Maybe Love

Maybe love will call you by your name

if you sit a little longer eating olives and alone

read a book that makes you feel things

and drink fermented tea

and rather than moving forward or

moving backward, simply levitate,

like an enchanted rug, this method is hallowed,

it has been tried.

Or in lieu of more complex plans, drive

until nearly gasless.

Think of the present rather than the past

and of how it feels,

sitting next to you in the car.

Lovingly you may find that nothing is lacking.

(I always want something different

than what I end up getting, and find that it is fine.)

Maybe I expect

that when love calls me by my name,

it will look and sound differently than it does

upon appearance- looks

like sunlight on a bedroom, sounds

like barely anything at all.

What is most stunning upon introduction

is a lack of love.

It always makes sounds,

even says things,

always looks like something or someone.

There is a little trapdoor in my closet

lined with tea-rose wallpaper.

I wonder what it will hold and realize

I have no secrets.

Our brief winter is buried in the warm
thawed earth now, I tell this to Hillary,
we were all a little befuddled there
on Broad Street.

The merchant told me that, when young,
she set her mind on living in a shack.
So she lived in a shack, in this our
teeming ghost state, and then she met
her husband.

I'm not going to send any love letters to
the void anymore, because
it doesn't seem to notice how pretty I am,
how pretty my living heart and medicine prose.
More fool me, every day.

The truth is that I drove up, past the
green quilt hills, the chalk-white Egret,
unhurried in the rice marsh, I drove right up
to this patch of quartz land to write a Great
Book.

And I did not write a great book,
but I'll drive home tomorrow

and don't grieve

(Even at night, ice on the ground bears

witness to the blackness of those “secret hours,”

always awake to the cold

sprawl,

sky’s frozen lake.)

Think of all the things you cannot hold

and don’t grieve.

(“We’re still alive!” says Rachel.)

And don’t grieve.

Don’t grieve for young times when there was less

to fear,

as you casually hurled grenades at encroaching

future,

or for the dream you had of swarming sharks,

or for men as they

make love to bottles or

women as they

make love to bottles,

don’t grieve for the unearthly procession of grandmothers

that were brought in with the mail,

for fingers lost to machinery,

for hearts lost to false hearts, or

environmental mirages.

Oh love love love look how you cry

on the inside.

Oh love love love look how you cry

on the inside

and don’t grieve

(“We’re still alive!” says Rachel)

and don’t grieve.

Don’t grieve for Jason Molina

he’s not listening.

Don’t grieve for Jason Molina,

there aren’t enough tears on tap in the world.

Don’t grieve for him, once started

where’s the stopping.

.

And all the things you cannot hold

I cannot hold.

Mornings: morning when a scrub jay

hops on the desk.

Nights full of fear and nights

full of comfort.

Sacrifice your carefully curated objects

to the truer abyss.

The truer abyss is adorned with

gold chains that slipped down the drain,

jaspers and agates that fell off

the edge of the lookout.

Don’t grieve for the truer abyss,

in truest form it both hears you

and doesn’t care.

And love love love

look how you cry

on the inside.

And love love love

don’t grieve,

don’t grieve,

don’t grieve.

1/11/15

Love Is

LOVE IS

Love is applying for jobs that you will not love because you need a job.
Love is dreaming of an almost embarrassingly modest salary.
Love is considering and then considering not and then considering grad school again. 
Love is thinking "I need to learn the format" out of fear.
Love is avoiding the novel and choosing to watch a movie.
Love is wanting to watch a romance and somehow ending up watching Deliverance.
Which you have already seen four times.

Love is being unable to outrun or outfox your strangeness.

Love is sending pieces off and having them returned to your arms rejected.
Love is sending them off again and again.
Love is writing "personal" articles and fearing who reads them.
Love is having them published anyway.
Love is the $30 you make per article, minus $2.85- the Paypal fee.

Love is learning how to sell your art and put it in your gas tank.
I mean that.
Truly.
I think that is what love is.

Love is selling your art
and putting it in your gas tank
so that you can drive yourself to peer out
at the great old vista
That You Love.

-

It is my winter legend, as if I had
walked far through a tunnel or trench,
my winter legend as if I had survived
all I have survived but at once

and this hovering blue light touches
all my gentler desires

(and my harsher desires are wrought
of hot wax and fire. Lovingly I will
dig a hole big enough for my body
in the sand of this age.)

I am almost as fearless as if
I had knowledge of nothing.

In Dutch Flat it is freezing
but not snowing.

The coal sleeps one foot below
the frost.

The pines shake and hiss:
I feel I'm yours forever, stranger land.

I negotiate the body warm and
pulsing. I negotiate its past pains
on this present day.

I know how frightened you are of fear,
of bad dreams, how frightening
the consequences of mindless movements-

but continue out of curiosity
or want of heat.

I have such an abundance of both,
stranger land.

The compass of my silent part, of my
Silent Part, is spinning.

...

I am Flying Away.

Something has loosened its meticulous hold on my edges

and like a careless garment I am Flying Away.

The place that raised me dissipates me 

and ushers me silently pineward saying, 

fearfulness, you are fearsome forever the sum

of a silent and mystical equation

strongest when broken, strongest when 

breathing, oblivious, taking in sun or streaming 

rain, strongest Every Moment, lovely and 

natural. 

The only part of myself for keeping is the 

finger of fire in my chest and not forever.

All else is shirked and shed as minutes.

All else is shook like snow from my jacket.

And I no longer speak a language of Despites. 

To think that not long ago I felt that 

I was Flying Away. 

I am familiar with this relationship between 

space and nearness. The lost drowning feeling 

of being far from the still surface of a moment,

of glassy gentle waves evading me or my body. 

I am familiar with strange newness rendered

casual and known.

I am not familiar with the moment beyond 

this moment, 

but the moment when the charged 

roiling stops- 

I am familiar with it

I and II

1.

I see the fragile, missing aspect

like a vanished rib.

“These things can be

assuaged,

by long drive

by the estuary or

sequoia.”

The body of the beloved

is disrupted

by a rock cast on water.

It goes all wavy.

And we were not milkfed.

I was fed on plum brandy,

you on engine oil.

That we have gas in our tanks

to reach the coast

is boon enough.

That we grappled

to the last-

I’m so impressed-

so impressed by the unwavering stars,

the prevalence of field,

by all you’ve collected

beneath your fingernails.

I’m so impressed

by our earthly grace

in the face of hard time.

I hardly know how to put it-

I’ll stuff this in a cinnamon box,

and send it on its way.

2.

Sometimes all you know

are your quantitative fears,

stacked like a cairn.

Or you wake from a dream,

wildly loving

the face you found framed

by the snow

of sleep-

Sometimes you cry in the car.

And I dedicate this song to you, like

a bench with a name on it.

Hands decimated could rest now,

rest in the tidal pool of my dream,

almost as if home.

Mostly I don’t think of home,

because it carries on without me

but I lost it

and then noticed it was gone.

Softer times allow for gentler pains,

stung by nettles, stepped on a hive.

But you were caught on barbed wire,

stepped on knives.

We both of us have known the mine shaft

too well.

If a heart is a nautilus,

it makes me want things.

Long drives, drive

in a warm den of silence.

Spit memories into the west wind.