The Potter and the Whale

I am all suggestion
and I’ve never seen snow this white,
so white it drowns out what would have been tears
to fill the barrels that by some rogue miracle
would have turned into wine.
It’s not a miracle
it’s just an alcoholic’s biology.

My face contorts,
and I cry out like a homeless prophet in flannel sheets,
my skin aching for clay,
for mud, for some desert tonic to fill me
with bubbles of light, the kind that make me spin in circles
flawless as a compass.

Teach me your language.
Let me wander your continent until I am weary enough
to rest in the oil twilight of your hair.

I am a patient stretched out far as the concrete girdles
that bind our country like a faceless consort
being burned like a witch or frozen like a god.
Maybe if I changed my voice,
changed my hair,
changed the color of my eyes so they don’t notice
the purple smoke that climbs up behind them.

I wanted your planes crashing into me until I felt everything,
until I felt nothing, until I felt something as expansive as grief
but something of an opposite.
I wanted the blacklight, the white light, some light to fill my vision
so that I couldn’t see you anymore, so you wouldn’t reflect
as you always do.

Teach me your language.
Let me wander your continent until I am weary enough
to rest in the oil twilight of your hair.

My mouth is tired, a cavern where no flashlights come to visit.
It is wet with love, but not yours.
It is the same fleshy extraterrestrials
that so often come to the same conclusion:
this planet is vague
this planet is yearning deeper than each and every widow
whose tongues are made of black lace,
whose palettes filled with white paint.
It aches, it moans, it waits,
but they only fix their eyes at the back of my throat
to see a transfiguration,
some mystery explored in ancient cloth.

You made your way out of my ocean
with mermaids licking salt from your sand-colored skin
brushing me from your hair.
You have shaken off
the wonders of deep water.
Like a beached whale, you can’t ignore it
you just want it picked apart
and I will be laid bare.
I will be laid bare for you.

The Potter--11/3

The Potter

There’s a crescent moon and one stray star in the sky,
but I don’t bother to squint at it anymore
unless it’s full to the brim
and beating on my window.

Today I fantasized about your hands covered in clay,
but I won’t come unless I see it in real life
making bodies into vases.
I want you to smear it across my thighs and tell me
I belong to you like I belong to the earth.
My roots are planted in you
the white fibers woven throughout you.
The story in the soil is a love song
that whispers through highways and the blue light
of apartments with white curtains
I hear your thoughts in the snow on the fire escapes.

Our pages are yellowed with smoke
and my cursive script is undetectable
but you have a bright lamp and I have the time
let’s decode the necessity of absence
when we could have been kissing our eyelids
and watering our houseplants.
Love cannot be kept a secret
it begs to reveal itself in the most garish purple.

Dirt Floors--11/3

Dirt Floors

You cleared your rain gutters
and told me my face was too white.
There’s not enough contrast
and I am not your complimentary color.

The way I saw it,
we were a pair of 3D glasses peering onto a screen
allowing images to converge.
I am water and I wore you down like earth,
but you receded before I could erode you enough to reveal
the soil beneath.

So wear your flannel
build houses out of sticks or stones
find a woman to keep you warmer than I,
a threadbare quilt.
I am worn thinner than paper
a few stray threads
and made up of so many scraps of pioneer dresses.

You swept up the crumbs from your kitchen floor
and rinsed out old bottles of wine for recycling.
Here is the one I made you try
and you spit out the window.
You said it tastes to much like oak trees
and the tongues of irises.
I hear you shuffle barefoot on your dirt floor cabin.
Listening, I am the glass in the dustpan.