Lullaby Languages

I know that you can hear the song

In the empty space at the end of a rustling newsprint page

Palmed from one arthritic hand to its partner

Glances and the introverted extraversion of a stifled chuckle

Breathing mystery into the blur passing us by

Those evenings when I am so unsure of whether the conductor’s voice conjures the particular station

Or if that certain space simply sings songs into our proximity.

Don’t hold it in, my love.

Look into my eyes hard

How we’ve always been too afraid to do, and know.

When the world breathes in the whole of humanity and exhales only melody,

I can hear it too.

This exhalation haunts so heavily

This tip-toed, starry-eyed sound silences long-hushed streets and fields

Contemplation bordering on insanity

Anchoring hands tattooed on tree bark, toes in streams, cicadas in ears

Moonlight combing through leaves

Conspiring with the breeze to whisper little shimmering loves from the slivered sky

Her messages carried by barn owls and the foreign midnight babble of water on stones

From my bedrock soul to Orion, down a staircase of stars, home to you.

Somehow we were both born speaking lullaby languages that no one else can hear.

The only secret is that there is one.

You’re searching too,

Let’s not wander alone.

Shadow Play

Breathe like the woods are watching

Tangling your exhalation with dawn drawn rose

Break my pulse over your knee

With wanted words on your tongue

While the crack of pine knots floods the Milky Way

Bury your gaze in daffodil flames

Finding symphony silence

In bright embers constellating

Do not be so afraid

The songs of the silence

Deafen only the dark

Hide & Seek

I need you to know that the thought of “you” makes me want to run barefoot through rainstorms

As if somehow the clouds might contain the condensation of your city

As if I could dance in the dewdrops evaporated from your sweating glass on a windowsill, wherever it is you are

I want you to know that at night I imagine I can count the street lamps from you, to me

I want to pluck them from the ground, one by one, like wildflowers, until I have a shimmering bouquet of softly petaled light

I want to hand them to you, become captured in the infinity of your irises, and say,

“I’m here now, love. It’s nice to meet you.”

Taps

This evening it poured

I had an umbrella in my handbag

I left it there

The dewy spiderwebs of my hair meeting rainwater, plastered on my rosy cheeks

You always said it worked at summer camp

When they’d throw water on your sleepy head

Dizzy

We stack humanity in little boxes

Miles high in whimsical warehouses we like to name after stolen things

People, places nobody remembers anymore



Cities are the loneliest lovers of all

Drawling avenues long enough to reach through steely glass

Yearn for times before humanity learned to live in midair

Learned to talk with their hands without touch. 



She knows all the ways home

And every avenue is a way home



If you make the right turn.

Pennies

I still collect pennies of you in mason jars
The lid laced tight so as not to allow any sunshine to escape
The whispers of wanderings
We once traveled through
I still send you light
I will search for you on train platforms
In each melody that spills from my mind
I dreamt you could hear me
When I whisper to the city lights with each exhalation of frosty breath
I felt you were real again.
Portraits of promises feigning flutters of hope
 
I have a collection of things that you love
Or loved
You say we’re strangers now, but if I close my eyes and hold real still
I can still feel the flutter of your heart under my palm, so innocent against your chiseled chest
Each beat filling the rhythm of the melody of saving you from yourself
Those sweet summer nights drawing dew
So at home in the drum of your pulse
The spine of Salinger turned over in our palms as you told me
That these stories changed your life
I read them cover to cover
Lingered in each word
For the mere fact that your eyes owned this prose
 
I read them cover to cover
To show you how your life changed my story
Your stories are still my favorites
The ones you told me in a hushed voice and those we told together, our hopes and hearts singing midnight hymns
I read them in the corners of my mind where my heart won't hear and allow abandoned hopes to wreak havoc
 
There are other stories
A box of photographs
A reel of black and white film
Lost laughter settling in the booming silence of my ear drums--
 
I miss you.
 
Do you remember that night we laid on the dock, counting shooting stars?
Twenty-two.
I counted twenty-two, my lucky number
I dreamt they could fall to kiss our foreheads and maybe give me reason to remember you loved me
No matter how far inside yourself you hid
I could still crawl through the crook of the old willow tree
Climb in and wrap myself up tight
It was the only way I would fit.
 
I miss you.
 
Sometimes I sit here and wait for you
Our old wooden foot bridge
Our peak of the mountain
Where you were Jack holding my arms outspread
And if you jumped I jumped too
 
I still collect pennies of you
When I find them upside-down, as I find they always are
I turn them over
So that perhaps when I walk by the next time
I can follow my Hansel and Gretel trail of lucky copper sunbeams
Know that even after all of our stories
Have realized they are that and nothing more,
You still send me light too