Soft Edges

"There are poets who sing you to sleep and poets who ready you for war and I want to be both" --Ashe Vernon

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Eulogy

Some nights, when I can’t sleep, lying down, staring at a wall, feeling everything from the weight of my blankets

to the roughness of the pillowcase to the spring digging into my side — I eulogize.

Words weave through my mind as I scratch, replace, rephrase, resign myself to the fact that it will never be perfect

and what irritatingly flawless poetry that is, since the only eulogies worth writing are the ones that remind us of someone’s

heartbreakingly human imperfections, heartbreaking only after the fact, and for now just endearing,

so I eulogize my friends, my family, my grandma’s secret to choosing the perfect strawberry (choose any strawberry and sprinkle sugar on it)

how a friend falls asleep in every patch of sun she can find, how they reframe themselves when reframing ideas, how his grin is higher on one side.

I don’t want to stop noticing the loveably human bits about these people, don’t want to forget until one day I have to write a eulogy;

I want to bask in this now, and a year from now, and after the eulogy, and every moment between here and there, then and now, I want these moments in all my tomorrows.

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Carrol’s Wall

A set of stairs lead from the creek to nothing, but what was once, presumably, something, and is now only long grass

and two wildflowers, shaded by old trees that dot the area around the water’s edge. Dappled sunlight shifts and slips from leaf to me to earth,

catching occasionally on dragonfly wings and tugging on drops of water suspended in the air; bark grows in swirls around the trees.

Across the creek you find wild mustard, boulders, a turtle in a shallow pool.

On this side you find a concrete pier, two feet by four, jutting out just far enough that the currents trip over your feet when you sit.

For the first time in fifteen years I brush the dirt off the pier read the words written long ago, trace them with my fingers,

think of the person who used to live here, where nobody lives, used the stairs that once lead somewhere,

built a wall that became a pier.

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A Girl and Her Dog

There’s something classically beautiful about a girl and her dog standing side-by-side,

framed in sunlight just brushing the top of the hills, looking out at the world, wind whispering through the girl’s hair.

The dog is old, very old, can barely see (or hear, or walk, or breathe) but she has always known

which girl has needed her most (that girl used to be me, it’s not anymore but god —)

There’s something tragically beautiful about a girl and her dog, something that makes you want to cry

whenever the dog stands on shaky limbs to greet the girl when she comes home, or moves at all. Sometimes you do cry, break down, scream,

sometimes you just lie on the floor for hours listening to the ocean inside her heart, inside her lungs now,

counting her breaths. You make sure to tell the dog you love her whenever you leave the house, or go to sleep,

only you don’t sleep, haven’t slept well since the coughing at night started, months ago.

You’re thankful that you have the time to say goodbye, but god, you hate it too, hate the past two years of knowing,

hate the past few months of seeing, hate a lot of things lately, but the one thing you can keep coming back to is

the girl who’s had the dog for three years, who talks to her all the time, loves her fiercely but gently, softly.

You’re always hoping they’ll get one more day to watch the sunset.

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Remember

what brought you here and what drove you out, the sun shining over castles and

the emptiness you found, hovering, soft but not soft enough,

hollowness speckled throughout the emotions swirling in eyes, remember

the people who cared too much remember the people who did not care at all,

remember, that there was no in-between remember

how it feels to sit on a lawn surrounded by sun and friends and food and music and remember

that the moments will cling to a soap bubble forever, remember,

the anticipation behind Taylor, the lanterns on steps glowing red at night, singing and crying and loving and leaving.

(and loving and leaving and loving and leaving, remember)

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The Dog

She knows when the strangers have come to her house, because her dog begins to howl at her heels, and her cat begins to scratch at the door,

as a warning, almost, but the dog is more effective, perhaps, in his signal,

the howling, and the teeth-baring through the window. The horse kicks the stalls and the cow

slams the gate but it is the dog that sends strangers running, that keeps them away,

that makes them whisper about the girl with the dog behind closed doors, the girl with the dog that doesn’t die.

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Pages

In the town where everything seems off like it’s been slightly shifted to the left, or the reflection in a puddle,

there lies an ancient book with a golden cover, which no one has ever seen because the book always remains open,

revealing whatever page is necessary for the viewer at that time. We see what we need to see,

except for the cover. No one has seen the cover. No one knows what the book is about.

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Year Four

The sun is warm and the grass is green and then breeze is soft and everyone murmurs while they walk and there is a sense of everything

coming together and falling apart, all at once, and you don’t quite know how to feel about it, or about anything really,

so you don’t think about it, or anything really, but you keep your head up and your sense sharp, and you take in all your last times.

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Key Chain

Sometimes the heads of the slain that we collect are just former pieces of ourselves, our old Goliaths and Medusas,

thinking we’re invincible when we’re not, (we’re not we’re not we never were) but here we are,

carrying our old selves around in our pockets like key chains, not sure why, but always trying to be better.

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Whetstone

The six ancestral swords that hang above the table in the great hall are there to remind us that you never get to stop fighting,

that your purpose in life is to move through it protecting others by forging ahead, by getting nicked and bent and tarnished

and sometimes, if you are very lucky, by finding someone who picks you up when you are dropped and sharpens you again.

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NASA

The space program’s magnificent finding was not supernovas, or earth-like planets, or the discovery of the moment just before the big bang, no,

the space program’s magnificent finding was that space existed at all, that an entire universe lay just out of reach,

a vast new ocean out there for us to explore. And the space program gave us that,

which in turn gave us Star Trek, and Star Wars, and Doctor Who, and Independence Day,

and the ability to wish on shooting stars and look up and wonder what was out there, to see UFOs, and write poems about black holes,

and describe the insides of our cells as the distance to the sun and a little bit back, because we get homesick. The space program expanded our dreams to infinity

(and beyond)

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Exhausted

And sometimes, you just need to sleep, but there’s no time,

and the clock keeps ticking forward while you fall further behind and your head hits the pillow

and seems to leave it minutes later, time has less and less meaning and you are so tired

(so tired so tired so tired)

the words blur together and so do the hours until it is time for sleep. Again.

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Endings

As we sail toward our quiet homeland, the sun is setting, our friends are crying, everything is beautiful and poetic and sad.

There are very few experiences in your life where the endings are known years in advance, but this is one, and you joke to make yourself feel better, like,

maybe that job rejections was just the friends we made along the way, maybe crappy dining hall food was just the friends we made along the way, maybe college was just the friends we made along the way.

The ending though, is full of laughter and tears and good food and warm sun and when the curtain falls it feels like the most natural thing in the world,

and it doesn’t feel joyful, but it feels right, feels like it’s time, and that’s all you can ask for with endings,

and beginnings, which this is too, in a sense, and you’ll keep in touch because you don’t know who you are without these people,

so you sail from one home to another, back warmed by the setting sun, eyes fixed on the horizon.

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Cliff Face

The bravest airplane pilot takes to the skies twice daily, scouts for survivors

who were lost on their travels: plane crash, helicopter crash, hiker who wandered too far she’s seen them all,

sometimes, at night, she sees them again, the faces of everyone she couldn’t save and this is why she is the bravest pilot,

not because she flies too close to the cliff faces, but because she flies even though she knows they’re probably already dead,

knows she’ll have to see their faces in her dreams, even so, the bravest pilot goes wheels up.

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Overthrow

Overthrowing the tyrant is harder now than it used to be, can’t use a sword and a challenge or an army and a siege, no

overthrowing the tyrant requires long marches and longer conversations and breaking your heart open again and again

for all the people who “just don’t understand” and trying to teach the people that hate you, even if they don’t know they hate you and

overthrowing the tyrant is painful and frightening and take an entire four years.

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Mess

His sweaty jersey on my bedroom floor, shower running, glasses on the bedside table, three water glasses on the desk.

He has become part of my life in the same way my room has become an extension of him and the mess is worth it, I think,

the mess and the paint and the understanding that 1+1 can become more than 2 and I lie down on my bed and doze until I feel it dip.

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Cheating

I’ll always remember the autumn kitchen, yellows and reds and window cracked to catch the last warm day of the year and I remember

the way the phone kept ringing on its hook, how I used to answer and drag the cord as far as it could go into the corner of the pantry and I remember

how the phone was ringing that day in the autumn kitchen until it became background noise and I remember

feeling your fear coming from the sound but I couldn’t answer and you couldn’t hang up the phone, we became two ships passing in the night and I remember

the way the autumn kitchen tasted that day, of desperation and hunger and pain and goodbyes and the way you used to kiss me before you kissed anyone else.

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PCH

Feet up on the dashboard in the passenger seat of a crappy two-door car that should have been retired five years ago,

car smelling of old cigarettes and the bergamot oil you hung on the rearview mirror to cover it up (it doesn’t work, but with the windows down

you hardly notice over the smell of the ocean). The singed concert shirt that you stole from your cousin flutters against your chest in the breeze and

your heart flutters because you feel really free, riding along the coast next to your best friend in the whole world.