Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
In time, even the meaning of time
changes, though it does not.
I used to bristle at what I imagined
was its rough touch, its interfering.
What it withheld was never the same as
what it gave, when finally it opened its hand.
And then, sometime after the middle,
I fevered or trembled at its approach.
I used to believe it was another name for promise,
for what endures beyond fog— Time, you do
endure. And in some ways I do, too. Ask me
what I've let go of, what I've let befall me.
My friend bought three pairs of sandals
at Nordstrom Rack, though she'd gone in
for a different item. All of them are cute—
olive and white and orange—and perfect
for the season. My other friend just bought
a house (or closed on a house) in a quiet
neighborhood not far from a cemetery
where my husband used to take our youngest
daughter to practice driving (no fear of killing
anyone there). I bought a dress to wear
to our nephew's wedding in the midwest—
something I haven't done in a while. It's cute
too: thin stripes on a cream background,
but in a midi length that comes to maxi
on my petite frame, which means I'll cut
and hem it myself; but even so, I'm
kind of excited. When I tried it on, it fit
so well; I could almost hear my mother,
who used to sew all my clothes, exclaim:
Kasla inar-aramid! By which she'd meant,
as if bespoke. Reaching for the thing
that made us giddy or excited, I marvel at
how none of us seemed to be consciously
thinking of the terrible stuff in the news
this week, even if we were—for don't we get
reminded every nanosecond anyway?
A nanosecond is equal to 1000 picoseconds
or 1⁄1000 of a microsecond, also likely the speed
at which dopamine releases into the bloodstream,
which aids the fight or flight response but mostly
works as part of our reward-as-pleasure system.
The shoes are dope, the suit is dope. We do what
we need to survive but can't deny the dopamine rush—
how good it feels to do something pleasurable.
Already, the brain looks forward to the next hit.
One evening she copied notes
for an assignment without really understanding
why it mattered. The professor said there was
a difference between a paraphrase and a precis:
one sharpened your mind, the other could dull it.
And so she practiced sharpening, hoping to produce
a brght graphite point out of the small heap of curls
and wood shavings, anticipating the feel of the first
stroke laid on paper, the letters vining into words
into sentences into thoughts that could carry
their weight across the page and to the reader
that might come upon them. Perhaps fictions
learned as lessons last the longest. Perhaps a story
is remembered best if someone writes it down.
A first taste leads to another, then another.
Just as in the days leading up to our family
potlucks, there’s excitement at the prospect of eating
for the pleasure of tasting what someone else
has made. We’ve become too familiar with
the shapes produced by our everyday hunger.
The crackle from oil, the bite of pink peppercorn,
the marriage of mint with watermelon and lime
are so much more interesting. Before we leave for this
communal repast, I drag the old garden hose
out front. Everything suffers in this blistering
heat—the rosemary and gardenia, the twin
Japanese maples and pale hydrangeas. We
all lap it up, lean toward the cool heart of water.
How to be a heart without a human hunger, how to be
a hunger you can sate without harm? Today I went
into the yard to see if any figs were ripe enough
to pick, and found a small nest in the fork of a branch.
I couldn’t tell if it was abandoned, or if speckled eggs
nestled inside. Underneath, everything seemed
a call and answer of dapple and wing; everything
thatched thick with heat that we index, as if it
could be pressed into the pages of a book.
Just a few days ago, reports of a rare pink dolphin
sighting in the Outer Banks turned out to be
computer-generated: fake. How to explain
the need to satisfy that kind of hunger, that desire
to flood the world with poor copies of itself?
A first taste leads to another, then another.
Past the solstice, the longest day,
summer begins to reel in its boundlessness.
I write a letter to you, because I dream
the moon will swallow me whole when I leave
this life if I don't remember how to let go
of the thread that tethers these flower boats
to the dock. My end is frayed; I've clutched it
so tightly though I admit, there have been days
when I nearly fed everything to my sorrow.
When at last I light a votive and set it afloat
on the water, it is like signing the name by which
you've known me all your life. It is what
one does before leaving the temple
after praying at the feet of the gods, after
dropping a final offering into the metal box.
All our passports have expired.
I stack them at one end of the table
in plain view, a reminder to fill out
reapplication forms. When and why
did this become such a procedure,
for those who truly have nothing
to declare? Last spring we wanted to buy
tickets for a train that goes nowhere except
around the foothills, starting from some town
in Virginia. Just as the trees began to stipple
with color, you might sit and look out of clear
picture windows, drink champagne and bite
into triangles of cheese while listening to a tour
guide narrate history. All this as if to say, why
should the destination always be about place?
There's still that deeper country to explore,
the one we carry with us everywhee we go.
Before I turn three, my parents hire
a photographer from a local studio to come
and take pictures of us.
We've just moved to a new city, to a small
apartment behind the post office,
and are waiting to transfer
to a proper home—that's what my father says.
I don't know why they want to memorialize
this time. I only remember
the terror of the flash
bulb going off above my face—a rip in the air,
before the moment our faces are fixed on film.
In the one where it is just
me, I press a clutch of dry flowers to my chest.
I have not yet learned how to properly smile.
What was it like when the donkey cart bearing the once
powerful to their execution by hanging, by garrote or
beheading, made its way through crowds pelting spit or stones
or eggs which, when they broke open, dripped like viscous
mucus down the once impeccably powdered face of the woman
who scornfully wanted to throw pastry at these peasant
tormentors? I wasn't there, but I remember the EDSA Revolution
of 1986: thousands poured into the streets—nuns and civil
servants, holding hands with activists at the frontline. For days,
my literature teacher made hundreds of sandwiches
to hand out to all, including armed and mute-faced soldiers:
soggy tuna salad on white bread, fakely pink rounds of
salami and cheese sweating in their cellophane wrappers
in the electric heat of that day. While crowds scaled
the palace walls, the dictator and his family scrambled
into helicopters to be airlifted to Hawai'i; exiled.
People poured into their previous fortress, losing
themselves in wardrobes and closets; a horde of bees
stunned inside a forest made of thousands of shoes, hung
with useless tapestries of gossamer and pearl.
What is forever, when we live
near the water? Sand-shifting dunes,
cords of seagrass. More inland, the soil
beneath is latticed with roots. Dampness
and heat give way to spores. When was it
that planets aligned like beads on a chain?
At the hinge of the year, we're eager again
to look for portents. A decades-old ban on
psychic readings has just been repealed in Norfolk.
Now I can look for someone who will run her finger
along the lines of my palm and tell me something
I don't already know. She'll turn my hand sideways
to count the ripples along its edge. She'll pull an oracle
card and light candles that smell of salt and driftwood.