Javanese Meditation

I have never faced 90 mile per hour winds
to feel the leaves flick my skin.
I've never stepped in a rain puddle and learned it is shin-deep.
I have never laid in my bed – one leg under the sheet
and the other so the fan's air grazes up my thigh;
sprawled across the kitchen floor and measured my shame
to begin with a heart beat and end with the next;
laid on a yellowed comforter with my toes in the tears
and smelled my niece in the seams.

I have yet to sit crisscrossapplesauce and listen
for the walls to tell me about international politics.
I haven't grinned an insomniac chuckle, and I haven't
gone to my desk and recorded everything in a second's
notebook. Penciling what I remember and knowing
that a quarter of it is lie.

I have not tried to remember anything.
The split thread I keep trying to shove through the eye
and pinch on the other side. Fingers never close enough
to grasp the passive hair and my slightest breath
always able to blow it away. Tongue out and against my upper lip
until I can feel my teeth through it– drying from exposure
and still drooling. The thread, wet from my spit, slacks
and I can't try again.

Walk Through the Open Door

The stairwell smells of varnish
and the doorknob sticky with paint.
People were here: their sneeze and ache
residue fogs the air. For a moment, we live here
– making our way through their
living room and dust-covered master room.

Running our hands against bare
walls. Dropping hair strands in empty sinks.
Camels mix with cowboys and track
shoes with stilettos. Thoughts of pancakes and compassion
and car wrecks and permission filter, push away
the previous thoughts settled in the molding.
Layer them with the respons-
ibility to carry pain.

We walk out the way we came
because it's easiest. I can't speak quietly
when I'm cold. Before, we whispered non-secrets
into the carpet fibers for someone to hear.
Face pushed against the floor.

Together, We (second draft)

Know the breeze on oily skin.
Salt your eyes. Listen to seeds
push from the soil.
Live with the pollen. Stand
in the coals – peel dead
from your feet and elbows and hands;
or dust a path for our children to meet;
but leaves but glow but the instinct to fall.
Touch my hair – tangle your hands in the naps.
Say, “Lo siento, 'speranza, y yo.”

Biennial Bears Fruits (second draft)

Murray and Etheline: grafted
together and they throw out the life
that soaks in my hair
and beads on her neck.

Murray and Etheline:
orange flared trumpets feed the flies
and bees that she bleeds
when she bleeds and bruises when she bruises.

'Urray and Metheline rally for the sun
as much as the shade. They barter
for water, drink it
in their roots and spit it in our books.
The sent a letter to our house
and addressed it to me.

Endearment,
Give us your happys and sads
and include us in your talks.
If we can do more.
'Cause we don't give
enough of what we should
but want to die
as if we did.

Murray and Etheline: afraid
that the spider
barreling through the rain drops
knows what they bear. Keep still
when the sun and moon sound them.
Sit at our table and choose to keep
the secrets
the Fates commanded -

the heart and soul I gave them
to spare us.

Addressed to Maya Regarding Last Week

1.

Hmm and hmm and hmm

the birds and insects hum and stutter

now like children, and contain your crisis.

Live on drink and cigarettes like others

live on family and porcelain.

Eleven hugs a day means you're loved.

2.

You should have been earlier in my life.

Sequined capes and feather boas,

we will leave and you will wander

in paisley-printed cracked-wheat fields.

As much as I can change it, I will

help you.

3.

I can't hear

the sweat hiss on your skin

when you step in the embers and snuff out

fourteen years. Our daily-dailies

and sand and gravel and I

will help you.

4.

The whistle was too high to register.

The moment: a spotlight

on transgression, a cross-culture analysis.

I'm regretful, and it's on the hill

and setting over.