drizzle

the only thing i have, that nobody knows i have, is this hill when

it is full of weather. i

feel alone in it, watching these clouds puff through the valleys,

filling the empty space between spruce tips with thick bubbles

of sky water and ground mist.

i crave the wind and the singular sound of

rain on my skin, the slick cheeks, salty lips, and light prism eye lashes

at the spot where there are no more horizons,

just one sky that begins on the tiny hairs on my nose.

there is a universe contained in each drop of water, complex and

full and enough for a life of study and love.

the snow bites my ankles as i slip through it, fingers white

then pinched red from clutching through the top layer of sharp.

the lower fog feathers against the sea. it cycles visions of islands that

are sometimes there and sometimes lost, with other things,

beneath the screen of white.

the grasses beneath my feet are matted to the ground

and my thoughts are movements and not sentences. 

i move slower than storms and i think i am inside of this one, inside of a

cloud at least. before, the wet rolled over my back in waves of water,

but is now steady and thick. the rain doesn't seem to be coming

down as much as living in the air as one drop. i miss certain things, up here, alone--

the glow of zoe's curly brown hair in the kitchen as the sun falls,

charlotte's gap toothed laugh coated in melted chocolate and thick espresso,

rachel’s home mugs she makes to go from her white walled apartment.

they feel quite far from the hill they may never know exists, even if they, too,

live in storms, and watch clouds, and feel far from the ones they love,

wondering, each day, how to all

live in the same drop of water.

dls 

the particulars

how many times, this year, has the word love

been spoken (nervously, said inside over, and

over, until it had to be true)?

we wondered on that yesterday, during a walk in the wood

(generally, though specifically, a wander through moss coated

alder that had fallen into trapezoidal geometry between

the big spruce and toothpick trunks of all the dead yellow cedar,

old goat's beard drizzling off their branches, as winter wren

trickled medleys from somewhere hidden.)

i felt closer to the trees then usual,

and at one point, dug my fingers into some bark until it hurt

underneath.

i felt a little absurd, seeing myself push myself deeper into that scene,

trying so hard to be wild like the rest of it.

but i decided, anyways, that i loved a walk in the wood, and

also loved my love of a walk in the wood.

there have been at least three this year (waiting,

fidgeting, darting eye contact, then blurting out, awkwardly,

things they love). they have loved, generally, many things,

and have loved, more generally, loving those many things.

(they always congratulate themselves on finding the specifics--the skin

over your spine, the knobby

cartilage, the dimples where the tailbone

dips). 

i could never pin down the

difference between the winter wren and the pacific slope

fly catcher, between the sassafras and the crucifera,

between the puffballs and amanita,

even though the markings are as clear and distinct

as they have always been.

i appreciate, anyways the fullness of their general company,

their coloring the green walk in the wood.   

a field guide can't own the forest floor--

to name is not to own. 

dls

information

today joseph and i talk about what we think about love, in general terms.

we touch on the best ways to find happiness in life, skim by related poetry,

and avoid any use of the past tense, as you do, when

you haven't spoken in two months because one of you was in a five week, silent

meditation, and the other one claims to have trouble communicating when fog is in

the way. i have always found fog to be a very real barrier to the world

beyond it.

we speak by phone--him, in Boston, near a pink bicycle that doesn't change gears, me, in a field, near tall swaying grasses by a tide that moves in all around me.

i panic, him speaking, as i realize the speed of the rising water, and look across it towards

the bushes of wild berries

(blue, huckle, salmon). joseph talks about the

ethics of enduring the mess of love if a lover is ill. does

true personal happiness require sacrifice for another?

or something in that family of conversations. a bald

eagle ten feet away waves undulating wings across the top of

the tall swaying grasses

and crosses into the woods, wrapping orange claws around

the gnarled branch of an old spruce

stump.

i run along the edge of the advancing water,

the phone to my ear, as I chase it before jumping to the other side.

i run up the bank and sit next to a berry bush,

pleased with myself, with my dry feet. i listen and wonder what to say

to joseph, who does not want to know what i have done today

(or any day.

ideas, not information, bring us closer, reveal where we are).

i lie my head below the bush and collect

blueberries onto my sternum, making

listening sounds, catching the falling berries by squeezing my arm against

my ribs.

the sunshine splits

on my eyelashes until i can only see

distracted rays of light, and a green brown bush with no more berries.

i remember late nights, past tense, early may, memorizing poetry in

joseph's bed until the birds then the cars became loud out his window,

louder than the words we repeated over and over until they started

sticking, hoping it meant they were sinking in where they

couldn't escape,

willing the ideas to stick us together, too,

closer together than this phone call, 

with its broken pink bicycles

and rising high tide, with its

distance and its desire for something, 

something  

like an absence, something like an

i missed you, today, love, won't you 
just tell me something you've done?

dls

thin cold river

we always say things,

things like

be mine

and love me

and hold me

and never let me

go.

(recently I spun out

from the trappings of

your love.

i uncoiled the twists of rope

and jumped into a cold

shallow

ocean, and if I let

my arm drop to the bottom,

it touched the

barnacle seaweed

floor, and if

I opened my eyes

I saw green

glowing dots

of plankton in between.)

we always reach

towards each other

the same way,

with extended fingertips,

marveling at the reality

of each other’s skin,

the warmth of each other’s

flesh, the beating underneath

of each other’s

pulse, the uplifted gashes of each other’s

purple scars.

(yesterday I rowed

out into the middle of the lake,

hoping no one would see me there,

and that my thoughts

would gradually shift

away from syntax and into the rhythmic

pull of the oars, leaning forward and

back, forward and back, forward

and back, before taking off my clothes

and jumping in the water

off the tippy black boat,

squeezing thoughts of snapping turtles

from my eyelids, shaking copper

droplets from my face)

we always pull each other

nearer at night,

give each other squeezes

to resist each other’s

inevitable disappearance, each other’s

inevitable drifting away,

as we then always fit the convex and cave curves

of our bodies into one other until we

feel as close to

one body as we can.

(this morning I woke up

alone, cart wheeled my legs out

from stiff crinkled sheets, and wandered down

in silence

to the cold thin river

where rocks emerged like small hills.

i walked slowly over the slick

hard bottom and sat in the cold thin

water and leaned back until

the burbling white flow covered my ears.

I looked up and saw the swaying

green leaves--oak, maple, hemlock--

all swinging in the wind as one.)

it is all always the same

and nobody owns any of it. the thin river,

my goosebump coated ribs,

the dead twisting branches.

it belongs to the same

nothing and acts according

to no one, and according

to none of it.

and all of it knows no

happiness like the emptying of

thoughts--forward and back, forward

and back, forward and back—

like the blank flow

downstream in the thin cold water. 

dls

“tell me if it’s raining”

tell me if it's raining. tell me why there are fiddleheads in august

when they're supposed to come in spring. explain to me which

violets to eat, when the best low bush blueberries bloom

round beauty below these trees. tell me what you ate today.

did you bake that lightly smoked black cod with the sea

asparagus, coating it with spruce tip syrup and that ancient

clover honey, topping it with chunks of sea salt

and saving the leftovers for breakfast?

tell me if you dreamed. tell me which fish you caught,

and if you made the hook yourself, what color it was, if it had

a feather. tell me about the sun cups in the snow field, why

some of the cracks glow blue, and the top layer

is stained red. let me know

what time the sun will set, if the phosphorescence

was out when you last jumped in the ocean, or waded in deeper,

over barnacle coated rocks at low tide after dinner and dishes.

tell me if you watched

the river, thick with salmon, bubble white water, as you threw

pieces of licorice fern under the current from the gravel bed.

tell me if any of it stuck with you,

if the food lived after consumption, if you still

have the pigment of yellow monkey flower in the well of

your palm, or the song of murrelets in the canal of your

ear, maybe even the spout of a sperm whale reflecting on the shine

iris of your eye. tell me if you wrote any of it down, named

the plants lining the deer trail or peaks carving the ridge.

let me know if you feel sad now

for not holding onto all of it at once,

but instead, slowly, letting little bits of it slip back

into the river.

don't tell me about the permanence

of ideas, of da Vinci’s smile, or dickinson's birds,

or the continuum of violence and the improbability of

love. tell me only the colors

of your universe, which ones pool and splash

behind your lids when you squeeze them shut,

which ones blend into the blurred horizon of

a sea sky, which ones fill your plate before

it is white and empty again.

paint it once, and i won't ask you any more,

until tomorrow, when i tell you

what i did today, when i translate

my electric blues and fuzzy greys, when i try to

hold tight to the magic of existence

in a world that expands every time

i touch it. 

dls

free

"free"

by june i

was starting to drift from shore. i moved

towards the solstice sun hanging over the horizon

until he called me back,

the dog shivering.

euphoria, he said, is the first

sign of hypothermia.

by july

i was slipping off rockweed into the alaskan pacific.

peeling trees from my skin at benzaman lake,

spinning my spine into an unnamed river near

the goat carcass below the twisty hemlock branches

in south baranof island.

you are like a child, he said, your eyes

so full of wonder.

by august

all of us, were wading in with

neon underwear and diagonal torsos,

holding on to each other’s limbs,

stepping feet around crackles of barnacle coated rock

diving under to find the

flight of middle of the sea suspension.

stay, he said, afterwards, his arms locking at the elbow,

sliding over my wet collarbone as we watched

the plankton glow green dust around our toes.

by september i was drifting across the continent,

floating high in a big plastic bird.

i stepped outside again where summer

meant afternoon thunder

and too humid to function.

the alder leaves stuck to my shoulders,

evaporated by cruising altitude.

summer dried waves in my hair.

the water dissolved distance,

melting topography and in between air, freezing fear

and wildness at once into my skin, reminding me,

thoroughly, and completely,

of where i was.

i didn’t feel my flight home. it was pressurized air and itchy pillows

hung above

the geometry of a landscape far

below. freedom

steals breath and hugs

goosebump coated skin

and pulls minds and ribs

into bodies

and is euphoric and maybe

the first sign of hypothermic

and no matter how close you are to it,

it never really, fully lasts.  

dls 

final

in the sweet indecision of almost spring,

nearly summer, i saunter through 

the silver silt hanging grey in the air.

through this light film of opacity, there is

blurry vision, cut through only for one

crisp, filled to the brim

moon, shining through these sugary webs

of cotton candy, this low hanging night sky.

i spent the day indoors—sleep filled

shorts and hands on my skinned over ribs,

too late in the no longer morning. later, the air

tasted, even to my eyes, and after, lingered

in the twist of my hanging down hair as

i wandered back towards a pile

of plays, a list of former habits.

[in my latest lack of dreams (dark matter,

thick sleep), i thought i may have, for the

first time, seen with the absence of

language a desert words flooded with

that color of that one band

of light that always spills over the line

of the horizon—light blue, cobalt,

anything but navy, i'll never know 

what to call you—after the hills below

have fallen into one uniform black shadow.]

tonight i am contained in the shell of a mahogany

egg and the air is too tense to taste, too moderated

to tell the season. it is full of

wood panels, turmeric lights, the thick

heat of inside earth. i want to crack myself open

and see the words spill out in different sized letters--

the syllabi and assignments, the untrained thoughts,

the would be ledes, the ones that someone

once liked (not me)--mixing together into indistinguishable,

racing to fill the plate of tonight’s white moon

yellow with a broken up yolk.

dls