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| my mother turned fifty this week,
i made her a card out of newspaper cutouts
and stirred impatiently through dinner, running
my fingers down the edge of the fabric napkin folds,
when my mother was born it was the nineteen fifties
and she had to wear skirts until seventh grade and i always
imagine the fences to be particularly white and
particularly symmetrical,
i always considered sixty to be the first old age, but
i suppose that when my mother turns sixty and
continues to soak her gray hair red i will have to think of
a number that is less impending.
this week is the first that has been consistently warm
in the winter way that can only be caused by
excess car exhaust and smoke that lingers in the air
and makes us think that we are okay
just long enough for daffodils to grow.
my neighbors yard has stems,
i snapped the shutter around a patch
until the film exposed itself and the little gray squares
bleached out and forgot themselves,
cut them out and pasted them
on my wall where the paint is tearing and
if everything appears different years from now
and my hair is graying at the roots i will probably
still think that the fences have maintained the same shade.
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I fell in love first at twelve,
a fifteen and a half hand
part arabian with silver hair
and a long back i picked
from a newspaper classified,
the tin roofed farm was
sixty miles south of here,
my mother was
hesitant. The first boy came the same year,
hardhitting-
with coarse dark hair and
calluses, the kind of boy
that gets inside your head
and makes you imagine
his hands and his lower lip
and the passenger seat-
and he doesn't even have
his learners permit. I don't quite remember when
my dreams of horses became
less exquisite, just wrapping
my arms all the way around
Madeline's soft grey neck and
clenching at her withers,
letting tears seep into her
winter coat, I remember
watching the trailer pull away
and clenching my fists together
and knowing I could never love a boy
that way, and that I would never
be the same. Today I talked to a woman who
takes her son to buy hay weekly
for the horses, she feeds it every night.
today the barn smelled a little bit
different, like new hampshire
and the hay stems
that had each been removed and lay
in the aisleway and it all seemed so rustic,
pastoral, lovely in this way that the
entire scene seemed to unwind as
you looked at it and made you remember
things that were worth loving.
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| once someone told me that writing is kind of like lying
and i attempted my first lie at age seven, when
my mother sent me to camp on little white bus
headed for fifty seventh street and i spent my snack money
on a silver ring that refracted light-the moment she asked
where i had gotten it i burst out in a streams of tears
that trickled down the sides of my cheeks
and tasted like seawater or maybe it was naivety.
i used to want to grow up badly, still do,
through my preteen years i would try on
my mothers dresses until they slid off my shoulders
and reached the floor and it was almost nice
to know i still could cower beneath her.
the other day i smoked a cigarette just to see what it might be like-
because sometimes pretending to be something is okay, isn't it?
sometimes i pretend i am my mother, with her
red hair and nicotine fits and not knowing what it feels like
to have your thighs touch underneath your waist ever,
and it's so much more of a rush than
trying to be seventeen or eighteen or twenty,
but i guess that's love for you.
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| I.
we went down to the creek and
scratched the soles of our bare feet
until our toes appeared ashen.
you made me a bracelet out of straw,
it floated downstream towards ferns
and decaying treetrunks and
castles made of pebbles.
we chased it all afternoon, clung to
overhanging branches and laughed,
you tumbled sideways ungracefully
and stained your blue jean shorts crimson.
in the emergency room in the little grey hospital
with a sign with a misspelling, you received three
small stitches in your knee and your mother
hated me for it.
II.
audacious and adolescent,
you breathed hazy smoke past my face,
it floated over the water and lingered
in the thin air while we shivered
by the water bank in our church clothes.
you tossed your copper pony tail and
said that come summer, we would travel
across the entire country like in "on the road",
sleep in dingy motels and take buses.
III.
you said the trees were our spines,
outstretched against the heather grey sky,
able to survive january with impenetrable
permanence.
there were days when the water was high,
engulfing the shore surrounding it and
leaving the land fragmented.
we rolled up our jeans
and carelessly drug our feet across the sand,
i told you i would always love you and
you said that love was fleeting,
that you can never really love someone so
much that you don't run when they begin to
shatter around you.
i didn't understand.
IV.
my house has a sunken in wall
that eats metal and regurgitates smoke.
in the old days, people burnt so much ash and wood
to save their bodies from the frigid temperature changes
that the air outside turned a putrid shade of gray
and swallowed their towns and cities and children and
they thought it was god punishing them.
(we laugh about it now.)
a machine will silver teeth tore apart the waterbed.
they built houses there,
you left for a grey walled place for having wrists
that were too thin to hold on to, your sisters
hair is red and sometimes i sit with her when it rains.
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| last night frost appeared, iced over all the roads in our city
until they resembled glass and when i woke up the sun was
protruding from the sky, i felt lost in your livingroom.
i drove home and the the radio played a song about loving and leaving,
or maybe it was living, i don't quite remember.
when i was younger, i used to believe that
if you left a glass of water on your windowsill it would bring rain,
when i told my aunt she laughed and i cried and still harbored hope
that my tears would induce precipitation.
that night my mother filled the little plastic cup halfway with sinkwater
and told me it had showered overnight, i was overjoyed, my parents
still laugh about it and tell strangers.
years later, august continues to bring dry spells that last weeks on end,
plants wither and their roots are torn from the ground, forcing replacement,
the air grows colder and showers ice shards for consolation,
i am still foolish.
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