Sad Wife

I grew melancholy after my first marriage, too.
But I attributed that to post grad school blues
and funerals
and identity crises.

It got us into therapy, which was good.
(I wonder how much money we spent
sitting on couches over the next fifteen years.

Clearly not enough.)

That first time, I sat in the rented house
on Fourth Street in Columbus
and sewed curtains
and watched reruns of Mary Tyler Moore
and cried.

I wonder if that scared you.

That first therapist wanted to make your childhood
into something sinister
but there was nothing lurking behind the facade.
The Myers-Briggs was helpful, though.
Things made more sense after that.

And then fifteen years passed
and we were someone’s parents
with mortgages and debt
and I stopped wearing all five earrings all at once.

And the melancholy must have been lost in New Orleans
or packed away with all the baby things
or forgotten in the apartment on Williams Fork Trail.

After that, sorrow always had a cause
and the effects were always tragically obvious.
Not this mysterious weight that has no name
and sits behind my breasts
frightening you, brave husband number two.

You who wake up joyful every day,
who has such utter faith in me
and proffers all your love without a string in sight.

How impossible I am, how wrong to live
in my magical life
and yet confess this gentle sadness in my eyes
and stuffed up in my throat.

I have no explanation.

except divorce and death and fear
and loss and love and lack of follow-through
and laziness and self-esteem
and loneliness and fraud and grief.

But then so do you, too,
yet you are fine to jump right up each day
and celebrate the sunshine or the storm.

My grandmother was mad.

Perhaps this is her legacy to me
and I should simply pin it to my collar
like a brooch
and wear it without fear or shame or guilt.

I think that I would rather ride a bike.
Or walk along the boardwalk holding hands.

I’d rather sleep in late or read a book
or make sweet love to you or draw a bath.

I’d rather bake a pie or make a cake
or take you out to lunch and sit outside
watching the people walking through their lives
on their way to the therapist’s or their OB appointments.

Watching the rotating blooms of flowers on the mall
and the various hats on the cart by the courthouse.

Watching the sad girls and the gentle boys
loving each other the best that they can.

Trumpet Voluntary

within the cupboard
of my chest
a trumpet lives
the herald of my song
and master of my breast
celebratory marches
together or alone

t’was strange inside
the child
stranger still
inside the crone
but heavenly sounds
of God’s own laughter
when it would play
me home

the complete package

papers filed
novel simmering
house painted
lawn boy mowing
furniture polished
flowers blooming
wardrobe revamped
widow waiting

primary source

you can do all the reading you want
but until they write the book on me

you are wasting your fucking time

there isn’t an expert sitting on my head
taking notes and faxing them
to the local library for your edification

so that you can more quickly reconcile
your dick’s social life
with the product of its fidelities

she’s not ready and neither am I

how many assholes does it take
to spin the earth off its axis?

New Rules

no clocks in the bedroom
from now on insomnia shall go
uncontextualized by time

laundry shall be a manageable pleasure
sweet smelling and warm
completed in less than an afternoon

flowers shall adorn the home
a tribute to the seasons, to the planets
to the virgins and harlots who live here

my best fiction

the madwoman in my attic
keeps pasting poison-pen letters
to the insides of my eyeballs
halting information to the brain

and
requiring a mirror to read them
from out front

narcissistic reflection combined
with fumes
from wallpaper paste

all of which result in promises
to restrain myself
(homicidal
only in my best fiction)

On Sundays

There is no room for me next to you
you push me over slowly

You start over.

You slowly ooze over onto me throughout
the hour and I
turn and adjust and show you my back
and feel you pushing me

Your chair is not enough for you
you take mine too

Your air is not enough for you
you breathe mine too

Your song is not enough for you
you sing mine too
and leave me voiceless mouthing words
gasping for breath

and at the end you feel Renewed
Rejuvenated
Fulfilled
Affirmed

and I am coiled in a knot under
my chair (yours now)

on the floor
between the feet of the faithful.

When the pen lies...

When
the pen lies
like a dead seagull on the shores of the page
there
is nothing left to do
but head back up the beach, toward the defunct lighthouse,
noticing
the empty shells scattered on the sand.

Thanksgiving

you standing on a chair
next to me at the counter

our four arms
in synch

our four hands
on the pie crust

fork between your little fingers
pressing birds' feet around

the edges that will contain
the farm-grown pumpkin

faces of the grannies
peeking over our shoulders

like visions

in a mother-daughter
country-western duet

Wax Works

the fury I will not unleash
flows like melted wax
into the corners and crevices
of my body

like the sand candles
we made in second grade

hot paraffin

searing and casting
the shape of anger in my limbs

requiring a lifelike stillness
enacted only to protect and serve

to spare the bystander

one more breath from you...

one more breath from you
and I will exceed capacity

overfull of carbon dioxide
blown hot from across the room

leaving only hints of bruises

irresponsible id with
its sense of entitlement

hurtling through space
to lodge in my limbs

like a tugboat

ramming the dock
and knocking people
into the sea

while the crew laughs
and disembarks

looking for a vegan café
that serves wine in stemless glasses

poured from tattooed hands

glass girdle

glass girdle
woven around my
hips and through
my vertebrae

curved beneath my coccyx

attached delicately at
the tips of my pelvis

needs shattering

Homecoming

Tremendous
grief.
Galaxies spin around
inside my belly.


Pain like smeared
zebra stripes
across glass.
what am i doing here?

my ego shrinks and withers
under this
intense heat.
Fruit rots.
They do not grow and

I cannot have
been away or surely I would not feel so
desperately dead inside.

Innocent bystanders watch and dodge
the arrows so carefully
aimed to miss.
Rubber tips
and suction cups.
Impotent.

I am in the crossfire.

Shame like indigestion moves around
inside me
and rises to the
surface of my skin
like gas in water.


If I were
a sculptor
I would sculpt a woman out of lead
and I would leave
the edges rough and bulky
and I would twist it like
a grotesque helix
and I would hand it to my family and say
YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE THIS.

Then I would leave it in their house and
go away for Christmas
with a special friend I chose myself.

Philadelphia-area Premiere of "Music's Music"

Renowned composer Steven Sametz used one of my poems as the lyric for a commissioned piece for the Los Angeles Master Chorale. "Music’s Music", originally one of the poems in the "Mother Music" series, premiered in Los Angeles last February at Disney Hall as a part of a program featuring new works by contemporary American composers. It is having its Philadelphia-area premiere this weekend at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Concert details are available on the Lehigh website.

Blue

you fell in love
and so I had to paint the room
where nine years before we laughed together at
the vitamin E that should have eased my swelling belly but
somehow landed four feet up the wall above our heads
and now the frozen wasteland on your side of the bed
has sprouted white and purple crocuses
and the spring thaw has begun

Mourning Men Who Haven't Died

incredibly
the power of your choice
leaves me eviscerated
deboned
like a naked piece of cold poultry
and it’s all just happening again
really and truly
for the very first time
as if you just came in and broke it to me
and the floor just tipped out underneath my feet
and I am reduced to nothing but viscera
no skeleton nor muscles to hold me up
no words nor voice to articulate my grief
only worthless puddles of blood and pus
seeping across the carpet in oily pools
putrid like me

Bomb Shelter

my hand explodes

and I can't reach you from over here

trapped between your infidelities

and the wall

scattered shards of cardiac muscle

decorate the bedspread

in flecks of red and blue

that seem

at first glance

like part of the floral print

but stick to my skirt

and leave a stain

that sends me to Heloise and the internet

looking for the remedy

to heal the inconvenient mess

Spoiler Alert

Do not read this poem if you have ever cheated on a pregnant woman or fallen in love with one of your married students or told your wife that you just don’t find her attractive any more and then got mad when she was hurt by your noble honesty. Or if you ever moved out of the home you shared with your wife and eight year old child and went straight to Target to buy a jumbo pack of condoms before you even thought to buy shampoo or toothpaste or a nightlight for your daughter. Or if you ever wrote a love poem at Back to School Night and then volunteered to read it aloud to your New Wife in front of your Old Wife and all the parents with whom you’d been attending Back to School Night for the past seven years.

Do not read this poem if you ever thought that carrying controlled substances across state lines was a reasonable thing to do in the name of art and religion. Or if you call illegal drugs “medicine” or getting high “journeying” in an effort to mask your adolescent attempts to create spiritual meaning around the hole in your heart. Or if you look to twenty-eight year old white men to be your shamans even though they regularly deceive their friends and speak disdainfully of their parents while sleeping with married women and justifying it in the name of enlightenment. Or if you are unable to be in a monogamous relationship without falling in love with this semester’s ingénue and then running home to tell your wife all about it in the name of radical truth and honesty.

Do not read this poem if you ever confused drug-induced intensity with courageous intimacy. Or spent a week tripping in the desert with naked strangers and then came home to condemn your wife as square because she didn’t want to do Ecstasy with you in an attempt to see the face of God and maybe save your marriage in the process. Or if your wife, by the time she asked you to leave and not come back, was so lost in her attempts to adjust her principles that she had banished all but a few tattered shreds of her original dignity and integrity. Or if by the time you left, she was left a bombed-out shell of her former self, unable to discern her own taste in throw rugs or to feel the warmth of a man’s mouth on her breast even as she looked down and saw it there.

Do not read this poem if you ever broke a poet’s heart, even if you believe you had no choice in the matter, even if it was fated to happen. Even if you loved her but didn’t know how, even if you hurt her but didn’t know how not to.