where i have kept you.

When I loved you, I loved you I held you it was warm and there you were
so expecting of a beginning that you hadn’t even closed your mouth; the steam
from the coffee rose up to my lips but I kissed you I kissed you instead and I took
your hand to lay it upon the different parts of my body you loved I wanted you
to touch. I had you had the shape of a woman, the softness of geography and the way
rocks can be made smooth. I loved you, in the full space of your mouth where I put my breath
and left it there for you to hold, filling all the black that black space with everything I could
pull from my lungs everything I could exhale, you so full of me you could hardly imagine space

Now I know all things about you, what the inside of your mouth tastes like, what the inside
of your body tastes like and then still, I know nothing of the what is left in the end, except
for shadows except for
what we did not say and, how do we say it? 

after the fall

And because it is fall, darkness will shadow the northwest;
and because it is late in this century,
darkness will be in the air you breathe.
And because you are human, darkness
has come from your hand,
your mouth,
and it thickens around your heart
like fat around a liver: you will never
know enough.
For you are alive”

-Jan Zwicky

What light? It is easiest to ask this question at dawn in the late fall
when the sun does not come in until after seven and I sit with the kitchen
dark at my side and the hallway dark at my side and there is light
nowhere.

Just a few days ago, a man jumped from space and broke the sound barrier.

Imagine the light. What would the ground feel like after that, or
being in love or being at all? Imagine the exhaustion. The need
to no longer be part of life. 1100 km an hour rushing towards
what he had left behind. Imagine being the heart of space and earth
for a few moments the core of heat in iced air plummeting
to the ground just to feel once again that there is solid dirt under
your feet and know you have touched earth in a way that you cannot touch
space but you have touched space in the same breath as having touched
earth. Is love better after that or weaker, diluted like sunlight keeping asphalt
on a long highway passing a truck stop between fields of starved grass:
do we keep driving because there is still gas in the tank because we are
facing forward because there is really too much space between us
and the turn-off

Or do we hit the brakes and let the tires spin for a split second a split
second of contemplating death just to feel that close to something just to
get that copper taste in the mouth get saliva at the back of the teeth and clutch
your thighs with sweaty palms knowing that this is what you wanted all along

Is it the same thing, plummeting through light and sound breaking
sound barriers every time you open your mouth hoping against hope thin as a windshield
that it might be the same? 

the river back home

And when I started out running, I took the only possible route
the route through the maples, heavy now as they are with colour
carrying their burdens delicately and sometimes losing, a leaf
here and there fluttering to the ground like a secret sigh so tired -
this route because it reminds me of the ravine behind our houses
where our parents said not to play without supervision

where the river stood at the bottom
 with wide open arms, ready to catch and carry where
dirt rock leaf padded our noises while we giggled rolled down the side when
the ground was there without hesitation I took the leap
and the ground was there       there was no such thing
 as hesitation

The path here is a lie lies straight and curved and flat but
I can hear the sirens of the city in here they seem
more frantic, wailing, all the trees pulling       inward hugging           their branches to the ground
as if these bright colours these reds and yellows are a scream a bullet
shot in the sky and then blood spilling, the blood of god
shaped to the vein of a leaf, fallen loose and now curled, a fist on the ground
that my foot crushes underneath. I exhale

Counting my rhythm to stop from breathing too hard to stop from
thinking about sirens and even when I was a kid, fish were dead on the banks
of that river.

We’d smell it long before we’d stumble upon it and I
was always shocked, would stutter in my step and then lower myself to look
into such a naked eye I was uncomfortable with the staring but sad because
this was all that was left, something half-picked clean by birds and flies
dead on the bank and the river just rushing past in a hurried commute to get to
bigger things and what if the ocean wasn’t enough that big huge gulp
swallowing again and again to get that lump out of the back
of my throat: even in blue skies even here
there are fish dead on the banks and the river wasn’t always waiting but was sometimes
swollen and brown with the mud of erosion

            
            And when we’d climb home we would run
            up the hill and reach for young trees to take their thin branches
            so slender like a pianist’s hand hardly there to hold on to
            and sometimes the branches the roots would slip, the let go the
            cannot hold on anymore, and we’d fall against the banks heaving
            breath like an insult a bone cracking somewhere deep inside
            the shell of fear being hacked so the cracks showed just a bit more

                       

            And the willows weep near the river their roots
            tearing up concrete looking for more space, not knowing that kind of thirst
           can never be quenched

Not knowing that the concrete is a lie lies straight curved and flat, twisting like a path
snaking through the woods, long and thin as a lie you started when you were young and now
can’t get out of.