Love Poem to Hannah

Pie and your countenance on my birthday, your hand slightly bristling

from the contrast of cold inside the bathroom against the heat of your body temperature

after sitting next to an open oven for so long, listening

to the flames wrought and cinder and caress and singe and melt.

It is almost glistening to think of how you will look at me

after I take one bite, after I will taste the apple that you’ve baked for me

inside a crust so luscious with butter my stomach ache will sing gravely and loudly

of the benefits and drawbacks of sugar--it will be glorious: you

will be glorious. You with your simple hair that leans back and forth

when you tilt your head forward and back, kissing me with

the eyes of your tongue, that bright red lipstick I love,

you are my birthday present. The crescent of your laugh, the chatter you bring

to the table and the bedroom, a sudden and gentle touch

on my shoulder that bewilders then calms then huddles everything close.

Do you bring this much into the world as you give? Bake crusts

that envelope an apple like organ music? The hair on your sweater twists

and falls onto the carpet every single day. I’ve seen pieces of it twirl,

curls of butter on a hot pan called air. What other pieces of you can I steal for myself tomorrow?

Similes

Grief like cloves mistaken for honey, like a

ship inside of a bottle, like bottled molasses,

like the sudden sharp knife of February,

like December, like March in mud season, like seasons

like the rapid vaporization of liquid iron

that seeps into the vein that marches on like militaries,

like militaries, like edges of quilts that

stack upon the smallness of the body of you,

like a million and one bricks smoldered onto one shoulder,

like one shoulder, like one initial tatooed

onto your eye, like an eye, like the iris that quivers

like cadavers when the morgue shakes with rage,

like the numbers of millions that moan

into the mouth of slavery, like mouths, like the mouths of babes,

like the equivocation in the voice

when language is underdeveloped, like unfathomable

illnesses that scratch at the belly

at the rocks that empty out onto the toes

like broken windows, broken books, broken doorbells

unanswered mail, cacophonies that

do not dispel the sadness, the road that elegies walk on,

the yellow and dusty dirt that etches

an ink mark down the troughs of muscles

on the bodies of crying mothers, like blue and blackness,

like the emptying out of rivers, like the movement

of time on the body, like grown arms

and legs and lips and speech, like a pencil

or bell that both echo like footsteps.

In the ecology of personal suffering, the world

passes by like a bi-plane, turns and gyrates and gives and gives,

thirsty like a philanthropist for its giving.

There is love and there is the hand that trembles like piano wire when the hammer strikes it, there is memory faded and there is memory that is a permanency, grafted onto the skin, a kindness like a beautiful body. Once I woke

and thought you had gained your body,

but if that were true, your hands would not be whispers

nor your whispers and smile drips of water on the edges of my eye.

This grief like a cushion I rest on, like a bread I dig into when I am thirsty,

edges away, returns and leaves.

There is no distinct reason why a memory is like a caged crocodile,

but there it is: silent, motionless, mouth

agape, breathing.

Today the world is bright,

is drier than most other days: it is fifty degrees

in February, almost fourty eight in the shade--

the cool breath of the wind

so thoughtful on most days in springtime

whispers in haiku syllables

five, then seven, then five accounts of how

global warming will not end, that we will suffer,

and the glaciers will melt

and I will die and everyone will die

but we will be warm, and our shoes will sink

into the loving earth that cushions us,

cradles our bodies as we lie onto it,

breathing in the breath of eternal summer

and honeysuckles and disappearing bees

and bears kept in museums and poetry

kept in museums, locked in glass cases like

so much fruit in the grocery stores

and the grocery stores filled with bright, beautiful

yellows, pinks, purples and oranges,
vegetables and leaves will forever be green

and green will be the flag because there will

be no nations, there will only be earth

and water and the few people

who populate this world,

as we dangle our shoes over the edge

trying to remember what winter

used to mean when it took us over in February.