desire breathes a solar system out of your chest

My body becomes restless,
the same way it used to
in the small town
in the summer,
despite the fun I am having.

I am homesick for the mother-

                                  land,

for the heart-

land.

I prowl the dark houses of my mind
at night so hungry for, exactly what,
I can’t put my finger on.  Nothing
there but the cats on the out-dated
wallpaper to keep me company
and the thin streaks of color my father
finds on the middle of all my sheets.

Let him think it is summer gently
tugging dreams out of me like
splinters while I sleep.

Let him wake me early.

Let him watch me tread water from above.

Let him drive my wet limbs home afterward.

And later,

years later, silently take my hand in his
as we drive home, racing the across
the golden touched prairie,
perhaps recalling those mornings
he handed me this future
as if it were only hanging just
behind my swimming suit,
drip-dying on the closet doorknob. 

I am becoming her faster
than ever now.  Jet black
hairs crop up on my arms.
I am writing lists.  For
everything. My fingers itch to set
the clocks ahead by six
minutes. The only thing stopping them
is the lack of clocks, but there is plenty
to clean, always, that never stops.
She was right about that, too,

I get hot, find myself naked before
the bathroom mirror, laughing
at both of us, playing possum with myself
all these years. I am becoming him, too,
but in ways much more hidden.
For instance, this morning I found myself
looking for cereal boxes
in the drawer beneath the oven.   

The force with which I opened
to you is not the hardest I have ever
done and that is for the best I think.
There was beauty in the others,
however cracked the ground,
however sad the mess
later, in the quiet ways we moved
apart.  Don’t fear what I have
strayed from.  Fear
that I might have opened
so easily to you, so violently,
as I did, passed like the monsoon,
like every season, instead of allowing
the viscous seep of our true
coalescence.  Fear that
I might have never left
the volatile clouds I loved
to come live in what I know
to be mildness for awhile.  Our story
wasn’t born in a tornado, nor
will it be thrown out of that
ragged sky so many miles
later.  We will be reborn
like the rain and pour on each other
for years.  We will make
wetlands, fresh and salted.

by Donald Justice

The wall surrounding them they never saw;
The angels, often.  Angels were as common
As birds or butterflies, but looked more human.
As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe.
Beasts, too, were friendly.  They could find no flaw
In all of Eden: this was the first omen.
The second was the dream which woke the woman.
She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw.
As for the fruit, it had no taste at all.
They had been warned of what was bound to happen.
They had been told of something called the world.
They had been told and told about the wall.
They saw it now; the gate was standing open.
As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

I have been in sort of a slump lately as far as writing goes.  I think that landscape and place has much more of an effect on me than I ever realized because ever since I moved away from the Midwest, sitting down to write a poem has felt like pulling teeth.  I finished writing my first book since moving to Portland, but haven’t really done much writing other than that.  I want that to change so I’m going to change that. 

Here is the first poem in a long time. I’m a little rusty but there will be more to come for anyone who is reading.

Cast Iron and Clementines

“To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it
Down a well, listen.
Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference
Shatter.”

-       EPITAPH:EVIL by Anne Carson

For months now I have been telling you
how much I love the way you smell and
for months now you have been asking me
what it is you smell like.

I will get to that.

So much is connected.  So much I didn’t even realize.
A few months after I moved to Oregon I was hired
to work at a group home.  I do a lot of things there.
This poem is not about most of those things, but
I do cook meals.  And one afternoon I was standing
at the counter peeling clementines.  Suddenly you were
blossoming in my mind. 

But wait.

The first time I kissed you
we were in the back of a bookstore
and since then I have held
your taste inside me like cast iron.

Sometimes I go through the apartment
turning all the lights out and it is still
not what I want.  There is no real dark-
ness anymore.  Just as my father is
the colander between my grandparents and I
so I can only know you as you pour
boiling into my body one stream at a time,
one day at a time.

At the house where I work we have cast iron
frying pans.  I hate cooking with them.
Tephlon is so much easier, but what
have we sacrificed?  Light pollution
has dimmed our minds. 

One summer I found a cast iron pan in the back
of a friend’s car so he, my brother, and I drove
down to the river.  We walked to the middle
of the footbridge and threw it in.  You are asking
this of me without knowing it; to hold whole rivers
inside of me each time we kiss. 
You smell like clementines, and as I stood there peeling
them your taste flooded my mouth.

The winter of my junior year in college
I took a poetry class.  It was a night class
and pitch black before I even got there.
Winter in the Midwest is such a cold, dark thing.
This class was held on the 3^rd floor of Old Main,
in a corner classroom that overlooked the library and Alumni Hall.
Our professor was this tiny, excitable woman named
Monica who would always bring a bag of clementines.
That was how it was every Thursday. 
The dead of winter, the dead of night,
as we sat around a rectangular table
in a small cube in a strange, dim light,
the smell of clementines dripping down the walls
as we spoke poetry into the high ceilinged, empty
hallways of the cold building.
Hours later, I would walk home near midnight in
a sort of reverence that had nothing
to do with poetry.

I may never be able to hold all of you but I will try.
You are still so new in my already full mind, but just
the smell of you recalls small winter poems and citrus
with the weight of history inside.

by Anne Carson

In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
“passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to
recollect that season.”
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the “memory
of words and things,”
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention “always useful for learning and life”
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
recollect wife.