Archives of Tuesday Poem

There’s been a lot of talk about the balcony railing lately. Is it up to code? Does it have a soul? What secrets does it hold? Does it have reality? Does it have anyone to blame but itself? What are we to do with it? Why does it have to appear at all? Personally, I don’t really care. It’s not our balcony. But as an external feature of the building we are to share in its fate and responsibility. In philosophy, this is called the problem of identity over time, or the doctrine of preformation. You may remember the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Well, this has nothing to do with that. This is an HOA situation. I feel the slow crackle of metamorphism. This is called hydrothermal alternation. I feel the clutch of the sublime when I say this. There is a balcony in all of us that develops by rumination. It becomes lost in its arabesques. Though perhaps it may be more accurate to say that it comes to itself in its arabesques. It honors the élan of its own extravagance. This is what gives the balcony railing its humor of increasing subtlety, of understatement and overstatement, of empirical dance and dynastic abstractness. Whenever I’m feeling parenthetical it helps to think of something prominent and wet. I think of the balcony railing. Its lucidity and inertia. The convivial curves of its filigree. There’s a certain implication involved in making an appeal to the vitality of carrots. It is, after all, a balcony railing under discussion here and not a catwalk. If this were a catwalk rather than a railing, I might mention decimals, or pylons. There are intermediates in protein metabolism that will serve as motivational tinfoil. Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities, said Aristotle. But did Aristotle have a balcony? Did Aristotle cook hamburger on an open grill? Did Aristotle own a single spatula?  It is enough that the balcony railing strikes the eyes of the passerby with eloquence. Everything else is morality. No one knows what a belief is. No one knows what a truth is. We just go on pretending that the balcony railing has all the answers. And open our books and read.

Beth Garrison or more precisely Or Breathings, Bearing Short and Bartering Ohs. Sorting Rehab, Harbor Tinges, Brasher Ingot, Neighbor Rats, Herring Boast, Groin Breaths or Groin Bathers. Herb Organist, Barter Hosing, Gather Robins, Erasing Throb, Aborting Hers, Baring Others, Boring Hearts, Abhor Resting, Horniest Grab, and Bighorn Stare. Happy Birthday Bright Señora.

Record summer of fire

close to your home —

a trailer, parked at the confluence

of the Columbia River overflowing

with fish, and tinder dry

Methow Valley. Gone. The water tower,

school, and churches.

Your tortilla comal and family

pictures set in Michoacán, zircon

tiara from a glowing quinceañera,

torched. Smoked too, was your job

tending hilly orchards where apples

caramelized on the branch. Fire left you

stranded like the bear cub

whose mother couldn’t outrun

the flames. Afterwards, no one ate 

the charred cows branded

and fenced in pasture, who were bred

not to flee, as you did, arriving

years ago with a few pesos, holding

tears on your tongue, and a blazing

hope — you might have been

the man standing, garden hose in hand,

spraying down his roof, green lawn

of dreams, untouched.
A previous version of this poem appeared under the title "Smoking" on the Washington State Poet Laureate site.

My diaphragm left behind

A mind works funny when it comes to sex

important things crash

A fire wound takes everything away

Random acts of nature relentless

Internalized violence a fog
I killed the frog for science

What we love we destroy

Yesterday I was a sex machine

My warrior searching a way to spark

Internet recessions scare me
I wanted to sleep with him

but my diaphragm was lost

His talking politics turned me off

What fool runs a train so fast?

Dying we land in the book of the dead

Damage occurs when you play the target
If only sex solved problems

We are soon to topple

Did I mention violation?

Law of the strong versus the weak

Mandatory sex is one way to subjugate
Someone was fucking in the warehouse

tools got slimmed, a rack fell over

solid groundwork was laid

A multitude of actions equals no progress

My ass plays tricks on your brain

There is no time for sex unless forced
Did you call the powers into a meeting?

The landlord too busy to attend

The accountant buried in his books

The secretary took notes even though no one showed

The notes were scant
People who don’t vote are like pigeons

dead on the side of the road

Evil an often-traveled trail

Anger stores up in cellular tissue

No heart can stand a broken back

We must learn to ignore much of everything
Survival, a game we lose

No jackpot named freedom

When did Clockwork Orange become fun?

A thrill a minute means alive

An exchange of body secretions

From the other-sided, alee the valley; to give what you want —

says the mentor, irreparably. As pretense gets wrecked like a

photograph. As we haunt eternally.
It's hard to tell.

Do we?
Cold guy drifts in cold veins, this nightly swim.

So I overheard in LA, grab a shovel, LA is dead.

Nothing is Real. Lame, 
I know. Ask if there's proof.

Of life, if not for death's warming the carpet living room.
I'm officially bored with weed,

as if a backpack with nothing in it. As if I hope the world is done

sleeping in synchronicities. 
Are there heavenly capillaries networking? Blacked-out to neon.

Who is recording

our untitled hallucinations: washed up on the amethystine sea he plunged,
and what of the notes nailed to the roof with a gun? Days of

noise funneling into the hollows

of my hips. A lot of beating hearts out there. As they say, imitation

is suicide, you lowlife.

I’m an insomniac, it’s a lifelong thing. And lesbian. I’m sick when I say this, a little envious of a body that can fit through anything, a lifelong thing, steady hands but a little shaky otherwise, getting hurt in everyday ways, we joke about it, I’m sensitive. Growing up together it’s years of tangled up arms or conversations and no one touches me as an on my own grown-up but for hugs and comings and goings or across my hair when I’ve just cut it, I’ve grown all arms and head. I say to students in art class, do I look like an octopus? And when did we all know I’m gonna know you forever, and the times we were wrong and the wet weather of being teenagers or losing touch, moving back, it felt like we were fully formed forever ago sweetie. We kept returning to the ocean with varying levels of expertise.

There’s a girl freshman year I still wonder about you, I don’t want to seem vulnerable, said something about misdirecting and hiding. Her cracking, daily voice. You share so many things I’d like to think your openness hides something else you won’t tell me. I’m flooded with sudden possibilities that are in the past. I say who knows, I don’t know. Remembering her like when I finally found an octopus below me but you turn to tell your sister bobbing next to you and looking back I can’t.



I don’t know what I’m looking at and I’ll know it when I see it, I’ve known you guys forever. In my marriage I had no friends there but nowhere to be solitary, you have to share everything, it was in a roughed up old country that knew everyone else better. We had a stuffed animal octopus from some country’s aquarium in our bedroom, it could have been Australia or mine from home or some trip, as a married grown-up what do you do with stuffed animals when you want them, because IT’S AN OCTOPUS, but it’s not for anything. In the divorce, apparently I got the stingray. It’s on a bookshelf now, or maybe never see you again, ever.

After divorce I kept finding myself ranting laps in the pool, back in my own country, foreign again differently now. Could no longer say my wife to uncamouflage myself in the straight world. I’m back with my childhood friends, grown-up together who all live there now they have husbands. The other night we were laughing about the little mermaid. There’s something else.



In England, Ursula was a real name, a friend, friendly, I met her at the lesbian Uni group. Then I got married and she was my wife’s old friend and first girlfriend, my friend their friend Emily’s first girlfriend too, they had such history I just dropped into it, no one was ever solitary, we would laugh about the history all the time or just forget it. I realize later she’s a widow with children. At the pool, there were paintings on the wall that recently disappeared and reappeared more colorful, dolphins sprouting with enthusiasm out of coral and sponges but the octopus picture never came back. I never say the plural, I don’t want to look foolish unless I know you know I saw it coming and know what happened and I’m ok with it, and breezy. I don’t know if you see this in me and there’s no point in hiding. I know it wasn’t realistic but it was my favorite, a group of them orange and floating blithely in the open blue chlorinated wall.
 



I also worked briefly at a rare bookstore in Cambridge for a woman, forget about it, her own kind of cartoon Ursula, brutal in an impotent small way, learned to describe what kinds of books as octavo to please her but she never explained what it meant, the work ended, it’s hard to think about when I needed her job so badly. It turns out I have a few good friends back here to rush around me. I’m the only one on my own but they are here for weeks and years. This time last year I told you I was coming here and so delighted, what I learned about cuttlefish as well, my grandma just died and the weekend had to let go of everything, rush to family for something huge and unspecified, but I came out on Monday as promised. You asked about donations to remember her. The death lurking in each funny moment, and I picked up some stickers for you, and I remembered intriguing facts for you, and I also have to be reminded about the facts. The last time snorkeling was your fairy tale wedding at the beach. I had food poisoning and thought I was dying like a small child on Friday nights when your parents got divorced. I’d still go back, it was beautiful.



Now we’re all back here I think in the fairy tale version, I’d be Ursula. It’s my body, I’m a nice person. I don’t want to hurt anyone, on the phone I don’t ever say it, I just listen and laugh let her feel we could be close because she won’t notice that we’re not, why uncover myself again. I have no evil plot but I’m not the other characters. You’d be Ursula because when I came back here for visits you suddenly grew up without me, as a grown up you wear dramatic red lipstick sometimes and it surprised me then but now I live here and it’s you of course, normal and glamorous. You’d be Ursula because of the greyish purple color I see when I think of you sometimes, and weekends together, and because of your octopus shirt that I love, and you’d be Ursula a casually flamboyant performer, and wicked sense of humor anyway and we were talking about it to begin with. At the end, I realize I’m Ursula because the sound of my other dead grandmother, I felt like she was family. When I’m sick I wonder if I sound like her. Her deep mysteriously broken voice, so ordinary to me but shocking to my wife then over the phone, no future partner will know it now just throwaway moments. Thought it was a grandfather, but only her normal everyday voice like a million ordinary things breaking and settling.

I use a trick to teach students

how to avoid passive voice.
Circle the verbs.

Imagine inserting “by zombies”

after each one.
Have the words been claimed

by the flesh-hungry undead?

If so, passive voice.
I wonder if these

sixth graders will recollect,

on summer vacation,

as they stretch their legs

on the way home

from Yellowstone or Yosemite

and the byway’s historical marker

beckons them to the

site of an Indian village —
Where trouble was brewing.

Where, after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter.

Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred.

Where most were women and children.
Riveted bramble of passive verbs

etched in wood —

stripped hands

breaking up from the dry ground

to pinch the meat

of their young red tongues.

There’s this vessel I feel

the presence of all the time. My sister-

in-law sprays a semi-precious wash

of silver beneath her tongue

which is one way to manage. For my own

part I envy the wooden pencils

shot through with graphite, deveining

themselves to the end of every line.

But for the stenographers

everyone do your own typing

seemed a sensible and leveling measure.

They still have their secret alphabet

and their flip-top pads so suited

to it. They took dictation

the way young Mother Theresa

heard God talking plain as a neighbor

yelling through the screen door

that the dog has got out of the yard again

but after starting that new order

and dressing all the sisters in white

cotton ribbed in periwinkle she didn’t hear Him

ever again. It’s not that Wisconsin

is newly rich in silica, which is another

word for quartz, which is another

word for sand, but suddenly industry

can’t get enough of its impressive

compressible strength and tiny

roundedness, which is another word
 
for I am found pleasing again. I will pour

most of the glasses of water I will ever

drink. I don’t mean loneliness. I could

impersonate your heart by tapping

on this wiped Formica lub dub

until you consent to tomorrow’s

urgent appointment but I hope

it doesn’t come to that. I think

of my prototype — the prototype

of me — gangling on

a ledge: the wire limbs

taped to the short cage

of torso were engineered for maximum

slouching, but, too, you could drop her

from the high roof

as much as you want. That egg

would never crack. 

We’re on a roof taking in the view. You

throw something over the edge. You don’t know

how to count into a million pieces. You don’t

know that gone is defined by what you still have

to live with. You want to see where it went

and it’s my job to tell you these things

so I show you, my shoulders and hands tightening

as I bend us into that irrevocable space.

You reach your hands out, straining

against my hold. In this moment I’m capable

of anything, which reminds me of yesterday,

the cup of tea I held steady as I tiptoed

toward my chair. The few drops escaping anyway

onto my skin. My hand opening. I remember

the cup breaking, how it woke you

from your nap, how my quiet was gone

even before it began. And now we’re here,

both looking down, and I’m that capable of anything.

On the plane I whisper the travel prayer more softly

I mouth the words but keep the breath carefully

concealed in my throat, worried I don’t have a permit

for these verses in international airspace.
The prayer is filled with soft sounds

Ash-ha-du a tender hush, unlike

the sharp hiss of testify. And the mess

of vowels    la ilaa ha illaa    wants breath

it is difficult to keep this all inside.

It is difficult to pray, and even more

difficult to marvel or to rage.
Allah was my go-to word

for all the moments of the day

the wonders

as in

(close your eyes and savor here)

Allaaaaah    can you believe the fragrance of this gardenia?

the colors of this sunset? How is it your lips

are still as sweet as the first time?
and the transgressions

as in

(clench your fists and tremble here)

Allahu akbar!

Please help me survive this

Please help me believe this will end

Please help me trust there is some power

greater than all this suffering.

I have this notion that if you live long enough,

there are three or four great stories that you will have in your life. 
A story of a journey or a transformation.

A story of love, which will likely mean the loss of love, a story 
of loss. And a story of spiritual illumination,

which, for many, will probably be the moment of death itself, 
the story untellable, its beginning and middle

and end collapsing with its teller into a disappearing conclusion.
I have believed long enough in my notion

to know that it is a romantic notion, that it erodes each time
I realize that the shard and not the whole

comprises a life, the image and not the narrative. Otherwise,
there’s no reason why all I remember of the airplane

I took as a child from one country to another
is the moist towelette packet we were given with our meal,

the wonder and absurdity of it. Or that, in love, 
high in a tree in the dark, and high, he and I sat in the rain-damp

branches and ate 7-11 donuts. Or this, this piece 
of a story that isn’t even mine, that isn’t even a story

but a glance of an experience, of the friend who held the stray
dog after it was struck by a car. Not knowing whether the dog

was dead, my friend called a friend 
who worked for a vet. Poke the dog in the eye, this friend said.

Because if the animal no longer has a blink reflex, 
it probably means the animal is dead. Decades after

college, when you could do such a thing, I typed his name
into a search engine to find out what became of the 20-year-old

boy from the tree. Like dozens of old keys
in a drawer, so many of the wrong people with the right name.

The child dead from leukemia, with a school gym
named for him. The wrestler who had a perfectly square jaw,

like a cartoon police detective in a fedora.
When I arrived at a page that was certainly

about him, I no longer knew the face but I recognized the life
that he had had. He had transferred to

another college, gone to film school, and become a producer
of TV documentaries. A film about fishermen, the harsh fishing

season in Alaska. A film about Abraham Lincoln
and a film about the last days of Adolf Hitler.

A film about the Sherpas who go up and down the Himalayas.

Bruise: A Study
I.

The bruise begs

in purple tones

for you to think

with your tongue,

for you to listen

with your hands

to the tremulous

voice of my skin.
II.

I:
 

pressed it into my skin, ran into the corner of the counter on my way to make dinner, opened a door in to my shin, let you too close, slammed my finger in the car door, dropped a book on my toe, pushed the baby on the swing and didn’t watch her swing back, had surgery, pinched myself over and over like a pulse, slammed my head against a wall, ignored the warning signs, fell down stairs, fell into you, fell away from you when you pushed, found myself under something heavy.

III.

Run your fingers along it. Here.

Feel the heat radiating?

One way to say it is:

I want my pain to warm you.

Which is close to:

I want my pain to warn you.

The fist-sized knot of color

throbs with my heartbeat

if I lie very still and don’t breathe.

I wonder if I might read bruises

like wood-grain or tea leaves.

I wonder if I would believe it.
IV.

Don’t view it from the corner of your eye. Look at it straight on. Not through glass or in reflection, but eye to blue-blushed and broken skin with only air between. Not with the intention of recording in paint or word, but only to see the way it fades in the direction blood flows. Watch the edgesshiftas healing requires. It won’t be the same again. No matter how well it heals.

V.

Like nausea it recedes

into green and yellow,

hints of death and then

renewal. But this isn’t

resurrection.

This isn’t a miracle.This isn’t a returning to.
It is something changed.

Something marked by pain.

This flesh regains the ability

to blush and pale and blush again —

but the nerves and muscle know

what has been.
VI.

The wound heals before the colors fade,

the body wants you to remember its work:

hemoglobin produces a red-blue color,

the wine spilled across the carpet;

biliverdin pushes green to the surface,

too easy to say the hint of spring (instead: bile);

bilirubin brings

the color and cry of jaundiced babies;

hemosiderin with its golden-brown,

barely distinguishable now from flesh,

except in the right light

where the shadows fall like memories.

Once upon a time a man took me to dinner, asked

if I’d been abused as a child, like that would explain it.

Sure. I keep a cabinet of curiosities —

but that was never one of them. See the dust?

Things we’re too old for slip off shelves,

line up to watch. In direct sunlight they’re small,

made of ash, disintegrating like abrupt love.

To recall a memory weakens it,

which means what exactly? Between what I want

and what I want to be, I get a little lost.

Blame the dinners where my glass fills again and again

before it’s ever emptied. Trauma and der Traum

aren’t etymologically related, which makes sense

but also not.

What I brew in me

your tongue no longer tastes. 
Do you believe passion

or security 
ruins the palette?

We once boiled red 
like the most glorious
 
emergency
and at the worst times.

Sip me 
before I’m lukewarm,

before the whistle of regret 
keeps us awake.

Dear love, last night 
I walked in the rain

dressed only in a bathrobe. I bought 
a little kettle on sale

and am convinced our lives
will be better now.

I am not sad 
when I say this. I am not quite

unsad either. 
If there is one thing to be said

about marriage or monogamy 
there is another thing entirely

to be undone. Clean or dirty 
is how I divide the day.

After you leave 
or before you come home.

The more I smell 
of cleaning products

the messier it means I am. 
The toilet, the kitchen sink,

every closet–this house 
is yours to pollute.

I’ve been alone 
in it

for many, many hours. 
Look around.

There’s no trace of me. 
It’s as if

I don’t even exist. 

fare well, feels. be gone

sacred geometry from

lover’s muscled tongue.

octogonal taste

buds — honey whispers hiding

larvae, bee stings, wax. 
freeze this full chalice

cocktail of liquid lapis —

high tide in the cup.

Its wings don’t ground into dust, nor do they signal

another ending. That is up to us, our rippled fingertips
smoothing the brown contours that flutter away

from our wish. The wings’ scales are tiny windows,
cathedrals of solar dust sealed into letters

that contain all of our questions: why are we here?
where do we go when we die? are we really so alone?

The moth collides endlessly with the moon, we see
its celestial weaving with immeasurable fragility,

and we feel night exposed for the first time again:
chafing pine needles erasing all we thought we knew 

of this life, the owl screeching the universe’s original
vowel. When the earth is no longer ours the letters

will slide open easily as a palm cupping water
or a moth revolving around a porch light pouring

fine dust into a thirsty mouth that calls everything loss.

It wasn’t that she wanted to be pretty.

She wanted the world to see her

as she saw herself.
She wanted to see herself.
That’s what my daughter tells me.
I watch her, high up on these rocks,

her arm extended in a welcoming gesture —

she invites the world in.
I hold my phone arm up

an echo of her greeting
and am horrified to see my face —

some jackass left the camera flipped

to stare back at the operator
and now I am confronted

with my judgmental chins

and slack mouth. What 
was I thinking about to make

such a grim expression?
I wanted to justify her figure

in this landscape. I wanted her

safe. My calcifying ideas
clamp around her, like the tower

Rapunzel’s furious witch-mother

locked her in. This fortress
I built with my own brain bowl,

bars grown from bone, I have stuck her

inside a snow dome, little white slips
flutter, so pretty; all the pages of magazines

telling girls how to be and the flicker

of grades and other ratings, ticker-tape
of male gaze and every comment

about her body — how tall, how blue, how boobs

and butt, how short the skirt —
why all this feedback about her appearance?

Who asked you?

And why mock her
when she draws her own door

and walks through it?

A winner, a swinger, a ringer.

A looker, a loser, an up-on-his-lucker.

Someone looser, someone tighter,

definitely not an all-nighter. A whiner,

wine-swiller, someone to entertain

the fundraiser chicken dinner.

Someone with handlers, another with baggage,

one with the umbrellas, another with the rain.

Different faces, symmetrical and un-.

A smoker, a non-, a joker, a song.

Two lungs, a heart, a head, a leg, a leg.

The drink, the dregs. The beggar, the begged.

Definitely an all-nighter, all-dayer, a swayer

of opinions, a bringer down of hammers.

An issuer of kiboshes, a knitter of knishes,

a whetter of knives, a weather of whether

or nots. A forget-me-not, a violet,

a violin, a cowbell. Someone old,

someone new, someone borrowed,

someone blue. Someone happy,

someone researching happiness,

someone who was happy once.

Someone false. Someone true.

A failure, a failure

who has found success

from failure, a feeler,

a feeling, the flu.

Sugar, salt, and acid.

Lake Crescent, Lake Angry, Lake Placid.

A shouter, a touter, an outer.

An innie, a sharpie, a shark.

What you want. Who you want.

Who wants you. The ditty,

the lark, the dark. 

I’ve memorized the dark of my room now,

the path between the door and the bed posts

that lash out and mark my pale shins,

memorized the width of the rivulet I make

between our two sleep bodies by rolling

just slightly away.

He told me his kink was “morning sex.”

Indeed, I feel extra naughty

at approximately 6:36 a.m.,

get off on licking the sleep

from your eyes. I reach my peak

when over pancakes I get a glimpse of the deflated

anniversary balloon in the diner shellacked

to the curtains and hanging sad.

In my dream last night I lived with my parents

and we were skipping town. Their faces a

mishmash blur, they told me I’d have my own

room; a window seat, a walk-in closet.

We arrived in the evening. My dream self

paced through the room, which became a set of

stairs, which became a zigzagging blue

slide into a dirt hole. No the slide is

a yellow water slide in Texas and cherry blood

spills from my toe. No my toe is my future

child’s toe that I bandage. No my child

is a portable first-aid kit no my child

is a pixelated projection on a weird white wall

no I will not just spend my life as

the tender of this tin of bandaids!

You shouldn’t end anything

with your character waking from a dream.

But I can’t get out of this room

without at least one eye cracked.

Taking my knife to the sharpener
I had to ask my brother
how do I take a knife
to the sharpener
one chance not to ruin
the flesh of this tuna I wanted
to separate the head
and dissolve the eye into
powder on my tongue I said
something about a fire worried
about dying in a fire in this club
with these people she said
“Where I come from that isn’t funny”
meaning Rhode Island
but we were in a rented house
on the Oregon Coast 
my teeth coated in the dark
with anti-fungal ointment
the label warned CALL
POISON CONTROL and I
did I was redirected
to the nearest call center
the operator asked
where I was in Maine
outside the Pacific recycled
its emergency she said
“Be calm, hon, you’re not
even the first one today
if you die today
it won’t be from this”
was her promise
breaking over a marsh
where cranes showed off
standing on one leg to touch
their toes or talons or whatever
a man walked by reeking
of gasoline and as he passed
the gasoline stayed
a woman stepped backwards
from her porch seeking
a stable place to lean the ladder
she climbed swinging
one leg over the gutter
to disappear
think of it this way:
throughout history the horse
has been an emblem of speed
even on occasion an emblem
of flight and to travel
with any quickness at all
meant trust in an animal
velocity which always arrives
with its cousin
a vision of sudden death
though when it comes to that
all anyone will talk about is the bees.

An earlier, excerpted version of this poem appeared in Big Big Wednesday.