how to let go

Maybe you just do it, unclench from the lip of the great, wide
unknown, whatever you envision as the cataclysmic drop into total
failure, or disappointment, or disaster, some precipitous nothingness
where you refuse, in your hardest heart, to locate yourself. But
what’s better than nothingness, that blank and soundless freefall?
How is it possible to enter, gracefully, a room
already crowded with furniture?

Here are your feet, your hands, your skin.
Here is the sound of your breathing lungs.
Here is the way you manage to make a meal
out of the castoffs in your cupboard.
Here is east and west. Here is 6 o’clock in the morning.
Here is midnight. Here is a piece of notebook paper.
Here is your history.
Here is your wisdom.
Falling will not change any of that.

as slow as I need to

Riding the steep grade toward the bridge,
I’m in low gear, calves clenched, motorists taking the hill
like it was nothing, like an afterthought,
and I’m wondering, mid-incline, if my legs
will give out, if I will need to unpin myself
from the pedals and walk the rest of the way,
wondering if I will ever take these hills
as joyrides, as cheerful obstacles, if I have it
in me to lean into the thrum of the hard wind
and barrel through, if I could dip any further
toward parallel, body symmetrical with road,
if I am capable of such alignment.

Last week, the day of reckoning, luggage
in hand, three trips to the garage to pick up
the rest, whatever I could muster in my car, leaving
for a greener pasture I’d yet to identify, I took
a last look at the mantle, where our picture was,
taken by your friend three summers ago when we were
in the airy prelude of love. How we leapt through
the streets for that camera, clutching at each other
like newfound objects. We were precious then, jewels
glinting in the June sun, dual sparklers of light,
and in the frame were are leaning in to kiss,
all smiles, all hope, like it was nothing, a joyride,
like the absence of a hard wind, which we could not have,
then, seen coming. That photograph, which was always
the first thing I saw entering our house, is now the last,
as I drag my red suitcase behind me, plucking the bits of mail
from the coffee table, gathering the ephemera of my evidence,
and shutting the door.

Days later, I am wondering if I made a mistake,
been too hasty, powering through this latest rough patch in
my heart’s highest gear, wondering if I’d worked the turns
with too much muscle, if I should have, instead,
simply walked the length of trouble however long it turned out to be,
concede to the granular passage of time. I told you I couldn’t match
your cadence, that I wanted a view, exhilaration,
a stretch of pure deliverance, you and me in tandem,
streaked with grace and good fortune, wind at our backs,
the whole of us sailing through air, almost weightless.

Of course here, on this hill, I am all weight, all plodding ordinariness,
slow as a turtle, the opposite of dazzle, and I’m thinking not of the crest,
or the view, or the blissful downhill just past the lip of the next bend.
The famous coastline on my left I barely notice.
Instead, I’m eying the road, this thoroughfare I realize, now, I’ve chosen
not for its smooth sailing but for its pull and ache, for the time it takes,
for the way it cajoles me to move as slow as I need to
and still stay upright. I picked this grinding passage,
this labored path around a city notorious for its hills
when I could have easily held reign over the flatter Avenues,
mightily notching up my mileage. But even sluggish and sweaty
I see I am moving through this terrain and its wrenching whimsy,
and spite of the wind, I am getting somewhere, I know it,
and it’s close.

fresh bicycle

On the long, flat straightaways, her mountain bike
does poorly against the sleek roadsters with their
tiny, thin tires, their double-digit gears. Her legs, pedaling
too hard, are like mud, like the sludge left behind construction sites,
drying tar under a hot sun. She's used to it by now, having saved
her money for furniture instead, for her rising rent,
for a writing class, for plane fare to Hawaii, so the fact
that not even 5 miles has gone by and already she's winded
doesn't rankle her much. This is what you get with the stocky body
of a Rockhopper, which in the altitude of Tamalpais fire roads
would serve her well, dodging ditches, poison oak,
the occasional lizard darting out for a brief moment in the light.
But with traffic, and pavement, and a sea of eager cyclists
taking to the road for a weekend spin in their fine Italian jerseys,
she is a nobody, a slow poke, a mole of the road, another hazard
to avoid, like young kids on their first rollerskates, the dog walkers
with their zigzagging menagerie. But she pushes on, stopping
once for a swig of her water bottle, a handful of walnuts,
half a peanut butter sandwich, then moves on through
Sausalito's tourist traps, up the long and narrow
torture of Bridgeway, until at last a vision of red-gold
pulls her into the parking lot of Vista Point to witness
the full span of the Golden Gate, that dutiful bridge
with its dual shock of splendors to the east and west,
and there she pauses, side-sore and sweaty, while the wind
makes a frenzy of her hair.

She needs a fresh bicycle. That much she knows, eying the climb
into the Headlands, thinking of Berkeley's hillside topography.
She wants these rides, the winding redwood-studded spectaculars,
a length of road she can sail along and lose herself in, legs nestled
in their pedals, body clicked into frame, some new alignment
that lets her take the road in her best stride.

But what she's is riding now is familiar and worn,
and there's a certain allegiance to the rust under the seat,
the torn-up handlebars, the labored clacking of the gears rotating
into their slots, but also how sturdy everything feels when she reaches
a summit at last and prepares for the coast downhill, how
she can ride the flip side of Camino Alto and feel invincible,
like nothing could touch her except the wind, and it's to this
she clings, even as her lungs protest the return trip home,
the way her bike has kept her safe and upright, how she has fallen
not even once, how precisely she has known her brakes.
This is what will be hardest to let go,
despite the roads that will open before her. She will have to start
over, discover the eccentricities of new gears, the magic trick
of new pedals, the angle and shape of her body adapting to
a different kind of aerodynamics, and she knows she will be tentative
with her speed and bravado, hugging the shoulder for comfort,
because it's hard to have to learn to ride all over again,
no matter how long you've already gone, or where you've been.

what the moon might have said

I am no sliver, no fraction, no trivial ornament of night.
I am not the partial view between the clash of skyscrapers.
I do not wait, timidly, while the fog passes, and cars squirrel
through evening traffic, until the fractious noise of the city subsides.
I am no flash, no flicker, no bud of spring.
I am no atom of memory, no fickle forgiveness, no splinter of love.

Despite the month's tidal shadows, the busy street scene where it is
hard enough to keep eyes level to the crosswalk, the clumsy drivers,
the endless trilogy of light; despite the rude awakening of sunrise,
the clamor of business getting done, decisions being made, acts of
finality and closure; despite the disillusion that life keeps slipping,
moments precious as emeralds, how each day spirals into oblivion;

despite this, I am as whole and wide as ever,
the only landscape you will see from so far and still exclaim
over its beauty, its metaphor, its tenderness and grace,
how you will exact from my shadows a shape reminiscent of yours,
how I will become your only witness, your lunar confidante,
how you will call to me in your darkest hour
and find something of radiance again, a slice of you
perfectly still, and glowing.

caesura

she takes a minute to slice an avocado,
spreads it over two pieces of bread, a little
lemon, salt, pepper, and sitting at the kitchen
table she realizes she can hear nothing but the hum
of the refrigerator, the entire house empty of
dogs and lovers and the attention that must be paid
to living things. she has forgotten what avocados
taste like when eaten alone, in a quiet house,
on an early Tuesday afternoon, that green silk
of fruit, the citrus tang alongside, the sweet burn
pepper always leaves behind. sometimes she wonders
if she is meant for solitude, riding the long stretch
of such a highway. but no. what she needs most is the pause,
a caesura from the clamor and clatter of love, a bit of shade,
some corner of the house untouched, untethered, hers.

only from here can she see the splendor of the living room tumult,
the half-read magazines, chew toys metastasizing on the rug, the couch
where, later, she will lean back to watch television or
rub feet or order takeout. from here, she can almost trace
the evening that will unfold after the avocado wanes
and disappears from her plate, how the light will eventually descend
and the sky will purple, then darken altogether, how the house
will begin its evening buzz, that other reprieve from all that is lonely
or missing, and the fireplace will crackle into another kind of life,
spitting its embers skyward, where the stars are.

Walking Into the Room of Myself

I saw her dance and wanted to move just like her
but these are the feet I’ve got.

Don’t tell me I sway just as beautifully.
Don’t tell me the story of my artful surrender.
I was not artful. I did not surrender.
I clacked, awkwardly, toward the center of the wooden floor
until it occurred to me I wasn’t the student for this,
until I realized I wasn’t willing to learn the steps required.
I felt the rhythm long enough to understand
this was not the tool, the diving board, my launch pad
into greatness. Maybe I would not be great. Maybe I would
never know, even, how to be good, how to carry my body
through the world as if on a pillow of air.
Maybe I would forever limp away,
my heart flagellating itself with deprecation and gloom.

Except this.

I was built for the accidental, for the elusory, for the split-second
grace of a cresting wave before it tumbles into obsolescence.
The ear-shaped pine cone tossed aside for its imperfection,
the dying pepper plant, broken glass, the sound of coughing
from the back room – these are my flawed cohorts,
my feckless playmates, the orchestra pit from which
an eccentric disharmony sneaks out after the professionals
have laid down their horns, gone outside to smoke a cigarette.
Once they’ve left, this is a place of derelict wonder,
of castoff elegance, of a world brimming with every exquisite
uncertainty, and in this room, I am never clumsy, or wrong or lost.
I am as close to home as ever.

not the poetry I wanted

Saturday, the hint of bad weather, waking warm
in a bed with your legs still imprinted,
a slight groove in your pillow. You woke
hours ago, from a nightmare, while I dreamed
of wedding outfits, of arriving late and underdressed.
By then you were purging a bloody scene
into your notebook, shocked at the horror you'd conjured,
and maybe that's why this morning, despite the easy lyricism
of a weekend, despite the long stretch of a Saturday,
I'm finding love off-kilter, tender to the touch, a bruise on my skin
whose origins I can't identity. This is not the poetry I wanted,
even rising out of a less-then-perfect sleep, but here were are,
love and I, facing each other distractedly and with a little suspicion,
and all the while the clouds overhead are thickening, weighted down
with the pummel of a storm last night's news forecasted, and I know
it's coming but who knows when, and I wonder if you will stop having
such terrible dreams, and if I will be able to arrive fully dressed
to the day of reckoning, if we will fall into each other like the last lines
of a poem, a pair of branches swaying, persistently, in the heaviest rain.