forgiving.

on the way to you

was writing verses about you
done with writing realized
was headed in the wrong direction

……Vera Pavlova  (Translated by Derek Walcott)

So instead of inserting your name against the one inch line where words go, I added mine. I have spent these months learning my way out of your presence, but it is my own that has left me this alone.

Last night, I sat beside another and we spoke about forgiveness. When your syllable came up, I could feel the noise of your teeth and spine. This used to make me curdle, but I am learning that to move on, one must move through.

There are humans out there walking out of marriages. Leaving children behind or stains of sterling silver on fingers. A poet recently asked me if I ever wanted to get married again. Again. As though I have already. And now I realize that I have. If marriage is a union, I have engaged in such. And if the opposite is separation, I have felt that as well. So would I do this again? Yes. And no. I am housed inside that no, until I forgive. All this time, I thought it was you, but it’s been me all along.

I need to forgive me.

Years ago, I traveled to the Netherlands, hunting. With weaponry of tiny red notebook (given to me by a handsome dreamer) and black ink pen, I spent every day searching for something in me to care about. I wrote poems with strangers, smoked pot with a beautiful German who gave me strict directions that life is about getting lost. Maps are meant to be written on, not listened to. He told me lost is where one is found. So each day, I hopped buses and walked new streets, misplacing direction. I gathered stories by people in need of sharing them. I ate an expensive meal with a stranger who wanted to know all about poetry and life in New York. I sang a memorial of candlelight and tears in a church. I was desperately trying to forgive all of my selves.

None of this is easy and when love leads us on, it is distracting. And terrifyingly beautiful.

I forgive you.

All this music I distract myself with and the food I fondle with my teeth and tongue and the poems and long walks in cracked air and the conversations with strangers and the ways in which I grow addicted to chaos and grey……..leads me here.

Just a few days ago, I articulated [one of] my trauma[s] into a box and sent it toward the west. I am writing my way out of these bones. Metamorphosing into something I can connect to and trust. All those years I called myself an atheist because I could not believe in myself (so how could I possibly believe in an other).

I’ve inserted my name into this meditation. Repetition will lead me forward…closer to who or what I want to believe in. A different kind of union between self and love.

where were you before you got here.

“A liar can reproduce the feeling that a wilderness does. In Sufism, ‘the pupil of the eye’ is the owner of each member of the body, even the heart, and each part becomes a tool under its lens. It is in and through and with the pupil of the eye that the catch locks between just-being and always-being. The less focused the gesture, the more true to the eye and the heart it is. You are progressing at one level and becoming more lost at another.”       –Fanny Howe.

Here, I move forward. From this distance between gender of collarbone and gender of calves, I am noticed. I notice.

Everywhere in this body, trees. And all the branches that curl around me attached to the others are not attached to me.

All this skin– that will soon be paper– drips of rain and afternoon excursions. Sap replaces blood. Grass is my footwear.

I am itchy, but wait for a darling poet to lean against me, and rub out my knots.

This quest for love has gotten me lost again. This map is torn at the corner and missing a slice of middle america.

I’ve used my passport enough times to understand how to present it.

I’ve been hired as a muse. I get paid to read poems and _________ .

How many clicks of heel or appointments of analysis or carvings of life into flesh to prove containment of love for myself.

I asked them to fall in love with me again but my letter got lost and they keep moving further and further into the wild. There is no internet access in the ocean.

Meditate ten minutes every mo(u)rning, then fall asleep from the germs housing a riot in your body. Awake eight days later to lunch of salt-water diet and handkerchiefs.

“For some persons, meditation, contemplation, prayer indicate that there is an emptiness already built into each body and it is that which (paradoxically) makes them feel at home in the cosmos.”     –Fanny Howe.

How not to get used to all this. Stop reading local newspaper and internet scroll-downs. Stop passing by handsome humans without asking them for coffee. Make the first move sometimes. Live inside present-tense, realizing the past can still guide you but does not have to define you. Where there is empty can be filled. Do not wait for another to fill it. Every breath is a possible movement toward self-kindness and forgiveness. This body does not have to be labeled. It can gather up a respective blur from each intentional push away from gender-normativity. And when love is found, they will appreciate the way your bones articulate their political movement. There is no such thing as stopping. Everything continues…..so continue on.

push. force away. drive out.

The first time I pushed you away was on a Wednesday and everyone kept talking about the sun and its entropy. You were not too wooden because I pushed my way through. As a courtesy, I sucked out every single splinter from all your years as a hummingbird and I think it all derived from that first time you noticed me notice you noticing me.

The next time was Autumn. Too much wine dove into me like an aggressive Olympian with too much spring and muscle. Is one ever ready for that kiss that does not need to be directed. Is one ever ready for the moment one’s body is accepted even in its pothole’d-caution taped-crime scene investigation? There must have been wind because you knelt down to pick up leaves, newly catapulted from nearby trees. You took a needle and thread, which you always kept in your right pocket, and sewed these leaves to me. Called them my wings. Told me this wind could lead me anywhere I wanted to go. I chose your hands.

There was that time we slipped on a rainstorm. The last time. We never believed in umbrellas or boots. You fed me drops of cloud blood and we ate meals of dandelion roots. You hated that I was a hippie, until you became one and you loved the knots behind my knees until you stopped.

Love never remains when fear is much stronger. To be ready for another, one must be ready for one’s self. These breaths are meaty and congested. This chalk outline has rusted. So how about now? How about this one? When do you really know that it is safe to take down the warning signs? To let go. To give in. To be at peace with an other.

some thoughts on magic and measurements.

…..first Sunday of new year and toes begin to weep away frozen hangnails

 

I traveled under

the brooklyn queens

expressway

over black and grey

snow. Got lost inside

a taxi cab just for you

to read my skin again.

Yesterday, this face was called unpretty. What is it about measurements and masculinity that causes others to feel so threatened or disrobed.

After the romantic comedy ordered for free on computer screen, she removed shirt and began to cut her hair. Each slice was deliberate. Hair was pressed into last plastic bag meant for sandwiches not split ends. This pile of locks is for the woman who lives underground and all around me. When others visit her, they bring rocks. I give her my hair.

After three decades of back-and-forth addiction, I may have settled on this last one. Call it magic or movement. Cannot be purchased from neighbor who cooks it in his kitchen. Or bodega window where if you only want one and not the whole pack, that can be arranged. Or from lover who stores it in jars meant for fireflies or love notes. This drug is less visible and cannot be hidden in pockets or up nose. Last night, when I chased it all across Brooklyn, I fell inside winter potholes, hidden by frozen water. Most drugs can be purchased; this one needs to be found.

We can talk about our gender all day, but when I think about your mouth, I am reminded of the canoe I clung to years ago. You make me think of rivers and walls removed. You make me think of yellow and that photograph of costa rican sunset that hired a muralist to create such an exquisite marriage of red and orange. You make me think of oxygen and the ways in which you have trained yours to communicate with the earth to wrap itself around oceans and caves. You make me think of the labels sewed into the roots of my skin and the sensation of digging these restrictions up and out of my body.

Last week, this body was called gaunt. What is it about binding my body into a carefully unedited story that causes others to fear starvation.

Here is [some] modern love. This has everything to do with the love affair I find myself in with my osteoblasts. And the night I thought about Rebel’s question of rebirth through orgasm. So, I found my nude while rain wrung out its sad against my windows. And I did not think about addiction to magic and melting measurements. Instead, I gained entrance to the parts of me I am strange to. It is too soon to call it rebirth; maybe just a new devotion to the complication and deeply erotic overwhelm of my self.

on being.

The world has accused you of not being a world./You retort with an acceptance speech/scripted by beautiful gangsters. You live under/the thumb of contracts hoisted/like minarets. Landslides court you/with a hospice of deserted/checkout counters and comic strip altars.[1]   

My identity doesn’t fit on a napkin. I tell this to the well-dressed poet etching out a diagram of his thesis onto paper meant to wipe faces. He makes identity sound so easy and maybe it is for him, so I keep listening. Soon, I am lost in the distraction of his neck, whose tie seems birthed from its skin while the one around my neck seems far clumsier. I tell him it is not so easy to figure one’s self out and that even when we think we’ve got it down, something shifts. We are not static beings, I explained. And for the ones who think they are, I speculate on their true level of actualization (or their rush).

I am not the same me as I was ten years ago. Or five. Or even last week.

The lover who sits beside me gazes at my fingertips pressing into alphabet. This lover is tattooed with my handwriting across the lines of its skin. We gain splinters from each embrace and sift through our varying degrees of lust. This courtship of elocution does not have to end. Instead, we leave each other mid-sentence so we always have a reason to go back.

---

[1] Italics by poet, Vincent Torro

Your/map/is marred/by borders/that become a sieve/of history, straining the wild/from the willing. Missions and malls encroach your sun swathed/villitas where flowers battle and murals proliferate like thirsty brushfires. 

How much of this you can read, I am not sure. How much of this you already know, you do not need to clarify. I have recently been solicited by an atlas. I am wooed in river slang and late-night mountain chants that chisel away the moan of my loneliness. At each border, we dislodge our jagged wounds and squat over the evidence of our whispers. Some things do not need to be shared with those in search of clues to our existence. Instead, we sift and call this a lung excavation or gender bending or self-love.