Cremation
To the water’s horizon,
I’ve sent gifts over time:
the sand pail, the glass earring,
my own body floating out
past the buoy line.
I've given the high sun my skin,
long night watches to the lights of distant oil rigs.
I gave even once to a thunderstorm,
a hair ribbon and some kind of elation.
The dark came and the wind grew,
but I stayed still, gave hours
to it like a painting: quick, deep brush-strokes,
music low and high, blunt songs to the sky.
License
It’s strange, this license to your body:
the mental paperwork signed
and the keys handed over,
the feel of your shoulder blade under my hand,
my fingers tracing the triangular outline,
hooking them into that small hollow where
I used to imagine wings
on my back as a child.
I’ve learned eleven lessons
just from your wrist bone,
tapped my thumbs
against the angle beneath
your shirt-collar,
created percussions
down in the beat of your flesh.
I've run my fingertips over
the emptiness between:
that pocket at the base
of your throat so deep
I could drink from it.
I keep record of the way your breath
expands your ribs:
how I can see Adam’s outline there
and understand my own sinfulness.
But it is your hands that make me love you:
the swift deftness with which you chop
an onion, or open a jar.
Then, spilling the jam,
the tiny seeds fleck
your skin, the transparent,
thick pink shines, smeared on
the heel of your palm.
Fruit
Winner of the 2010 Gurian Writing Contest for Poetry
I used to take my knife into my backyard
and plunge it
into the rotten apricots,
that lay scattered, split
upon the ground,
after they jumped from the trees.
The same satisfaction visits
every time I convince a girl to bed,
Soon it was their idea,
just how the apricots
reassured me that they were
already broken.
