c is for
cosmology
chamomile tea
carpe diem
café au lait
chrysanthemums
caramel apples
capricorns
it’s for the cosmic dust that appears on the backs of
your eyelids when you’ve rubbed them
and
the conversation my lips have with your spine
(a wordless exchange that goes something like
“I’m not good for you.”
“Break me anyway.”)
it’s for the curl of your fingers around your mother’s hand
when you were one and two and threefourfivesixseveneight
and the way she still looks at you sometimes like she’s hoping
you’re just going to grab onto her real tight again
and call her Mama and let her tie your shoes and comb your hair
but she knows you want her to love you a little less
and her tongue shows the imprint of her teeth from
all the things she wants to say but never does,
but that awful fiery something in her throat will choke
her some day if you don’t let her get it out,
because deep down in the valley between your
right atrium and pulmonary valve,
you know that no one deserves to die
from a broken heart
c is also for all the cliché love songs
about how beautiful his smile is
and you’ll roll your eyes and stick your fingers
in your ears to drown out that 4/4 beat,
but because all melodies have a spot in our bones
your lips still know the words like you know the way home
and it’s for change,
like that time we were driving on the highway with
the windows rolled down and I reached for your hand
like I reach for the moon on a cloudless night
and you looked at me like I had all the answers,
held my hand like your fingers were trying to speak and said,
“Some things won’t ever change. Like numbers and
the speed of light and you and I.”
well it’s been four months and I reach for the moon
like I used to reach for your hand
but c is also for clutter,
the clutter in our homes and the clutter in our hearts,
and how we always say we’ll straighten things up tomorrow
but we’re funny about forgetting even if we’ve managed to forgive,
because somehow the WANTED signs never peel away
completely from our bulletin board hearts
and it’s for champagne,
for that airy, golden promise of a fresh start,
the forgetting of a year that could have gone better and didn’t,
that could have been worse but wasn’t—
because in the grand scheme of things you’re
probably dying just as slowly as the rest of us,
so drink up, cheers, c’est la vie
and remember to love thy crooked neighbor
with all thy crooked heart
I am vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.
Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard - our moonlight motel -
where we slept summer’s hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.
Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt;
stairs leading nowhere; high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.
b is for
blueberries
butterflies
bungalows
book thieves
bruisy knees
it’s for boats with glass bottoms and
black holes hiding in the middle of galaxies, conducting
stars and eating up their light and I think I would like to
become one of these phenomena, to know what something
that pure tastes like—like freedom, maybe, or liquid gold and
I feel something like a stomach ache coming on, because
the universe is beautiful without even trying to be beautiful and
I’ll never be able to inhale it all, not even in a billion lifetimes
and b is for the way spines resemble book-lined shelves,
where every ridge is a signed first-edition and your hands
can’t get close enough and you have to touch every single one
to be able to say you’ve been there and done that
it’s for the bliss that comes from a proper first kiss,
where your eyes are wide open so you can count their
eyelashes and they look like little webs and you want
to blow on them and make a wish as if they were
dandelion seeds or candles on a cake for a birthday
that even tastes like you’re one year older
it’s for the old wives tale about buttercups, how holding one up
to your throat will tell you if you like butter or not,
but that’s just too easy
what about the one about how each of us has a song to sing
and they’re all the glorious color yellow, like the belly of summer
and shouldn’t we all just start singing?
“you’re the bee’s knees”
do they even have knees? if they do I would imagine that
they’d feel exactly as you’d think: all dusty and soft from pollen
and maybe they would even hum and this melody would
get trapped in your head for days like the imprint of the sun
on your eyelids when you stare at it for too long—
but even if they don’t have knees, that’s what I think of you,
all spectacular and wonderful and you’re marvelous too,
and even though no one uses that word anymore
b is also for this
it’s for the belief that exists between your lungs that
you are not always going to be so lonely, the belief that comes
from looking up at the sky when it’s a full moon and somehow
just knowing that someone else is looking up too and it turns
out you’re not the only one who appreciates the fact that
you can hold her in the palm of your hand like a shiny new coin
and of course, b is for because,
because everything is about love no matter what they tell you,
even if the poem or short story or novel is about socks or astrobiology—
someone loves those things enough to write about them
and you leave it at that
just because
a is for
autumn,
amor deliria nervosa,
a la mode,
azaleas,
aquariums,
aphrodite,
astrology
it’s also for amortentia
and afternoons
spent on beaches where the sun spills
over your skin like some kind of baptism
a is for aurora borealis, for those great
leaping lights in the sky that make you dizzy
if you try to dance under them for too long
like the whole alaskan tundra is your dance club
and you’re just looking for someone to take you home
it’s for the ache you get in your throat every time
you hear a song or see a person or read a book
that’s so beautiful you just wanna stitch them
into the edges of your skin right where your
heart beats because hey, you just want to
feel beautiful for a change, even if you
have to walk around like siamese twins forever—
what’s a sacrifice like that when you get to
be next door neighbors that are so close even
the roses don’t have secrets?
it’s for the song your atoms hum
when someone gets close to you,
close enough for a kiss
and you don’t have words for this
you just know that you never want
to be looked at any other way
by anyone else
ever
why isn’t there a word for that?
and it’s for ambrosia, because i am
ninety-nine point however many nines sure that
if i ever got a chance to go to the moon
and if i didn’t need a space suit to protect my skin from ultraviolet light
and if somehow my lungs could inhale nothingness and survive
i would get down on my knees like i’m going to praise the heavens
and press my cheek to the ground and close my eyes and breathe in—
the moon would smell like that, ambrosial and balmy,
like cinnamon peels and the way leaves smell when the sun’s awake
and it’s for how i imagine being with you will feel,
like the heraldic color of the wide open sky
azure
My heart born naked
was swaddled in lullabies.
Later alone it wore
poems for clothes.
Like a shirt
I carried on my back
the poetry I had read.
So I lived for half a century
until wordlessly we met.
From my shirt on the back of the chair
I learn tonight
how many years
of learning by heart
I waited for you.
I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet.
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket.
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from.
I wish I was that somewhere that you come from
every time you get there
and when you get there.
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
and postcards saying
‘Wish you were here.’
I wish you were here.
Autumn is the hardest season—
the leaves are all falling,
and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.
And the trees are naked and lonely.
I keep trying to tell them
new leaves will come around in the spring,
but you can’t tell trees those things.
They’re like me. They just stand there
and don’t listen.
Why do I think October is beautiful?
It is not, is not beautiful.
But then
what is there to hold one’s interest
between the various drifts of a day’s
work, but to search out the differences
the window and grate—
but it is not, is not
beautiful.
I think your face is beautiful, the way it is
close to my face, and I think you are the real
October with your transparence and the stone
of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.
In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.
And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.
(Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)
In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.
And at the evening’s end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.
Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.
Federico Garcia Lorca
