the same old traps

it was fall and bay road curved

as it always did

i drove as i always do: fast
around the curves, one hand
in the dark.  everything was ordinary:

i was coming home to you.

and then it was

there.  like the sudden glory of anything new and impossible

a light appeared between the trees
pinkish, papery, the only light for miles.

it was a house inside-out, only
tarp and two-by-fours.  newborn

its burning heart revealed in the naked night 

gone at the next curve.

all winter

i waited for the meaning to come

and drove as i always did

in the dark—nothing
glowing but the ordinary: dashboard, headlights, cigarette.

you were gone.

i remembered the house, but i never found it again

and it meant nothing

no matter how many metaphors i tried.

it was

like you

mute

and

persistent.

there and here

there are things i know about people as soon as i look at them.  like how some people are good at knowing how much something weighs, or how far away something is, or how many things are in a jar without counting each one.  i can't do any of that.  but i know exactly how far a person will bend before they snap.  i don't always believe it, so i end up using my fingers to do a little pushing, to feel the resistance, like feeling a loose tooth. or maybe, since i don't know why i know what i know, i'm hoping i'm wrong.  that maybe i'll push against someone and realize they're not what i thought, that they'll surprise me somehow.

usually, though, i hold back.  something i learned in school, when nobody liked the sound of my voice anymore: i stopped raising my hand all the time.  then the unsaid words just hang in the air, where no one has to look at them.  you learn to take shelter under them.  i never said the word love to jonny, never, never; he would have bolted like a spooked cat across the road at night.  but it was there, over us, like an umbrella.  instead of hurting me, making me vulnerable, that love protected me from the darkness that surrounded him.

it was the darkness i wanted.  that's the thing hard for everyone to understand.  i could see it, but i couldn't see through it, and i wanted to get under there.  i didn't raise my hand.  i waited for him to reach for me, and he did.  maybe there's some reverse law of attraction, where he needed someone like me to absorb the force of that darkness without being destroyed.  the first night in the warehouse, he was the one seeing how far he could go.  underneath the noise, the world was different.  that was the beauty of everything punkrock—you had to avert your gaze so as not to go blind, listen through the muffle of ear plugs unless you wanted to go deaf.  in the room behind the stage, he said nothing, while my skirt slid up my legs.  i said nothing while he pushed me down across the bed.  his friends across the room were talking.  one looked at me, right when jonny put his hand between my legs, blinked before he looked away.  i let him.  i let him.  i let him touch me and i let him watch me.  just like i let him do anything to me, later.  like i let him turn away from me while he slept and i watched him breathe without touching him.  like i let him serve me up to his ex-girlfriend another night, in another dark room, in the basement of the costume shop, where he left me handcuffed to the bed for her.  she tasted like honey that night.  it was in her hair, long and knotted and black, and the coiled tips of her hair brushed across her chest and neck and across my lips and i saw him in the corner of the room, leaning over some project, something he lost himself in, something he made for me and gave to me which i have forgotten.

i never gave him anything.  because i knew better.  the only thing he ever took from me was a bath i made for him in my parents' house, when no one was home.  i didn't look at him then; what he'd done to his skin wasn't something i needed to see to know.  i let him keep it that way.  because he let me hide there in that place with him where there was nothing to say, which was all i ever wanted from him.

the only empty seat on the train was next to him, and i was too tired not to sit there. i'd seen him before. i liked the cut of his hair at the back of his neck—clean and sharp. his eyes hooded and heavy, but bright under there, like he was noticing me those times i saw him around the city. drinking coffee, or at the bar, or just passing him on the corner of 9th street. on the train, he sat reading, hunched over his book, so i thought i might go unnoticed. i closed my eyes. but then i started looking over his shoulder at the page, attracted to words like a dog finding the scent of food—or whatever it is they find when they nose the corners of buildings and garbage cans and gutters, lifting their heads, sniffing. i tried to stop looking. his body leaned in my way, so there i was with his neck and the back of his ear and his big, clean hand on the page. i could see the clean cut of each hair over his ear, the angle of the blade's edge. and his collar. and his jacket. and the little holes worn in the back of his jacket, which i wanted to work my fingers into. this happens to me sometimes on trains or elevators, this false intimacy, when i want to touch a stranger so badly sometimes i have to jerk my hand away. i want to tuck the tags into the backs of their shirts, or pull a piece of lint from their sweaters. it means nothing. but then i am there with that feeling, aching in my hand. and i liked the way he sat leaning over his book, with his body bent toward it, fully involved. the words i caught were indecipherable: sorcery, trough, man, moon, blood. moonchild. it reminded me suddenly of home, of my parents. of the dark wood of the bookshelves in the living room at home, the sharp varnished wintery scent, the fireplace, the sound of the wind in the fireplace, the photograph of my mother and her dog in the mountains when she was young. i wanted so badly to lean against him. to touch the back of his neck. and it made me cry suddenly in that mute, ridiculous, expressionless way, where the tears just appear without warning, like when you stand too long in the freezing cold and can't even feel them wet on your cheeks. what is wrong with me, i thought.

then bedford avenue came and we piled out of the train car in a throng and my body was pressed against his through the doorway but it didn't matter because everyone's was and then it was over. i had to dart down the street in the wrong direction so i could get out of the crowd and breathe. i kept walking that way, away from my apartment, crying a little.

there's nothing important that it can mean. it's such a little thing. but i am built to notice these things. i am built with this aloneness around me, and i have become expert at delineating its every curve and pulse.

earlier today, a friend said to me, "you're my favorite," and i knew he meant it because he said it without thinking, like it just struck him. i knew he meant it even though we're not good friends; i see him for a few minutes once or twice a week, at most. "i know," i said. it's easy to do everything right for those two little minutes, while the rest of my life is a mess. i'm really good at those minutes.


all these years i worked so hard at being perfect, in order to be loved. i didn't know yet perfection is never loved. now my heart's split in two: between wanting to be loved, and not knowing how to stop wanting. the wanting has its own momentum. it keeps hurtling forward into the closest thing it can crash into, dragging me along after it.

what happens in the heart simply happens

from Ted to Sylvia 
     (Hughes & Plath)

Child's Park

What did they mean to you, the azalea flowers?
Those girls were so happy, rending the branches.
Embracing their daring bouquets, their sumptuous trousseaux,
The wet, hot-petalled blossoms. Seizing their day.
Having a good time. Your homicidal
Hooded stare met them head on.
As if they were stealing the brands
Of your own burning. I hurried you off. Bullfrogs
Took you down through lily tangle. Your fury
Had to be quenched. heavy water,
Deeper, deeper, cooling and controlling
Your plutonium secret. You breathed water.

Freed, steadied, resurfaced, your eyes
Alit afresh on color, so delicate,
Splitting the prism,
As the dragonflies on the solid lilies.
The pileated woodpecker went writhing
Among the catalpas. It clung
To undersides and swooped
Like a pterodactyl. The devilry
Of the uncoiling head, the spooky wings,
And the livid cry
Flung the garden open.
You were never
More than a step from Paradise.
You had instant access, your analyst told you,
To the core of your Inferno--
The pit of the hairy flower.
At a sunny angle
The fountain threw off its seven veils
As the air swayed it. Here was your stair--
Alchemy's seven colours.
I watched you as you climbed it all on your own
Into the mouth of the azalea.

You imagined a veil-rending defloration
And a rebirth out of the sun--mixed up together
And somehow the same. You were fearless
To meet your Father.
His Word fulfilled, there, in the nuclear core.

What happens in the heart simply happens.

I stepped back. That glare
Flinging your old selves off like underthings
Left your whole Eden radioactive.