When the sun comes...

...and hangs around a while, then I will be happy. Oh February, what a tease you are.

I am steadily revising what feels like everything I have ever written, so there is not much new to give you. Here's a first draft that I keep meaning to chop up and make better, but you can have it raw:

Some Elegy

You stand separate from the crowd,

and still I cannot find you

in this place packed tight with bodies—

I never asked to breathe these smells.

So you find me, and weave,

more feline than thread,

through the rest.

At your approach, my first thought:

Who wants a woman with stick legs and a round face?

We were beautiful children,

we moved in light, in circles,

embraced the awkward and the lithe;

we smelled of snow.

Here you hold yourself so still,

not statue-still, not stone.

Yours is the stillness of bones

that have given up on flesh.

You used to refuse all skirts,

borrowed blue jeans from your brothers.

I remember you rosy and dirt-faced,

your weak spots so well-hidden

I believed you had none.

You have embellished yourself with shadows: 

long hair that hangs down,

kohl, the illusion of cheekbones,

clavicle and wingbones

more prominent than what they hold.

I don’t believe now that you ever were a girl.

But I like to imagine you on a bicycle,

or putting in order feathers, small stones and shells.

Determination would suit you better than pallor

if you still possessed a will.

With those hands,

the gardens you could plant!

This wan waifishness

disturbs my sense of you

who used to be a finer creature: 

glossy, wellfed, wily and soft.

The way you slipped between trees,

evaded every thorn and wayward root—

you had talent then, native and untamed. 

You are smug and fragrant now

in the most mundane of ways:

talcum powder and rotting fruit.

I would like to see you with apple in your mouth,

red skin like blood on snow.

I have no hope that you will ever taste

the world’s blood now, that dulcet mineral.

You do not give.

You are not strong.

Every promise spoken comes to you in foreign tongue.

I think you used to sing.

Nothing I give you can draw your eye

or breach your skin, all pale fickle flash,

one long impenetrable grin.

I have for you no name.

You crave color for your hair eyes lips and fingertips.

You have no color of your own.

A collector of longings,

No pulse ever stirs your surfaces.

You stretch like a cat, and yawn.

No different, you say, than any other.

But you hide your sorrow better,

dress your sickness warm and rough and well.

You could get away with a corset or a veil.

Rhetoric and rules, historical traces do not apply to you.

I used to think of oceans when I watched you,

of riverbanks overrun.

You stretch the limits of proper, of beautiful:

nothing normal about the ability to appear so ill

and so at ease in these skins that suit no one—

the way you shrink yourself, then swell.

Remember, there was wholeness in your every gesture;

your vocabulary was your limbs.

Your body a tool you are learning to use

with the coldest precision,

a locked box you’re learning to pick.

I hope you don’t give yourself.

I hope you don’t freeze.

I hope I forget you.

I hope that you don’t.

I cannot care any longer

for your words, for your limbs.

Don’t put stones in your pockets.

I taught you to swim.

Another month slips by.

This one full of snow... drifts up over my head!

Here's something:
 
 

A Reminder

You were busy making masks

for no body in particular to wear

and the walls were staring at you,

all unblinking fixtures, while I

contemplated how to change my hair,

change it like so many clothes.

(I don’t like being a girl like this;

it happens only when I am bored.)

I was wearing a shirt of yours,

flannel and down to my knees.

The stove glowed with persistence

and for once we were warm together—

as if breaking a promise

we embraced the comfort of fire,

watched it leap and gambol

as if another living creature

we have taken on, taken in,

though really, it possesses us,

like your many faces possess you

and create you. What it means

to be what are widely called artists:

We belong to each other

only briefly and breathlessly:

The erasure of solitude surprises us.

Cheeks flushed, we tend one another

like fires, eyes drawn inexorably

toward the other’s movements,

the flickers and signals

speaking those most intimate of truths,

indecipherable to those who would look on. 

Your masks are more transparent,

their rage, delight, surprise more pure

than day-to-day shadows

cast by day-to-day flames,

more pure than my words—

forever circling all that you capture so quick. 

Who lives deeper in the heart of the real?

And why must I keep asking?

Comparisons strip away the meat,

suck out the marrow and leave us

like paper, flat, dried, and partial,

awaiting the fire—our only hope

of completion is in the ashes, the dust,

the return to the unshifting forms.

I hope to speak less, but hope

wastes the heart, makes it brittle

and bitter, a shell of itself,

with no core. Breath comes in sighs,

sings its frustration with words

that will never speak true.

You go on tracing and trimming,

you embrace approximation,

while I add layer upon layer

and line upon line, feeling some

shiver of need to brace myself,

to insulate. Watching you,

I feel my own art stifle and pale,

I feel it move farther and farther away.

If I could be more fleeting,

relearn the brief and breathless,

quit drifting into theory, into form—

My body might know, if I let it,

how to be, how to set itself warm.