I am broken, I feel broken, only happy when I write a poem though I hear nothing nothing in the wind in the street in my cat’s sleeping breath to suggest a poem tonight. I hear nothing. I see nothing, therefore, I am nothing. Thinking is never enough to be something. You can’t just think to be. You must also see. You must also hear. You must also feel. You must be. Otherwise, what separates us from a tree stump? How do we know if a tree can or cannot think? Or feel? Or see? Or hear? Or know—I write that word real slow and if the font of my handwriting had an “italics” function I’d use it on know. It’s this “knowing” we seek, we look for, we crave to be part of. It’s this knowing I sometimes convince myself I have, I set myself apart, and then never really find anyone else who “knows” (words real slow BOLD and italics in quotations just to set it apart, to give it weight, to give it importance.) And I don’t even know what I know or how I know, but I know I know, and I crave to meet others who do, too. Like I can just look them in the eyes and I’ll know, and he or she will know, too, and we’ll be together in this knowing. Am I talking crazy talk or does it all make sense? Maybe it was all that acid in my youth, maybe the endorphins from my natural childbirth in my twenties, maybe the hiking to the tops of mountains, I don’t know what, or who, or what, gave it to me but I feel so strongly that I have it. You know?

Blue on white.
Blue on green.
Blue on blue.
The colors of you
Mother.
Crooked branch,
frozen thigh,
I just barely see you with my eye.
Drive by one yellow tree
in a huddle of March
green firs.

How you confer
your muddled shapes
your muted grays
in a veil.

Many times I’ve come to your chair.
Today I notice the seams in
your ocean wall,
the line down and through
the dolphin’s tail.

Black-striped
diamond
drill-bit
saws
at my tooth.
I smell the burn fetid burn,
swallow blood, bits of bone
the sucker missed.

I had to surrender to the
needle’s rape of me:
the plum violation
in my jaw — red , raw, plunged
yellow grip — needless to say
I felt more
than the tip.

I’m gonna get you numb.

That’s what we tell our Mother
when the winter comes.

The icicles demand
their stake in my mouth.

Bite down hard.

I write in raindrops Scottie in the Kingdom says to me, and a deluge of creativity comes raining down on me, comes pouring down sometimes when that muse whispers in my ear, tells me what I want to hear, which is people being creative and making meaning with their lives. Meaning with words, and meaning in whorls, which can't even be recreated no matter how hard we try, no matter how often we ask why, there's just a certain something to the science of life recreating itself in intermittent shadows and swirls of worlds.

An Excerpt from Everyday Seven Minutes, my book in progress:

I glide miraculous through this air that could be the air rushing off the peaked mountains in your picture, or the red and yellow fire of autumn in the fields of that other picture, or the rusted boat in Honduras. I glide miraculous through words and worlds and who needs travel when you've got a pen. I could be Zen, I could be back then going everywhere I should have gone before becoming a mother. But I am this other creature, this other human of inhuman remains what maintains stability in the frothy light of dusk and bedtime, you don't even know what's mine as you drive this time to my house. I am miraculous as I glide, and slide, and love the feeling of you inside me, how could it be, a poet finds something so divine outside herself, she can't help herself, she just wants to write and be heard and be understood, no matter what's good, no matter my mood, or who or what or where. You like hardware, and we write a poem about it, and you are genius in your simplicity, so simple, no duplicity, hard at work making wood, making words, making poems, who could have known? I'd have a naked man on my couch this evening. Do I dare, do I dare? How could I be so bold? Don't I do as I'm told? Writing. Free. So free to be me. To look at this man asleep and wonder if he really knows me. Or does he really want to.

Mammography Room

The mammography room where
my left breast is talked about
is small, and on the desk stands
a rubber spatula
in a silly wicker basket in the shape of an owl.

Rubber pads on machines can't cushion the words
nodule, left quadrant, biopsy.
My blood drips from bitten cuticles
(I could never shake your hand,
doctor).

His voice on the other end of the phone is only
36 hours too late, babbling about tastes
not having colors, and Swedish Fish turned hairy
at the bottom of a pint glass of beer.

Some performance, this life.
This pain and swollen mass, this
learning how to listen
to these vibes, the ones that tell me when
to cry, when to write.

Telling me: he was never the one.
I'm always looking, just as deep,
trying to pick up the one blip in the x-ray
that could mean something
or nothing at all.

Making Metaphors About Metaphors on Valentine's Day

My heart scrapes against glass
again in the wind. It's a metal heart,
red, with a small hole in the upper left corner.
It's less than perfect (everything always is).

The wind shoots down the street as if it's aimed,
a tunnel of sound, it's the only sound in this small town.
A few ghostly howls, a steady drone, and it could almost lull me
to sleep if not for that jolting scrape of metal and glass.

It gives me a start as I lay in bed, and makes me think twice
about hanging love out on the porch like that.
After tonight's storm, I'll find my heart on the ground.
A little dented maybe. All wet. That's how it goes, I guess.

I still have hope that this time, the storm won't be too strong.
And this time my heart will survive. I'll just pick it up, brush it
off, and hang it back up on that rusted nail.
'Cause I'm the kind of gal who hangs her heart outside, who loves hearts made of steel.

Single-handedly
I alone
am alone
by choosing
to be me
by choosing
to be free
what crazy woman
raises a son on her own
what crazy woman
falls in love
more than once
and thinks each time
this is the one
the one true saving
she’s been waiting for.