Terminal

The airport is brand new, shiny like a penny with big windows and high ceilings. Everything changes, grows, moves with the generations. You know the mountains outside the glass like the skin on your lovers neck but these gates are unknown. A mosquito gets trapped near your seat and you wonder what it’s like to emigrate against your will. My bag is full of bubble wrapped heirlooms, 200 years of building lives. On the back porch last night I sat staring at the stars and thought 200 years is nothing to them and I wondered if that was sad or a relief. Edward abbey sits in the south Utah desert and eons go by under his fingertips, perhaps there are others like you out there. 

I was always slow, about all of it. But I think perhaps I wasn’t 

always

wrong. 

Suite 102

Thursday afternoons in another desert valley,
how time moves differently
in the country
in old age, how
We count our days but not so much our hourly rates
here
I stared at the mountainside for an hour and forgot a millennium,
The mountain scoffs at your wrist watch,  
Rolls its eyes at your deadlined ulcers, it
has lived here longer than your people knew their name, will
erupt and erode long after your bones have crumbled in the
desert sand,
We
sat across from a surgeon who said all will be well
In the end it’s just
We’re not at the end yet so
I need you to put your watch away a little longer
and let the mountain crumble
Because it will

But all things survive
by falling.

In Bloom

The lilacs tumble and grow in every garden, the desert valley awash with sweet scents. On the field outside my window, the season's new calves stumble around in the cold morning. It will be hot soon enough, May in the mountains feels like a deep breath of air, a calm before the storm. He sends pictures from the south and we compare skies: so wide out here, so tinged with the humanity that lies beneath hem. In New York, the swelter has begun. 

I sat under the full moon last night, speaking into the stars and wondering that I had so little for which to ask. My mother paces around the questions that surround her, speaking with her chickens and forgetting the routine for planting her sprouts. Life is long and short all at once, you cannot grasp it as it trickles through your fingers, I grew up in the woods very far from here and I don't know how I made it all make sense. My father tells stories of our ancestors, how they, too, traveled to the edges of their universe, how they, too, made ends meet only as a means to afford their creative endeavors how they, too, burned for something they could never reach but couldn't help trying. 

In the early mornings I sit on the cold stone on the back porch, focus on the things I can count: breaths of lilac, turns of the hawk across the field, mountain peaks with snow still on them. Ten years from now this valley will be unrecogizable. 

Ten years from now, will not you, too?

De:Part

The old routines are rusty, lie unused in unopened moving boxes at the back of the closet, ask themselves of future purpose. I stress clean the apartment looking for them, scrubbing tiles and arranging piles of paper, while the clock spins itself into a tissy. I have forgotten how to do this. Come morning, there is a bag by the door but I don't know what is inside it. Come morning, there is a ticket with my name on it, there is a flight ready to carry me across the country, you know the weave of this terminal like a dear friend but approach it instead like an old lover where you've forgotten why you loved them. 

I have forgotten why I loved you. 

The year has been cruel, and long, and lonely. But it has not been a year without joy. Has not been a year without magic. I found a tails-up penny at the security checkpoint and turned it up for someone who might need the luck, but did I not find a heads-up penny in a seat at the gate, left by someone who thought I might the luck myself? The Universe winks at us even when we forget to request it. 

The Universe remembers
for you.

Depart

I say, it isn’t lack of want, it’s lack of can, and he sinks into the corners, retreats with icy fingertips while you try to negotiate a trip after so many months without. There should be joy in travel but this time you feel mostly weight. His silence is deafening, speaks volumes. You clean the kitchen before you go, pour baking soda down the drain. The temperatures are going to hit swelter while you’re away. You water the plants. 

Men fail us in all their shortcomings, their unwillingness to step up when the season calls for it, but we carry on, meeting more of them and turning them over in our palms. Will this be the one polished gem I retain in an ocean of sea glass? 

My backpack is light. This journey has seen us before. Everything is different. 

This is the only constant. 

in the Sky

A tree grows on the windowsill across the street, impossible on a narrow ledge, stretching green paintbrushes toward the sky. Grow where you are planted, literally. We drove north in the early morning, unfamiliar fingertips hugging the curves of the parkway, curves of the nape of your neck, unfamiliar in this neck of the woods, would you like to know what it all looks like in the morning, in the fall, in the future? 

I came home drunk last night, weaving a rickety bicycle down sleeping St. Mark's and discovering an armchair on the curb, dragging it up four flights of stairs and trying not to wake the neighbors. They say New York took a beating, but I don't know. I have long conversations with strangers in the street, I find little winks from the city in unknown corners, in the morning I wake to birdsong and the super's brother wants to marry me, it's not New York if you didn't fight for it in one way or another. A woman rear ends my car while we are both looking for parking. My cheeks are flushed with sunshine. 

The time has come to make good on our promises. 

What will you let bleed out,
what will your heart let be
known?

Vernon Jackson

By the time you get to the subway stop, the red tape swerves around the bannister. You will not be getting back to the island. Trip across Queens streets in silence, count minutes till alarm clocks and demands on your awareness. I only ever wanted to be free. 

We sit at the other edge of the river, watch deep summer sun set behind Manhattan, I know this view from another life, the sting is only dull now, I turn it over in curiosity. Nothing bad doesn’t also bring something good with it, we say in my mother tongue, my native language I am a hundred poems in one, how much should we afford each other our shortcomings. I reach another subway stop, find another connection, feel the pressure of a midtown tunnel and long to reach Manhattan soil. 

It was all built on garbage but at least it is ours. 

Change trains in midtown, in the back of your mind something feels familiar. Doesn't the same go for anything these days, like you know you’ve gone through these motions before, know you’ve built smiles and exasperated hearts, know you’ve seen the New York night undulate underneath trembling fingertips, but it’s been so long and you don’t know if you trust it anymore.  

New York, my darling how we longed for you, how we ached and waited and burned when there was nothing else to do but fear, how we stuck it out. My head races in poetry on quiet Long Island city streets, it cannot be helped, I no longer want to help it. There was a time I thought the answers lay in watching that sunset with another pair of eyes seeing the same but I know now, New York, the other pair of eyes is just my own, mirrored, is just the magic of coming back full circle for round two. I told you I’d risk these streets to memories, and the time has come to make good on my promises. 

I empty my coffers for you, New York. 

It isn’t much, but oh, what it aspires to