an urgency of.

What time is it.
Soon we are given back our lost hour and this makes me think that someone will arrive at my door and ring the bottom bell. They will have gold and red weaved fabric purchased for three dollars at summer stoop sale in Brooklyn. Inside, will be my 20’s.

Not currency……………………….years. 

Sometimes I feel an urgency to locate someone to root with. To impregnate me with poems that I birth out in painful contractions. Each time my water breaks, I will instruct my mate to leave the liquid alone.

I’ll need to pick out the sounds and search out the rhythm. 

We will have tiny jars of spices we’ve dried out from markets. Footprints of travelers in each room of our home. The sky will wear us as though it were a giant envelope and we are letters.

I will sift through my 20’s, then stuff them into my pocket like loose change. No need to peruse much longer than a few minutes. To remember. To recall. Split second reminders of life. That one. That time. That dislocation of breath. That excruciation of movement. The pills. Dark. Water in handfuls or handshakes. Rain. Locked out of car. Break-in. Burnt sienna. Across country. Moonsongs. Malbec. Macaroni and cheese. The musk of that one. Bookshops and the fire that tried to remove 27. And then. And then.

*

On Sundays, I peel away the folds of newspaper and bring out the section of Styles. In it, Modern Love. Here is where I find my salt and inclination toward the romantic. Here is where I also view the ones who are looking to stitch themselves to another. A lover once asked me why I look at the photos of strangers announcing their marriage. I don’t recall my answer, but what I was thinking:

This loneliness is unsympathetic and I am searching for photographs to remind me of what [could] bloom beside me. And I search for something to recognize. And [maybe] I search for me.

*

There is so much music in here. And someone inside this note whistles a tune that wraps itself around my expanding waste. I translate this high-pitched air as an urgency to remain. Or persistence to see what waits.

*

Our someone is still out there. Or maybe….they’ve just arrived. What matters is that with each sleep we gain insight into the dreams of our lymph nodes. I’ve got one beside right breast and it reminds me to wait. And it reminds me to [always] touch the parts of me that fear. And one day, that mate will arrive again. Like a swelling. Like a reminder that even in urgency, there is a need for patience. 

         `

all this can be used for something else

Walk the beach long enough and you will find a shell with a peep hole and when you bring it to your hazel or blue or grey or spotted-owl-brown, you will see beyond ocean and fog. You will add this shell to the others, collected on a Monday when trauma trips you almost off this earth and a human arrives with an overripe banana and a bottle of water and a car, wheezing from lack of gasoline. There is no driftwood on this beach, but your eyes find bits of animal and ghosts of storm from months before. Your feet are nude and ankles too as questions arrive like how can love carve so many scars on our bodies and how can we breathe when loss is like a subway collapsing on lungs and all this is part of life but what parts of life are meant to make you want to remain. A big enough shell can be used as a soap dish or to hold quarters for laundry or as a ladle for thick soup or rice. That curved branch left all alone over there can be used to hold things like toilet paper or discarded love notes. The water is too cold but so is life, so you jump in with clothes on because the shyness on your skin is too scratched up to be seen. All this can be used for something else. You are offered a souvenir of black-and-white magnet of this day and it sticks to your refrigerator of the time you almost drowned. You think of the ocean as your body: salt, loss, death, wave, deepness, peed in, grainy and dangerous. You want to crawl toward its bottom to find a way out. On the way out, you notice the seagulls and fall in love with their aggression; you are jealous of their flight. Home is many avenues and city blocks away but you’ve got all these shells to crush into your skin like armor. Sometimes life is about one day and how to get into it and how to move through it.