on finding

While outside leaves and empty beer cans play catch in the whirl of wind, we stare at a white wall and think back on the days when we were children.

I don’t remember how we met, but every night after going to the store to buy bread for dinner he and I would skip down the hill with full speed, our spleens filling up with blood as we chased after the wild geese. And we looked and looked for traffic lights and signs but they were all long gone.

He was the fastest runner there could ever be on this planet, with muscled body and nothing to hold it back. I heard the wind beside my back fly by. It slapped my face as the ground trembled with the thought of bane when his feet stomped the warm asphalt underneath.

He is mute, and I – blind

I used to see though. When I woke in the early mornings he would be sitting outside on the bench behind the fence where raspberries lay over swollen with the fall. He’d just stare or poke on a green leaf he’d caught before it fell on the ground. He hated being alone, or at least I believed so, because the very instant I struggled to open the door he looked up and told me (I’d learned sign language from a lady who gave out flyers downtown) to come out, and take a walk with him to the forest where last night little children played hide and seek and lay in the wet grass to laugh at the misshaped stars above.

We went to school in the morning. Sometimes we stayed after all classes were over to relearn our lessons. I read him a new story and he thought me a few new moves on the basketball court – now abandoned and lonely, except for a few gulls that begged for our candy bars and negative attention. They wanted to be kicked and chased after.

I was delighted at the innocence of his character and just what a normal 12-year-old boy he was from the inside, with a mask to cover it and mechanical flaws that have rusted a long time back and now it was too late to fix them. It made me very sad to look at him finish a book and start to try sounding out all of his favorite moments from the story, the people, the scenery and then more scenery. He opened his throat wide as a sparrow, but nothing came out. In his mind the characters were alive, the grass swayed back and forth and its soil was awake. Things happened in the book, as things happened in life before and were recorded for the sake of false theories. … (to be continued)

You resonate
Like a guitar string
That has been struck
Left alone
To fill the air
With whatever is left of its history

It takes a million years
To unlearn to be wild
And only a second to memorize
The intensity of rain clouds
Passing through
Above
Too high for them to matter
It won't matter if they decide to fall
Because you give me time to run and hide
And I give you space to build a bridge to cross to where it is dry

Someone pressed stop request
In the middle of the bridge

You're beautifully old,
There are parts of you
No one has invented words for… yet
Parts of you no one can claim

I want to give you snow
I'll carry it in a metal case, from far

I love you strangely...
Strange love too is love
I think I forgot to say sometimes
I chase you in my dreams
My shoes are worn through at the heels
You’re too quick to catch

I do want to hold you
But better not -
I am reckless

on love and remembering

this is an older poem, a bit revised:

i remember feeling like children do
When digging with a spoon in the dirt,
Digging to get to the world
Their own secret way
i remember milk weeds soaking in the light
A city gives off
i remember the Roma mothers in their red slippers
As if escaped from the page of a book
Strolling through town - gently
As if the weight on their backs
Was not weight
i remember catching a glimpse of my grandfather
Staring out at the water, belittled or fascinated
Outstretching his arms like a boy that doesn’t know
Exactly what he wants, just knows he wants
i remember water to be a religion
For my non religious family
i remember the perfect stranger - a neighbor
Who when he wasn’t himself
Was a fisherman
And i remember his treasures he left behind for us kids
To find: wooden statuettes, coin collections,
Bones, fishing gear, sepia photographs, a key
No one cares to know what it unlocks
i can’t remember you the way you remember me
But we are the color of butterflies when
We hang on to each other
We protect each other from the storm by being
Entirely immersed in it
i hope you remember me
When owls stop to breathe
In the middle of their flight
i hope you still remember me
When i am just a part of the Atlantic
i remember being a code on the back
Of some skin, people trying to figure me out
Poking through with chemicals
Until i am useless or exactly what they have been
Needing to find
i remember wanting to scream
But forgetting how to
i remember being a newspaper
Melting in the rain
Word by word
Article by article
Page by page
People’s lives being taken away
From them for the second time
And still i remember you dancing
In the dark
i want to remember the world
The way it was days ago
Forgiving and curious,
Willing to give up parts of itself
To make space for everyone
For the scattered ones
For the ones wearing blood on the outside
For the butterflies that fly for hours on end
To get to where they can die in peace/peacefully
For your crafted fingers resting on the edge of the table
For your voice showing me what it’s all about
i will remember that it takes a lifetime
To unlearn to love you (though I see no reason)
Just as it would take a lifetime
Knowing the color of the sea, when it
Wants to be blue, then green,
Then black or pink, then invisible

Three small holes

           -in memory of J.L.

You have three small holes: one for when you sat wide eyed in the night (the musty garage was your refuge) and you glued together shreds of glass until they became an image – the face of a mother you never had; one for the constellation you kept recording over and over on journal pages, waiting for a star to die, or be born; one for the people you left behind to claim your dreams in cardboard boxes.

No, nothing is permanent, but you.

You become like a stain nobody else can see, but those who too are stains.

He carries you on his conscience and it’s heavy the way rain is heavy after months of drought.

They need you, but the way birds need their chicks after they have been taught to fly or the way divers still need the sea even in their sleep.

You were sunlight landing in through dirty windows that would never open. I hate that I can’t cry for you anymore. Just wear your temporary name on my chest and scream and tear old notebooks of childish dreams and try to break through the door but never quite succeed.

I hope there are no quadratic equations in heaven; just soft backed chairs and bears like you.

Life through children's eyes
                                 - for my little brother

I want to understand life

And its jumbled abstractions

I want to be a page in your book

Of superheroes

I want to be a four – leafed clover

And be lost and found again

I want to be the cane

Leading the way for someone

Who returned from war

I want to remember this sketch

Of the sea, and your hand

Holding the brush, finishing it

I want to be a jellyfish

Discovering

Sand, shore, toes –

For the first time