doorwaydance

'move to keep things whole'

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Greenhouse Effect

Forget all that you knew about warming. A red cardinal turning grey of a glass heart.   All you didn’t know of dancing on the moon. Zooming in on a tree and opening to it. Red wood. Red bird.   Pine roasted, you were grilling over an open flame. You were swimming above a blue lake. You were asking a friend what color of green her day was.   Forget all that I didn’t know of the patterns of stems, that calling names is just another way of claiming the weight   of you, which is to say when I learn your first word — light — I unlove and love you right then, just to feel it full again – this bird song, this green house, this lemon pith of warmth. Our own floating city.   Forget what month we devoured with citrus, that fog can fill us too. That in sleep, our bodies are just white tissue contained within flutes of streetlight.   Forget the rules of gravity. Forget locking the door.   This home is my home and yours. We wake to burnt blood oranges, coffee humming, un-shelling ourselves — the new sun resting her lungs on a deck of a hill house.   The moon caked in lemon peels, hollowed cavities where we creviced into sleep, inlets where we danced fog-bent and silly, made rainfall, showered below open pines, gathered moonshells, seas, patterned our breath, tangling, untangling and tangling again into the glass nest we call this warming, you call this shade of sage, this waxing love year, this unfastening of name song. Nick, I say, it’s always warm again.  

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because the sun

is assembling in the sky like a golden blue plum so big all the slices made entire people pull over cut engines stand in the streets like they could swallow it whole   these moments feel like bending over self forehead to ankles to murmur I forgive you to our own anatomy   this honey dust this flaxen split   the body made open to keep us close   within reach a hummingbird flings into orbit its whole sphere glows sapphire   it’s simple it’s morning what then follow a prayer   in the throat there is a pit grooved rift of our own frames horizons arrivals this upon us   yawning unlatched sun drenched drowning in an ordinary hum flinging our forms into whatever place will want us next golden whole sliced together swallowed blue for now that’s all we want to be      

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Citrus Poem

But here we are — dissecting a pomelo warmed by my car radio on Sunday and weekdays of sitting by the west window watching us move in rotation, disks among a sliding axis, gravity now propping us against the counter top, in the kitchen, admiring the thickness of the pomelo skin. As if it’s waited so long to be unpeeled. Grown swollen and fish-pink in longing. We pull it apart cell by cell. I’ve never swallowed poetry like this. These coral citrus segments could be light-moons like hearts at the beginning of things — 8 moon flips on Jupiter, says the radio, that night, the tides pulling us under the lemon tree, twisting our names into reoccurring rotation. You’re slicing me, citrus moon. This is candy, yeah, like that.

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Dear you      in dreamscape form

I want to write you about the stars in Canada               to say stars are just              shards of light to say              there is a field                        a slope of dandelions             all the counselors are kissing in the weeds but I am young and open                 legged and letting everyone tie friendship bracelets around my ankle bones unaware                     of twine and its flammability   We eat with cutlery   miss the word silver             My skirt pockets are full of sliced apples and coffee crisp                 Then I remember: it was pouring when we drove here                      the moon was white toothed                      I am trying to recall what blooms on the wheel stamped road of                    distance                      lilies mums snapdragons little trampled roses             Is it possible to be homesick always wanting                 something                 more?   If I write this adventure right, youth is a cabin above Toronto                to rewrite a letter may be a dangerous act                   I want to pull you                 home to Manitou Lake                   my olive rock overlook above the cinnamon fire pit little cove of out own world between us two                        this is why we send words across the lines                     mailmen are poets dancing in haste   I want to write you to say the dandelions dyed my tongue moon-shade                  The squirrel   under my bunk bed keeps etching itself into                    the creases of floor boards             like nails into segments of a clementine                   11 acts of fragile separation                 I used to think this kind of slicing was contained to fruit baskets                       salt slugs woodpeckers all the wasps the              holes they dig in skin                      bark                slow movement of learning more of some one you don’t                        skin                 rinds of flesh   Is it possible to puncture from afar? I signed up for archery         didn’t go I choose the bottom bunk but                   moved                        now admit admiration for                      space              the floor                     the shadow leak of the bed frame top bunk                     I want to write you to say silhouette romantics                        firefly solstice                        flowerscape               to say paper wings in glass shoe boxes               the way that summer made me older       made me want things                      differently   Canoe paddles slice water               to wholeness                         Our cabin door is open Bagels are charred with burnt marshmallow residue There are many stories but not enough space                by the fire I want to come home                      come back next summer   I want to write you to say one night                   we stripped down to the white pollen               of humanness                       skinny dipped in a milk lake feed our flesh                        stars                ceramic light   It is raining At lunch today                       we had a food fight              I scrapped my knee but it was ketchup   It’s hard to tell what’s real               just light      

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Daydream

We are dancing in the bleach kitchen where all of our friends hold a beer and an apple. You say, tell me about your room, your walls made of ginger and calyx and I say, you are my door. This isn’t my house. This map is winter’s comings: stranger, pod, house of sugar. Let me trace our route for you. Let me drive you there. The circle of my tongue sifting you like flour. We are in the bleach kitchen where all our friends hold an apple, so I ask, what color is longing? and you answer, fling me. Here, I am handing   you a sketch. My eyes are greener than that. Draw my reoccurrence. Smudge my knees. We are kneeling for the white moon while California dries. I have candied ginger on my lips. There is nectar on the floor. You wore that shirt because your eyes are sand. Our sediment, my empty house, this waiting. Just press your back against me.  I am trying to sort you out. You are running our limbs to the center. None of us are fish. We are in the bleach kitchen where all our friends hold a beer, and I sigh ocean blue and you hum moon core. We are all just trying to be wordless. I am opening my ribs. Slip your hand through. Just be holy and spill through space.  There is a pie in the oven. Our hearts are full of sea. I am rooting myself on your walls. We hunger for depth. You count the sugar grains. We are in the bleach kitchen and all our friends are drunk and sinning, and you breath flour and I moan sand phase. This is sand. This is water.

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Field Guide to Field

There is a sunflower field in Dixon. I’ve never been, but I used to own a dress the color of red plums and milk. I tore it dancing in the orchard that October forgot to map.

This is about lines, but mostly about what humans   say about sunflowers, about being golden inside & we keep singing light & we keep saying no & seek. & there is this bit about freedom & the edge of the world being not edged but centered close & sometimes even in the poems we are strayed.   I should have kept the torn dress for the daughter I will have, but I can’t stop thinking about florets & if they are rust or luster or maybe like that skin between my knees that keeps shedding—   Space any space begs, move  slower, bite softer, kiss less of me.   I thought love was like this & flesh was a word you learn in girlhood. I thought I want familiar & wild & blue-eyed & here, I am dreamscape —   my feet are healed & I am turning in a fog film of flowers. I get to kiss every boy I’ve ever lust if just for a sap minute, only soon they are tearing my dress off & there is plum juice on my shoulder blades & the law of gravity is the law of wanting; there is this center of pollen & it keeps pulling us, bending earth to grain.   & its not about reflection or maybe it is but backwards; the sky is warm rust orange & moonbeams green & all these boys are in the stars & I am left with one I barely know but want to turn to comet dust.   His name changes when he touches me, & this fog is rain we’ve danced with before & we are drinking on a cloud—a glass atrium filled with glass bottles blue like hope & light is seeping & pollen is longing & I say earth dream earth, and his refrain is flesh flesh flesh meaning whole meaning, this is our home & our bath tub is oil & stem, meaning kiss more of me. Blow me to powder,   pulp me to sun-milk, leave me lineless.  

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Fantasy

We dangle on the laced rope of a hammock, my rhubarb bra flicks over the birch branch, prints the whole lawn flush pink. We are inside a star. We are dust. Your look is granular, whistles gather me.   I am dancing flush and light. There are s sounds in all the words without them.   We roast apples on a fire  made of beach glass.  We sleep without a roof. The hammock rope is damp still with morning cloud. The hummingbird croons a tale of open lids, honeybees, wake, honey, 

wake. We come and core ourselves like a story. We are apple-cherry  and culled. This is the beginning  and the end is seedling, long like blue

in distance. It is after now. We understand time like tea.  Your palms yawn, sing we are moth-eaten and dirtied from all the hours in the flower beds—

I tell you I am afraid of wholeness  and also not being whole,  and the earth turns to opal salt. 

We watch and imagine the things you will gift me laid on a cedar plank: talc poems, spiced corn chips, two sawlog wheels with honeysuckle spokes, a slate blue voice, all the craters you know on the moons of Mars in diametrical order,

a map of shelter you call a constellation, it dances slow, you whistle.  The onions in Maine bloom pink flowers.

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Mineral Stage

The afternoon my ankles thawed the valley salted itself. The skyline was a catch of shrimp paddling to de-tail me back into a human. From the human came opal   dandelions, came pollen & petal, came grain & powder. I used to want you whole, they said. The mountains were a story of aberration. Between the red rock chasms, spiders dropped from the lack of air. They lost limbs. I heard snow fall  in my dreams. I was a guardian of lemon & birthstone. I hiked a trail, collecting rinds. My pockets filled with opal ice. You can grate a home out of peels. You can hollow a wall from wind. You can dance on a brick staircase fighting with your feet to frost or shed until you turn to salt.

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Mist Indentation

Some homes are like this, the haze of pining or brittle light, movement in dew wind, the oak woods readable to a girl whose heart is wrought of eucalyptus; it keeps eclipsing itself green and oil, the stony plantar of a body forgotten or what the eyes in the vase    want to remember of the dawn, construction of a hill house, this sketch of bay, marble night stands, elderly with small dogs, novels rested in a glass chest, this haze of empty love, then closure, travel, then resin words tumbling like fog, just when this plot   is ruined by us, we construct a pond  with timber water and the background of the portrait starts with the conception of leaning against something even if for minutes just bark, orchid sphere of wall   and honey, holy like these cotton moments and others blooming, we keep what will stand, hard pulses that come and wane, the red moon sky, the sheen nerve we are alone.

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Abandoned Love, Peyton Fulford 

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Thoughts on Botany

We play most of our games   in June. Feet pressed against the edges of a salt slot canyon, corn hole, teasing amber smoke across the wet ground of a 1 am rain storm when the sky forgets the concept of loyalty. It calls me on the glance.   Says don’t be afraid of seeing me split. Our first time, I was afraid to open my eyes fully and I think he was too. The moving body often wants to dig through space without knowing its confines.

Light cracks bruised apricot  once the eyes unlatch,  unfasten upon human lines. To understand that we are whole is a bedroom illusion that shakes  only within a salt slanted ceiling. 

This is a city of geographical  boundaries—ash hazel mountains and snow tops that withhold melting, beg stay in a voice that reminds me of my first boyfriend and why it took so long for me to leave him even though I knew of the time. 

Moss is flowerless because it lacks desire, doesn’t want to be held  to anything. Yet, roots are the derivations  of all wanting, the string  with which we can’t help but hold  ourselves to another: fingers, smoke,  sex, home, the light purple of a bruised back bone.

In this binding, there is a constant reproduction of a capsule of apricot light by which I mean to say that despite the rules of botany, and how low and green the carpet,  I loved him before I wanted him and I wish I had told him then, before the summer untangled its moss wrist, opened and begged: look away, I’m splitting.

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|| California Summer Ends (in your palm) || 

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The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing job. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

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|| four light moons above salt lake city ||

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Thoughts on Shapes

This is the moment when you leave, it is August again, didn’t the salt freeze in the spring, didn’t your tongue melt into me, weren’t bodies made of scorched mountain tops, burnt lightning beginnings of the first day in June   when you walked across the valley, whiskey valley, moss smell of nine years of circles in which you lift your pen and begin again onto the same orbit.   I remember how we used to think this city was a grid, baked sun lines drawing a charcoal tic-tac board between right neck nook and hips.   I don’t know where the x sits anymore. I remember how the world felt, wine flushed and tight, in glued columns, weren’t the gates unlatched, didn’t we climb the north fence and pour ourselves through windows, into beds.   I no longer feel your body for everyone is feeling, falling over this cherry smashed carpet.    I no longer care what sound want makes,   didn’t this happening end, didn’t the melting salt flood our hip walls, didn’t the city lines blur of consequence.   One of the nice things about wanting is how you never recall the origin.   Wasn’t it the wood carved neck, wasn’t it your father’s room, doesn’t it all come down to dancing and wine, a floor, didn’t you want me in waves, in smoke, small brine currents, freely.     Tell me this is the end, I won’t trust you. Tell me this is a circle, I won’t belief your words, didn’t you want this.