’s time
to relearn the sum of me.

With every language you learn, you learn something else.

There are languages mixing like paint, moving in the air all around me. To my left, there are two tall fair haired teens speaking animatedly and excitedly in Japanese. To my right, French is spilling from other throats and the easygoing sunny lilt of the Portuguese tongue is everywhere. I was greeted in an excited shriek of rapid fire German, walking in the door. I’m not in a foreign country per se, but I’m in a room filled with exchange students, who have all come back to our tiny upstate New York district to share experiences from their year abroad.

By the end of the day, I can see everyone getting tired. For those most recently back, English is becoming difficult. I see the relief in one girl’s face, as one of the Rotary members comes over to talk to her about presentations in Portuguese. No more English, it’s too hard after a year away. One of the girls who went to Germany, rattles off “Ich bin all over the place,” and doesn’t realize her mixing of language until I ask her to say it again, in all English. She laughs and blushes and I’m struck yet again, with the eerie prickle of deja vu up my arms. I remember writing my reflection essay in German two years ago when I came home, because the English words wouldn’t come. My Rotary mentors remember it too.

“You looked a little lost,” our district chair, Zoren, says to me at this conference. I am struck by how much he saw, as I floundered in coming home, and how much he never said, waiting to see how I’d do. What I’d do.

There are presentations at dinner, a short five minute blurb about each exchange student’s experiences over the year–hardly enough time to sum up a year of incredible experiences: watching the sun set over the Amazon, touring the ruins of Macchu Picchu, learning the history of Cambodia firsthand, being a member of a jazz band in Germany. There is never enough time to say everything you want to say about a year abroad and fewer people still to listen. But ah, there are exchange students, who know what that’s like. And so they spent the whole day talking, talking, talking, sometimes in English, sometimes not, creating a new kind of exchange student family, one that’s rooted here, on US soil. Weaving stories and common experiences together into one story, bringing worlds together. And isn’t that what exchange is really all about? I believe we could have world peace if every family sent a child away for a year to a different culture. You learn patience. You learn tolerance.  You learn consideration for others, living in someone else’s home for a year. You learn how to adapt to situations and you learn how to make your own decisions. You experience other cultures and have the most incredible opportunities. You make a family around the world. You learn how other people live and more importantly, that everyone around the world wants the same things, more or less.

One of my friends who just returned from Brazil remarked, “We were watching the sunset over the Amazon. And I looked to my left and my right, and there were exchange students from France, Mexico, Germany, Japan, Australia, so many different countries. ,And we were all sitting there together in peace, watching the sun set.”

Another girl, who went to the Czech Republic said something else that struck me. She said, “With every language you learn, you learn something else. There are some things that are expressed in Czech that can’t be expressed in English. And there are some things in English that you can’t express in Czech.” You learn a way of life when you learn another language. You learn a culture and its views, by learning a language. We express ourselves with words–when you know someone’s language, how can you fail to understand the nuances in that language that speak to certain views and values? English (at least American English) is slangy and casual, an all over the place, rapidly expanding and changing language. Sounds a lot like our country. German is very structured, an organized sort of language, with specific rules and a tight sentence structure. Functional, descriptive, efficient words. Behold, some attributes of the Germans. And so on.

Another exchange student, who went to Taiwan commented that if you don’t know the language, you’ll never know the people. The only view they’ll have of you is “Where is the bathroom” or “Hello”. But you if you can talk about your religion, your political views, your family, your dreams–then they begin to know you. And you begin to know them. And we begin to understand each other better.

The world is small when you are an exchange student. I met my best friend from high school under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, my newbie from Argentina on exchange knew a girl from my high school who had been in her Rotary Club the year before. Many exchange students talked about meeting up on various trips or by accident. You have a place to stay wherever you travel and the six degrees of separation theory becomes a real thing.

It is a blessed, beautiful thing to be an exchange student. It is a one in a lifetime opportunity. Go abroad everyone, just once. Doesn’t matter for how long. But wander. Wander down European cobblestone streets and ogle at thousand year old castles and buy freshly baked bread at 8 am from the local bakery, and buy that bottle of cheap wine and drink it on the beach by a bonfire. God knows I did. Wander down the Amazon river, towards that glorious sunset. Wander down the crowded streets of India, with car horns blaring and sweat drenching you, and drink some fresh fruit juice there. Hike the Alps and have a snowball fight in the middle of July. Go for a run by the sea in Denmark, with the dunes rising high and sandy to your left and the sea stretching out forever to your right. Bathe in the turquoise of the Mediterranean. Let the entire world be your friend. Open your eyes past state lines and stretch your heart over seas.

It’s worth it. You’ll be richer than you ever thought you could be.

Heart Line

I can’t keep you in the heart lines of my palms,
even if I dug them trough deep. Not enough
to keep us Manhattan close, shoulder to shoulder on the subway.
I’ve drifted down the Hudson, pen and ink
words fluttering behind me like last goodbye kisses, blown
to ears already shut, hatches battened down.
I won’t know till later.

Maybe that’s why I tried to scrub my heart line away
when I was sixteen, because I didn’t want to see your smile
become familiar-strange like a doppelganger on the street
when I was twenty.  Because I wanted to study
your cells under a microscope for hours to know why your hands held
a safe place.  Because I wanted to read you under the covers
at night, like fine print, to understand your rules.

So I’ve lost another one, like I’ve lost
earrings and pen caps and socks. Pretty
words on a page stop meaning much.
Does your heart line ever stop growing? Google
won’t say. It’s not something much asked.
If I’m being honest, mine stopped
at sixteen, blown out like birthday candles.

Interlude

Rain falling like it’s a street performer,
tapping a syncopated line, one
flashy burst and lots of flair, like two
people at a subway stop, duetting with empty hats. Three
big raindrops eyedropper onto the windshield, four
more make a tiny river, direction downstream. Two
rainbows today, like God was promising twice,
but there’s rain forecasted for the next three
days. I don’t know what we’re waiting for.

Three boats sail past, like water-borne gulls, winging
to the safety of earthbound harbor. Against the window, the rain is spitting up,
three-month old baby, colicky, displeased.
Four days ago, we sensed the storm,
foreboding, like a blister about to pop, it was
too quiet. They say that good things come in
threes, but has the flood come to water or to drown?
Four days from now, this may be what we waited for.

Measuring the rainwater, counting
inches, like we’re counting liquid hope,
like we can hold it in our hands. One
to four inches, the weatherman says, with a black-suited shrug,
his pencil taps a rhythmic measure, waiting,
like us, for something sky-big to wash it all clean.
 

Organs

Scars like stubble
beetle track across parchment paper skin.

Working hands,
like every cut opening up into red
stories—remember that time when?
Daddy hands,
like your hands have always been continents
to my countries, and I didn’t mind
getting engulfed there.
Giant hands,
pinching jam jars off in three and a half
seconds (I counted).
Packing snowballs the size of my face
(I remember).

I used to count your scabs and band-aids,
trying to understand how the world could hurt you.

Little girl hands,
open map of my journey, like I’ve only just
jumped in the car—let’s go.
Writing hands,
like ink stains can form new stories on my skin,
like I could copy yours.
Talking hands,
mouth trying to keep up
with all the gesticulation accompanying a truly good story.

I’m not a little girl anymore, one inch below your forehead,
but I’m womb safe when you hold my hand.

Rose Petal Skin

Let me press flower petals
into your skin and say
I gave you roses.
Light squares mosaic
on the floor, and I’m straddling
a shadow line, both feet in the sun.

Can I read Braille on your bones,
learn a new language in the Morse code
of your breathing? Late summer and old loves
fading like the hours of sunlight.
I’m ready to fall,
for someone with eyes like apple cider,
or like an autumn New England sky,
and a laugh like the first frost,
clear and fresh.

I’m trying to get my head back
down to earth, it’s been out
flying with the birds,
but they’re headed home,
au revoiring in V’s, honking goodbyes.
I should warn you I carry
a little devil in my pocket,
with a paper cutter sharp tongue
and a Mary Poppins bag of imperfections.

But I can give you looks filled with the Milky Way,
cinnamon warmth to keep for the winter,
laughter for your alarm clock and poetry
for your lullaby. I will etch
a new character into immortality,
like I’m a goddess, like my fingers can set you in the stars.

Echolocation

I talk like echolocation,
but your echoes are empty. Your shape
one I could trace blind, but when I call
only the night sky answers back.
You are nowhere to be found among the constellations.
I’m your Stellaluna, but let me live right side
up.

I trust you–or try
–like knowing you’d catch me at the bottom
of the big slide at the playground.
But your faith in me scatters
like oil in a hot pan, scalding
us both. Tempers like cayenne
sizzle.

Send me echoes back,
love waves across the air, mother
steady. Ears listening
for my voice and what I have to say.
Too many words fill up our space, raining
down with acid intent. Look,
we’re corroding, one sharp blow
to level our foundation.

Poems For My Father

I.

You used to sing a song
about a tree “with roots growing down to the water,
and leaves growing up to the sunshine.”
That was my honeysuckle childhood
song when your fingers lullabied on guitar strings,
when I learned about faith, trying
to hit the right notes and trusting
your voice would catch me.

You were my tree, planting
roots in sturdy soil,
lifting me to your shoulders so I learned to see,
and kiss the sun with chubby cheeks.
You are my caffeinated adolescence,
stirring raisins into my oatmeal, sweet
bursts of good morning love with a side of forehead kisses
and coffee. I studied the art of learning
from you. I discovered a cosmos of “Why’s”,
and made a game out of finding something you didn’t know.

You are my song, keys
tapping on a different kind of instrument.
Words about you come hard,
like trying to describe a child’s smile the first time,
or the way the ocean salt water soothes
the rawest places in my heart.
How do you describe a song  whose intricacies
only you can hear?
You are my lullaby, my mixed tape, my wedding march,
you are my soundtrack into adulthood,
playing behind one a,m. conversations,
tinkling in the chime of beer bottles clinked together,
the hum of the truck as you drive me to work.

Tree songs for you,
love notes scattered throughout the branches,
whispering softly in a late summer breeze. I am home
with you, the hummingbird who has flown across seas
to find her place again.