Featured Poet
Photography by Jackie Sheeler
( New York, New York )
poem and audio link
You tantalize me as the swollen fruits of summer have teased pollen from radiant tiger lilies reaching up from ditches by the road. I am morning on a day you wished for when desire doesn’t submit to the lock and key that dims with time, or the yawning of an inactive heart, the distance in my chest. We could meet on a dusty road in Mexico where stray dogs run in syncopation, where one door closes and another opens, while our bodies ripen in the rusty sun. What I cast away is my accusation that you kept the best sections of blood oranges for yourself. Out of an irrational fear of feeling lighter I accuse myself of murdering an unnamed solid. I would ask you to wait, but I keep moving, as species of birds recognize the discoverer for whom they will be named. You absorb me and never question the difference between reflection and subcutaneous. The sun gives us one more hour of humidity and salt, as my tongue licks across your skin for its lack of water. Static in the air forms a small natural disaster, a personal tornado brewed in the brush you pull through my hair that falls into silk against my back, against your forehead, or your chest. This lets you sleep in the dim light while I work among the harsh words of afternoon. Walking among our favorite dead poets and the ashes from cigarettes they used for punctuation. When our vectors cross again, what I don’t want you to know, I will shield myself from revealing. Now I am different. The past is misplaced among old boxes of shoes and ceramic lamps. That is why I can be here with you and when you grow tired, I’ll be gone.
Everyday, I exchange by fax, poems with my friend the poet, Frank Lima. He had a dream about all the older poets he’s known who are gone. We spoke about how much they are missed by us and the poetry community.
Around the same time I was listening to Grace Kalambay, a young poet whose poems are set to the music of a single acoustic guitar which were filled with longing. I wanted to write a poem that combined the sense of emptiness and longing with the paradox of a human tendency to isolate, or push away, that which we long for the most.
When I was a child, I loved having my hair brushed by my father. As an adult, it’s still comforting when a loved one brushes my hair. I wanted to work with the idea of a comforting act like someone brushing your hair stirring up emotional static electricity or a ‘personal tornado’.
This was written in the summer and as Frank and I always talk about Mexico, which are constant images in his poems, I incorporated the dry dusty heat of Mexico into the poem. I got the idea of tiger lilies tantalizing bees with their pollen and had a vivid image of the country ditches teaming with glorious flowers that no one thought were particularly special.
The end of the poem refers to the way we attempt to protect ourselves. It concludes with a promise to only be as ‘present’ as the other person is willing to accept, which reinforces the sense of the human condition and 'aloneness' or isolation.