When you see a seventy-pound octopus squeeze
through a hole the size of a half-dollar coin, you
finally understand that everything you learn about
the sea will only make people you love say You lie.
There are land truths that scare me: a purple orchid
that only blooms underground. A German poet
buried in the heart of an oak tree. The lighthouse man
who used to walk around the streets at night
with a lighted candle stuck into his skull. But winters
in Florida—all the street corners have sad fruit
tucked into the curb, fallen from orangery truckers
who take corners too fast. The air is sick with citrus
and yet you love the small spots of orange in walls
of leafy green as we drive. Your love is a concrete canoe
that floats in the lake like a lead balloon, improbable
as a steel wool cloud, a metal feather. This is the truth:
I once believed nothing on earth could make me say magic.
You believe in the orange blossom tucked behind my ear.
When I do the dishes I think too much.
I think of the way objects accumulate as a kind of representation
of an individual mind.
A projection of my American intellect.
Intellect that feasted until the whole brain
moved into decline,
until it stopped forever
its fanatical growth
and settled down at twenty-three
to a permanent size.
Now my intelligence is a line of hieroglyphs,
a blouse fluttering.
I am barely able
to breathe. I cannot appreciate
rain on my bike. Or stand
on a balcony for too long
without throwing something off of it. My mind
walks slowly across the abyss.
My mind thinks of itself as a shipwreck.
My intellect is like a grist of bees
surrounding buffalo
in secluded forest.
My mind rides hard with horses
under a sky and moon
that issue chromatic variants of white.
My mind
finishes you. Love’s cigarette lit
in love’s one free hand reading you a poem
that begins: must then all humans love like this?
"in the thought of your wrist bone
resting against any part of my body"
If a man is only as good as his word,
then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours.
The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian
in the same sentence— that really turns me on.
The way you describe the oranges in your backyard
using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath.
I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue
wrapping around your diction
until listening become more like dreaming
and dreaming became more like kissing you.
I want to jump off the cliff of your voice
into the suicide of your stream of consciousness.
I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die.
I want to map it out with a dictionary and points
of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart
than a strategy for communication.
I want to see where your words are born.
I want to find a pattern in the astrology.
I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions.
I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments,
in the haiku of your epiphanies.
I want to know all the names you’ve given your desires.
I want to find my name among them,
‘cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word.
I want to thank whoever told you
there was no such thing as a synonym.
I want to throw a party for the heartbreak
that turned you into a poet.
And if it is true that a man is only as good as his word
then, sweet jesus, let me be there
the first time you are speechless,
and all your explosive wisdom becomes
a burning ball of sun in your throat,
and all you can bring yourself to utter is, oh god, oh god.
The year you thought you were dying
was a really great year.
You ate licorice on the beach in January,
swam rum sauced in the icy Pacific
wearing only blue rubber flippers
and your grandfather’s dog tags
and for the first time, it felt good to be cold,
it felt good to be so cold it hurt.
You doted on pigeons and stray cats.
You ate honey peanuts in the park
and re-watched every movie that ever made you
cry, including Steve Martin’s The Jerk.
You tattooed your entire body in Pablo Neruda
translations and cherry blossoms.
You blew all your money on comfortable shoes
and one of those mattresses made from NASA space foam.
You slept the sleep of assassins and kings—remorseless.
You bought chocolate bars from all the kids who came
to your door and stock-piled them in your broom closet.
You left them in your will to THE SECRETARIES,
every last one of them.
You volunteered at the local senior center playing bingo.
When you won you forced to whole room to take shots of
Welch’s grape juice and sing the national anthem.
And you spent time with your favorite lover.
You let him get close.
Secret suicide note, nonsense alibi close.
shampoo scent dissection close.
Close enough to memorize your tells,
hand you your ass at pillow poker,
make your defenses look like the silly decoupage
of paper angels and Victorian roses that they were.
Close enough that your laughter
punched him with mint gum puffs.
Close enough that his sighs drove circles
in the parking lots of your sighs,
close enough to measure your ribcage
in wrists, your palms in lips.
So close, you didn’t even notice
your heart speed up, then stop,
when he kissed you so hard,
when the New Year’s ball dropped down.
