you tell someone suspect, someone
yr not sure you want to tell
you become infinitely
(you will infinitely tell, there's no escape from the infinite)
responsible not only for the telling but for the translation
of that situation's speechmaking
(fault tree 26)
Here in this space, a rectangling, is a construction of how we mark time. Once there was a doubling, look where I wrote on February, 5, 2013: "you don't get happiness, you don't get it, what you do is learn to be still & swallow it down, you can make the unmake"
This place not belonging not mine not
("This place")
Here in this time: when the calendar called we operated, we dogged the ear to mark, so love too is a formula, you can never know a person, and you can forget this over and over. What I wrote on February, 18, 2013: "tried to make a space safe for all of you but couldn't failed in that measure/ barter this miserable moment for all the lifetimes/ for all lifetimes/ I've had more love than most"
i want to know about the war in yr time
what you did
(fault tree 35)
Circling as it does, one comes back upon loss, it comes back up this surface side against water, we never were far from drowning. February 18, 2013: "how a house does not make a home even when you rebuild it from the ground up, exactly, a memorial of what we had overcome & thinking we had weathered enough storms"
just acclimating rendering syllables
on tongues etching landscape onto brain
("Driving")
Roots deep this city a way of imprint as clear as my name, you can't know this or not know me, this constancy sweeps truth, sweeps false, sweeps the ashes of what burned fastest: February, 24, 2013: "no talk of where love gets you when all you get is survival, from means to means/ the heart is another matter/ filed away years of what we said or didn't"
as some people do, ones of us more actively
than others of us but all to the same end
we are betrothed
(fault tree 40)
Distance changes the tone: the sound of a thing reverberating, the heart's echo, the underwater silence that is not silent, once upon a time is an amorous place: (March 5, 2013) "talked till there was no other narrative erased in the long stream of how you kept me/ so no one can walk away or be a different person/ how could i believe there was any other than your catalogue/ in the end began to see there was never any thing resembling love/ there: a mirroring or just some shattered phase/ all that was required was an owning"
no names for this
for touch of leaf
no name for trade wind
nor stomach churn
("Dictation")
Travel ground in what you fear and sneak wonder, awash in the wave's descent. What can you handle? What is unspoken that you keep down, but can't keep quiet? (March 12, 2013) "I would walk fire of fires for them, mothering dragons/ my flame scarred right. spilled 3x a bellyful, bright red. I pull out of the ash my cindered heart's space/ nothing can burn twice/ fires the fire I fear not"
so if one spewed of hate
one built hate
and if another spewed of immobility
one was static
(fault tree 47)
March 26, 2013: "tried not to disappear under the wounding of failure/ not parent enough/ not mother enough/ to give over a decade but for it never to be enough/ you can't ever sacrifice enough, if mother--you can't ever risk being a real person-- each night I was away from you I waded in the guilt of it/ convinced time takes care of everything. what it really does is make us other people."
limbs long and light the water carries me
in it I am endless I am a finite thing
cells exchanging one for another
brain bumping against bone
against tissue against water
("The Pacific")
April 23, 2013: "how do you navigate a breaking/ what could we have done better/ I can see the etching on your heart/ these days we will recall/ we all have these days/ they come uncounted/ what you do is collect joy, the people who love you --in fact, all the love is a collecting, you can never predict where it comes from and in what doses, you choose what you can choose, other than that, trying to survive."
May 20, 2013: "you flaw down your life, find faults that sound your face/ this decade he took & took till all was just confusion, so sane, I thought I knew the words inside my head, thought I was the one telling the story, eclipsed forgot the way to stand/ forgot the way to end when something's over, some payment for my lack/ a mother has no way to keep him out/ there is no thing on this earth that will keep me from them"
Author Note: This is a poem created to be read as a poem and not to be used in a court of law. I used kathryn pringle's fault tree (Omnidawn Press, 2012) and Megan Kaminski's This Place (Dusie Kollectiv, 2013) to create this piece. Both poets stayed with me between May 22 and May 23, 2013.
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