From the Diary

        for Neill

April, 2006

My body is at it again,
ever-demanding like a man,
yet I’ve never felt more like a moon -
the way it folds into the sky,
examining itself before refleshing.
I am so greedy with my body,
too greedy with my light.

I went to the beach at night,
unfurled the sand, the wet grey
unveiling a whiter, dryer earth.
A bony finger wrote: yes, this is me.
My cells, my sickness, semiotic things
telling me what to want.
What coral. What misnomer.
What jellyfish bubbling up
its medusa – a gelatinous bell
or ball. I want them all.

October, 2006

Here he is telling me
I’m not me. How can that be?
I was born with the same large eyes.
They still vault clouds, however
dark and cyclonic, and make a ghost
of them. Most of them.

It’s true that their sameness
has gone away, and like an artist
I keep the special ones for myself.
The shapely kind. The thunder kind.

I used to be the quiet kind.

February, 2007

Yes, I said, I’m too cold
to be here so gently with him,
too synthetic and metal.

More and more, I shove
the steel into the tree,
and the problem with

my problem is the world
becomes a translucent vapor,
refracts his face, symbolizes

his face becoming apparition.
I hate to be direct, but I’d rather
see him cold and halfway than see

a sharp, pointed, disappointed face
peering curiously into the problem.
Yes, I said, the problem.

June, 2007

Why are you so much of me?
You’re a nerve coiled up
like a spring, reacting, pushing
up into a new dimension of lover.

I’m enraged. I flew uncertainly to China
and wandered a Buddhist temple.
The silence. The incense stuffed
itself into my nostrils – here girl

here’s your smoke and air.
I’m not even Buddhist.
I didn’t touch anything.
I breathed and I wished

you out of my skull cracks
and the tracks left stoned in the dirt.
I left my lumped lips to the atmosphere.
I can’t stand being here.

January, 2008

I snaked into my love,
healed and freshened.
But he has become plural.
I etched my name in him
the same way a prisoner
counts on the walls.
90 days of me trying
to understand a flower
undulating into a flame.
This fire game I played
blackened itself on his chest.
The rest of my rest
became his thirsty name.

September 24th, 2008

Neill, I’m not as lunar as I thought.
No gravity. No cycles telling
the tide or quiet light looking
into lovers moving between worlds.
I’m not the ether or near it.

I preceded you, then made you
believe I always came first,
but my firstness was a cell,
a bead of dark ricocheting
between your overwhelming self.

I know, Neill. This part should
be the heart of what I mean,
but what has meaning got to do
with anything? I contorted
and bent like a reed in the wind
doesn’t mean I broke,

but I did.