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.

untitled so far

Black dress metaphors + WASP imagery=I watch too much Gossip Girl and I'm madly...smitten.

-d

****


You are the seam I don’t want to rip out.
I’ve re-sewn this black dress again and again;
the style has changed with me.
It started as a moon-shaped collar,
but it became a neckline as low as a drowned man
and the black satin lay strewn on the cutting room floor.
It was a dirty movie I never wanted to see again.

I’ve made some cuts
taken it in and stretched it out
crazy stitched a red heart
that looked more like the burning end of an expensive cigarette.

I wore it to Gatsby’s summer parties
a black hole in white-hot August
the sweat and wine blotting out the fabric
like an exploding feather pen.
The sun burned my shoulders
and all of old money New York saw me plunge into the pool.
I made a spectacle of myself
just as I planned it.

I met you on a yacht in the racing red heart of Indian summer.
All their couture eyelids opened to watch the idiot
throw herself off the edge in a deafening splash
but you pulled at my sweater
and I fell back on deck.

What started as yet another cheap performance,
yet another manic fit
soon became what some call love
(but I’m not sure.)

Carl Sandburg’s cat cleans himself in my apartment
as we create chills for ourselves, a magnificent fever.
You made me a perfect tailor
on a dark dance floor.

tova

I read a short interview in Time magazine about a woman named Tova who was a flawless matchmaker, but only for Orthodox Jews. She claimed that the first time she made a match, God spoke to her.

-d


******


Tova

Five pointed stars swing over my head
a silent wind chime
that only I can hear.

People are like icebergs
but age and violent sunlight
make everything that is underwater
seem less significant.

I must be some sort of reparation
for the ash we lived in all those years.
The only thing god could send
was flowers and chocolates.
Diamonds are the new manna.

I send them all to live in white houses
with fresh cut flowers brought in by some Gentile woman
every Wednesday.
Bathrooms with monogrammed towels
and portraits in the paper.

And I sit on my digital cloud
waiting for names and faces to magnetize.

satisfaction

Satisfaction

I was, as always, a spectacle.
My eyes, when they were shut,
were like two eraser marks
and when I opened them, you could see all the mistakes.

Such a strange bird I must have been.
The female flaunting her few bright feathers
that ridiculous yellow against brown.

You left when most people are waking up
and offered me no promise of finding an end to the maze
or a solution to the puzzle.
Only the theories spinning in my head
knocking against the skeletal wall.

Was I a whore or a nurse?
A trapeze artist or a crumbling statue?
An addict or a kind apothecary?

Another wedding dress is burning
in the little closet in my brain.
Only this time, I use the sleeve
to light my cigarette.

white rabbit

White Rabbit

So smoke your cigars and drink your wine.
There’s enough matches to go around
and there is always someone to clean your lipstick off the glass.

I never thought I’d miss the collegiate life.
That slot machine everyone kept feeding
on the off chance we’d get lucky.
Still I can’t say bohemia isn’t any kind of insurance
I can rely on.

Now I sit up in the attic drinking bottled Pabst
and eating blueberries for breakfast
too afraid to know love as anyone more than an acquaintance
he wasn’t that great of a friend anyway.

So I am left as nervous as a white rabbit,
waiting to see if I’ll appear
out of nowhere.