Dear Matthew: A Ghazal

Remember me, remember me: it’s what any woman wants.
Between night & sleep your arm hooks around my waist but I want the security of your days.

Days dragged out in quiet inner longings. Do you meditatate on the curve of my hips?
I want to know you might even smile when you think of me.

I want to know you know me as well as your hands know how to hold me,
That your heart and mind pin me down as hard.

We don’t do lovemaking, most of the time it’s just sex.
Skin on skin, the smell of you: I can get drunk on less than this.

Enough wine and your whispering in my ear all the desires of your cock
I might just believe it feels something like love.

I want to tell you everything I know.
Lives invisible live within these walls
Yet they hold me, and that is what I know.
They hold my books, my poems, family portraits,
Blankets, a couch, an unplayed guitar: All
the things I think I need to live a life.
And that is what I know. To live one's life
Between walls, among things. Comfort. Luxuries.
I dip Oreos in milk; the wind howls.
Winter screeches past my door and I am warm
Inside, while outside, the almost full moon,
With its cold face, stares down the snowy ground.
It's all I know: to watch with rapture at
The seasons, to listen and think each car
That squeals by or parks in front of my house
Is him, coming to tell me he loves me.
But it's not him. It's just me. And the wind.
Cookies & milk. These four walls I call home.

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.

Triolet

Pieces of you get left behind.
Ripe dandelions on a windy day,
stragglers by design.
Pieces of you get left behind:
your skin, your breath, your imprint on my mind.
Sometimes I wish the whole of you would stay.
Pieces of you get left behind
as ripe dandelions on a windy day.

Methodically walking because it’s the only thing I know how to do
as I contemplate leaving you.

I know you’re not the one but I still want you to be.
You’re too different from me.

I just want someone to love;
to love me.

To hold hands with down the street;
recite poetry.

But don’t cover me, nor devour me
or make me feel incomplete.

Life’s just not that neat
even with all the straight lines I see

as I walk from line to line
on the squares of sidewalk.

I gawk at the way we follow lines:
the crosswalk
the timeline, and tick-tock, the clock.

Even the cigarette in the hand
is a line to our death.

Oh nonsense, nonsense, none of this
makes any sense, like the yew and the moontree,

some great powers that be,
an inverted universe

where I am a poet
and the lines follow me.

Samantha Kolber
from 1/17/08

I Think It’s Sort of Amazing

With the wind at my back, the points of yellow stars always point to you
as if the punt in the bottle coaxes the wine from the neck.

Sometimes your mind won’t stop, not even for
a moment, not even to take in the shift in color in a cloud at sunset.

They say the whole is greater than the sum
but I wonder if greater is better...or worse.

The sky that just sits above your head as an offering:
some silence is peaceful while others are awkward, drinking

wine the color of crimson and blood, like oceans after
a feed, rolling through folds of a tapestry more colorful than you can possibly weave.

Ruled by ways we can’t understand, the not knowing a weight on our shoulders,
and maybe, just maybe, all that came before, is all that will come to be.

Words like branches reach out to the sky;
Poets always walk alone and wonder why.

Poets always stare too long at the beautiful:
a child, the moon, a blueberry bush so full.

A random lady in front of a Friendly's
bends to touch a white flower, its green leaves

point up skyward.
Again, I see that metaphor, awkward

of life and beings all reaching up
as if to grow from bottom to top is not to give up.

As if to write about it makes it so.
My son says don't write about me though.

He asks, Is it about these crayons?
It is now, but way beyond

those four basic colors, red, yellow, green, blue,
which can't even capture you.

The riper of two fruits to my taste
is a man's words that fall from so much haste.

All this desire I try to feed,
my fingertips stained from picking blueberries.

A Sunday afternoon, a day almost done.
A poet almost satisfied with what she's begun

to articulate, to communicate:
a fishamajig on a plate,

a few french fries, the still blue skies
and something from deep within that plies

through the waves of black ink crashing down on the pages through this pen.
As if writing in a booth in a crowded Friendly's is a way to find my Zen.

Divine Light wants to pour into my head through an opening I am not sure I want to admit exists. If I am open, I am vulnerable. If I am closed, I may as well be dead.

Epiphany at the end of a poem (or at 2:39 am)

This is what a poet must do: make the invisible visible
a thought, a feeling, an idea
only poets see these
fly as a bird, run as a wolf, stand naked as a tree.

Red Dragon Breathing Flames

No one says the word baby and I
Place the box of tissues over the magazine cover of a round belly
I know she saw, the one unsterile detail in the room, the
Red dragon breathing flames,

Like the suction hose and speculum full of blood.
Her belly licks of stretch marks and scars,
Some fullness holding tight to walls
In that high tower, as if waiting to be rescued

Is a bad thing. No one knows the strength
Of princesses: women concrete in naïveté
Until it’s time to swim away
On white, fluffy clouds. On bubbles.

And she holds my hands too tight
And we fill the room with chatter
Contracting to anything
Born from the night and given to the light of day.

No one sees the curls of her hair stuck to her forehead
Or the brown bark in her eyes turn to water
To nurture the severed roots
As her fingers spasm in odd waves with the pain.

Definitely no one sees the secret muscle
Too deep inside layers of anatomy
Being tugged and pulled to almost weeping, and
Kahlua-colored iodine cold on thighs, which

Even the cotton balls can’t soften.

Origins of Sweet and Salt

Sweet sap of Earth and trees
of land-locked lines rushing through
the orange plastic, running into
buckets, oh fill thy cup with sweet sap of Earth
boiled and taken to holy shades, cooked
and poured raw over fresh-baked buns.

Salt water of Ocean and cavernous depths
of the space between what land we see
what lands we don't, oh Mother Ocean,
borne of her amniotic waters, pulled into her
tides, her mouths, her great, powerful surges
what salty dangers wash us clean, and what do we offer her
but littered shores?

If only we could combine the two.
It would be like a chocolate-covered pretzel,
we'd suck and bite its sweet-salt pleasure just to enjoy
that moment.

My Two Selves or Like Having Two Seasons at Once

The scope of winter things:
the baby in the bed,
frost on the windshield;
a low pervasive hum is Spring

as silent snow falls and gathers unseen.
Just last week the moon hung low in a pale blue sky
still and more silent than night.
I wished for green

instead of last night's dishes in the sink.
There was the sun showing,
my rhythms, like plants, turn to its glowing,
a miracle on the brink.

I used to gather sticks for my survival
now I buy four loaves of fresh rye,
an engine idles nearby,
a street corner's revival.

There's stasis in the daily shuffle:
people, kids, papers, things, dust and dirt
move back and forth like love and hurt,
move back and forth between home and work, it's awful

how a Self can be divided.
It takes a child to show that life's alright
look at the shadow of the spider in the flashlight
it's here I am mom and poet, united.

Stolen Kiss

Time can always have blue,
the night star,
the white anchor above my head.

But not my heart
or my feet that leave the cobblestone
to jump into your embrace.

I curse time!

I want the weight of you.
Not just your hand like a delicate shadow
on my belly.

Not just your open mouth on mine,
your scruff on my neck,
no, this won’t do.

I don’t want pieces of you.

I want the cool finger of vision,
your hands down my spine,
our bodies wading shallow,

naked in a reflective pool.
Like two puddles coming together,
the meniscus of our

crescent shape
droplets
returning from the waterfall.

On your lips I tell you this,

taste our stolen kiss.
You don’t hear me
through the rush.

A Place to Curl Into

Recently I found a dead mouse
in the toe of my son’s ice skate. No, I’m sorry,
dead isn’t the word for it: Decomposed.

Forgiven any semblance of a life form or body, just

Dark, downy fur in tufts and
tiny, white dollhouse bones. Dried,
papery shell-skins of maggots. And, oh, the smell!
The stench was deafening, or whatever the word is
that means impairment to your olfactory sense.

Deafening and maddening yet I inhaled it
so that now the mouse is part of me.
Particulate pieces of its body
now inhabit mine.

We all want that place to curl into

be it a shoe, warm house, or someone’s
pair of lungs with its many winding passageways.