Rain Upon the Gossip Tree

The window frames the gossip tree tonight
Dark brick below
A clean gray blue above

It rained for over an hour
The air cooled
I thought of you
The birds sung
My room felt like a rain forest

The window frames two simple colors
Deep green
Gray blue
As if they were drawn in with marker

And I think of what I would say to you
I scratch my arm
There are many songs I could sing
Lullabyes and ballads
Sung a thousand times
They are so deep, like ruts
So easy to flow into
They tell a story you would like to be a part of

But I cannot imagine how I have come here
And that is what interests me
The question of being
How I came to be in this body
In this city

What of my past?
-1999
-the room I lived in during grad school
-the Pacific Ocean
in its particular composition
of molecules
and vectors
in February 2000.

Where are the hours I thought
I would be in so much trouble
If I didn't finish a paper, or read
Another chapter, or get to class on time

In what way have I escaped?
I look around me.
I am 29 years old, I live in Philadelphia. I work.

You are 42. You are getting divorced. There is
A house involved. I live in an apartment. You
Have a studio. We sketch on Thursday nights.

I am me. The me who slipped, who wanted to die.
I am me, whose skin burned with self-consciousness,
Who saw pathos in bracelets and ponytails, who
Couldn't befriend people she wanted to be.

I am her, but I am not her anymore. I am easy,
I make many words, and have a sure voice. I don't
Ask.

But I don't write my poems
Like I used to.
The need to confirm
That I had an interior.

My eyes had not adjusted to dreams or light,
Now, they suffuse all, and involve themselves in all.
I spare no personal expense
In entering. But I spend nothing I do not wish to spend.

And yet, and yet,
Who is this
With arms that wave
With fingers that fly
Who I will not be
In a moment
Or a day

Who is in this body
Who will remain in this body
But who will be left behind
In this Sunday evening, May 2007.

Write What You Know

When its windy, I see him. He is always already waiting, like these lines. Until my fingers touched the keys, the words were nowhere. Then suddenly, they were leaping out; impatient, ready. It is this way with things that I think and see. They are never there and always already there. When the conditions for appearance are right.

It's been a long time. You know. You could write for the rest of your life without a hitch, it doesn’t matter much what you write. If you are a writer, you write. When you stop writing, you call it writer's block but that ‘block’ is really the problem of thinking there being a specific product that has to come out of all of this. You’ve forgotten this is a process of discovery. You have forgotten of the Lords of Life. You are a petty shop clerk with no religion.

Some say "write three pages a day," some say "write one." The things is, if you are a writer, there is no such thing as a number of pages. There are only words and they will continue for the rest of your life. You will be putting down these words until there are no more. And when you realize that everything is words anyway, there will be no more writers block, there will be no more waiting, there will be no more doing everything instead of writing. There will be no more doubt about your talent or if you have stories to tell, because you realize ALL YOU HAVE ARE STORIES, but the hard part is getting at them- and this is only hard if you forget that the telling, itself, will figure its own tail out.

The beginning, the rambling, will conjure its own end. And really, there will never be an end to beginnings, middles, and ends, only spaces of time where you cut yourself off from a certain piece with one certain name and then continue it under a different name. These are the things I know, although I know nothing. These are the things I am saying now, though tomorrow must wind its own way through.

(photo courtesy of Victor Alvarez)

Prospectus

I believe I can feel this way for the rest of my life

I believe we are calibrated to follow mission

By witnessing our feelings and thoughts

And the patterns of our glory and struggle

And if it takes, in this life, in these first years of the

Third millennium

In a city in North America,

A broken heart

A dirtied will

Years of bad jobs

To force me to accept my bliss

And my passion

Which has been dancing

In front of my eyes my whole life

Then, I am grateful

That I find myself here

At 28, writing

As I always meant to be