Those Red Sneakers

I am those red sneakers with polka dotted laces so old that feet shouldn't wear them but I can't throw them out because they remember when red converse sneakers were still made in the USA and not overseas in some dragon of a factory where tiny underpaid hands worked for hours for me, or us, and dreamt of some pot of gold at the end of an 80-hour workweek rainbow myth.

These shoes used to, like a lot of things, come from somewhere in my backyard, beside the flowers whose names I know and whose garden's smell I can remember even when I'm not there or haven't been there for years, the years these red sneakers have seen me through, from my room to the mountains to down home and away, overseas, overrun and nomadic, a twenty-something stealing through worlds in red sneakers, polka dotted laces, through shifting opinions to this.

And I remember when I bought those red ones, at the shoe store downtown, the man in the green shirt smiled and said, "This is our last pair still made in the USA. Nike bought Converse and now they're making them in China." He said cheaper, most likely, more profitable. And even though the rubber on the toes didn't line up quite right they were red, and I bought them, and they brought me here.

Sidewalk Scene

I sneeze and the bum

clutching his can of Four Loko

says "fuck you."

This is the world we live in,

where the sidewalk smells like fish.

And in my dreams

I am always alone.

To Swim Alone

Tomorrow I will go to the water's edge. I will look out at the lake. First across to the other side, where the tree line and water lap together. Then to the sky, shielding my eyes from the sun. I'll probably point, say something about the white and the blue of it. How it matches the color of the water, and wonder which is it – who matching whom? I will take off my clothes in the sunlight. I'll fumble with the socks. When I am wearing nothing, I will wade in, hands folded at my breast, scared, wondering. I will study the feeling of the sediment beneath my feet. I will study the bits at the bottom, then the deep. I will look out at the goal. While pine needles stir at my ankles, while I long to look back to you – your body, your calm reassuring smile, you voyeur's desire – I will focus on the surface. Then, I will break it. Hands first. Hair streaming behind. Skin cold eager to fill with blood. Eyes shut. I will dive out alone. It will be okay.

Xerxes Avenue, Minneapolis

This flat place of my birth
where every neighborhood looks
like mine.
These freeways my once-young parents
saw to the hospital three times,
the grasses we picnicked on,
gardens of zucchinis and babysitters
who stole from us,
that lake where they met--
lifeguard trunks and fishing poles
and the never knowing what was to come.
Grey summer sky that does not
let up, let me crawl back
into you where I came from,
then come out again 26 years ago.
I am my mother now--I want to be
her child again.

Chance Spring

We find each other every few years

in bookstores or bars or

the lyrics of some unheard song,

collisions as inevitable as spring.

This time, you have developed new habits,

squinting, laughing a little quieter,

you are less earnest. 

And all the color has been drained 

by winter from the trees outside--

the grasses, the gleamless river water,

this negligent sun.

Perhaps we will not ever have 

spring, that anticipation of familiar 

buds to edge out and flower on all the same branches. 

I used to think we always would, or 

hoped, amid these chanced

seasoned meetings of the heart, and

that seed we don't wish for, but have.

The New Hour

This is the end, finishing

the way all things do:

seasons of baseball,

birthday parties, bells

ringing.

One day we are bounding along,
cheering and listening,
making bets and lists.
Then find ourselves walking amid

the strewn bags of

stepped-on peanuts,

the cake-smeared party hats,
the lost bets.

There is a ringing through the body

of the quiet tongue.

No chatter or music,
just the silent new hour.

Anonymity

There's something so sadly satisfying in

being alone--not loneliness, that creature of the quiet house,

with its dripping tap, mouse droppings, cool linoleum floor,

and echo of street cars, long and tunnel-like and lined

with doors. that will always seem lonely.

But satisfaction in being on the busy street--the coffee

house, beside a crowded couch without a familiar soul

outside your cup. Famous strangers, unfamiliar neighbors,

a mess of stranger faces outside front doors.

It is this to love in the city--mother metropolis, with her

trash blizzards, fast-forward, where-am-I, grab-the-map

delirium, where we all mess together. Our cyclone home,

in which we are often lost in the crowd,

that loves us little back.

Sprinter

I am a sprinter.

A poetry sprinter.

Rolling down the one

hundred meters of

the moment, my lines

are under ten seconds.

A brief flash of

bright nylon, spinning legs

and then the finish line;

the runner's rapid breath

then the cheering that echoes after.

Spin Me, Spin Me

I imagine how I will speak of this time once it has passed. I was in one of my poetry phases, I'll say. Reading it all. Writing what I could muster and turning, in the moments in between, back to all the books I loved as a kid. I was reading picture books while drinking strong coffee because the way it made my heart race matched how I felt my heart should feel. I was taking medications that made me sick, and imagining that somehow there was someone out there reading my blog. I knew there wasn't. But, at the same time, I liked lying to myself.

It felt the way one feels when riding sitting backwards on a train – going where you need to go, but not seeing the road there quite as you should see it. In fact, sometimes I'd sit that way and I pretended I was going to end up where I'd come from – rewinding time to arrive at my past. Trying to get a grip on how I ended up there: how I ended up here, with the toe of my boot toeing a plastic bag full of shit on the sidewalk in front of my apartment.

I knew I was on the wheel, I'll say. That wheel of fortune that spins us ever round then round again, three Greek witches behind us. I knew where I was on that wheel, I'll say. Head down, falling down. I'd spend the rest of the year sitting there at the bottom of the circle, looking up, looking around, counting down for the turning of the tide up.

Spin, spin me, I want to say. Spin me at the top of this hill so that I can bend back in your arms and look at the city that way I love – the lights sprawled across the ceiling and the floor an endless sky.

We Used To

we used to love grandly

large words scrawled on big walls,

big syllables to loud rapid waters,

rivers had nothing on our force;

seasons could come and go as surely.

Now, we scrawl tiny sentences

on little sheets of paper

then fall asleep, alone,

with them all around us like pebbles.

On the floor

between the sheets

underneath the pillows

upon which we sleep

and dream, and dream,

and dream.

Every Nine Miles

There you are, behind a fence,
picking up my 19-year-old ass
from swimming lessons.
My whistle is still around my neck.
Your socks are new.
And you look as if
you’ve just committed
a crime that I will never know about.
Then we drive away in that big white car,
the one that takes and takes.
One gallon every nine miles.

November

Two girls in the park
parked on a patchwork quilt
on the wet green grass
linger and drink milkshakes.
It is November.
But they pretend it is summer still
and if we keep up lies long enough
soon we will close in on the truth.

Unfoldings

Years ago, our sailboat, slicing through saltwater, was suddenly amid one thousand dolphins, slicing too through a sky-shaded surface. I watched, clicking pictures, and in them there is the back of my hand pointing, the fins of hundreds, and the windy chop. But in my life, each moment is the beginning of a dream, or the stoop to a doorway that leads off. There, from that moment, I am not watching them from the bow but diving in. I reach out underwater toward their white bellies, their smiling snouts, and sink deep alongside their rubber torsos, my own beige one an ornament on the blue.
I can apply these exits anywhere: insert them into escape-worthy moments and they become trapdoors down and away. Such as when he left, closing the door behind him. I returned to my shaded room. But in that next world over, it developed differently from there: our whole existence together unfolded. Much like a film of a paper crane being made, then played in reverse—this soft winged creature we have built loses his wings, the sharp beak. And the great worked hands of the universe smooth out each fold, each crease, and bring us back with thumbs and a table surface to the broad pieces of paper we were before all this. He, a squared golden plane. I, a dancing surface of green flowers. From there, one can decide anew to become anything again: a box, a flower, a paper hat or even, once more, a winged beaked thing.
Then there is today. I am on this train careening toward the clock of the day, the telephone, and the howling tick of productivity. But in that other world I skip my stop; I ride and ride until the tracks run out and then I find a new metallic road and begin again, riding farther and farther until I have circled the world in these boots and this grey wool scarf.

Souvenir

She is floating in a pool in a purple bikini
admiring the strange flat picture of her
tanned torso beside the preteen periwinkle.
Somewhere deep inside the body, it is beginning to form,
that substance readying flesh for performance,
and soon, she will unfold those frog leg wings and
transform.
This purple bikini will suddenly
mean so much more.
Her tanned skin will be a canvas for hands,
this piece of cloth a smoke signal,
and her face, a souvenir.

The Lakes of Canada

My hunger for freshwater is obscene.
I wake writhing from a dream, reaching
though dry sheets for a handful of it;
for the cold, crisp splash of the glassy surface
on my palm, around my ankles, then
caressing my cheeks, cradling flesh.
The embrace of lakes will always satisfy
more than any other, for there
one can return to the womb,
folding in among the reeds and fishes,
moving without the thrill of gravity,
kicking out from the sand into the great,
cool, center of the world.

touchstone

face down on your stomach

back scratching

evening

this is the story i 

am telling minute by 

minute

constructing you from

the pile of bedsheets 

with hair

and eyes

i sometimes wonder what its

like for you when you

lean toward me to

press your face into 

this one 

what do you see 

a small storm of jaunty

lines light hair expressions

i am 

a puppeteer

peering from behind the screen

imagining the show he performs

but will never see

it is harder than we realize

to know oneself from 

backstage

then i look up at you for 

a moment

the breath of you experiencing 

this show of me and

i come suddenly and briefly

to the touchstone of 

myself

from there i can measure

all the rest

Branches

When we were young we named mountains from our window perch.

I would go there someday, I imagined,

sprouting wings and making my way from the windowsill out,

touching down, toes first, to plant the flag of my world there.

but the trees were smaller then, and we could see distances from between the bedsheets,

now they've grown old, tall and jagged, dangling heavy limbs into that line of sight.

The world seems to have closed in on us this way--

growing as we grow, eclipsing view.

I imagined maturity would tell us who we wanted to become--who we could become.

But now I'm seeing that it only tells us more and more what we cannot be,

offering little direction but that: blocked flightways, a narrow horizon, 

a view of branches.

Good Morning.

Nisqually

This is the water’s chosen courseway
through a slowly changing landscape—
chosen the way we choose roadways,
pathways, lifeways—the only way that works.
We flow where we can, constantly reassessing
turning for boulders, carving cliff faces
roaring, trickling, meandering to the sea.

Mt Rainier

Somewhere there is a road that tunnels through tree forests,
a primordial passage into wilderness.
The grass is greener on that other side
and we follow each other into the blue.
It is difficult to stop until you reach the summit
of all things--with this suction of sky,
a promise of views and a place to
stand on the lid of this world.
How can one come down from such heights
and ever thrive at the edge of the sea
having beheld the thin lightness
of being atop it all.

Notes On The Weather

We are clouded in once again, the snow days of this city.
White wisps find their way over the lip of our front door
and the cracks in the windowsill, creeping into our sleepy
Sunday living room, slow dizzy ghosts.

To live in this city is to live among clouds,
below a friendless blue sky,
where the tops of the buildings reach up to hold onto fog;
to pull it over their faces like covers on a blue grey bed.
An ocean is out there somewhere, we know,
humming its hum, sending in
bottles and cans and painted artifacts,
small notes from a world beyond,
wishing us to wake up and emerge.

But for now, our curtains billow though the window is closed.
We tape them down and climb back in bed—lost in longing
for more of that white
brightness.
Soon we know, we must rise
to turn on all the machines
and continue clawing at the world.

Timepiece

My tarot cards fan out

before me, the pattern of my life,

these cyclical roads

all mankind in all the

world knows.

The Ace of Wands,

an unknown Knight, lovers,

crossed by swords and

pentacles.

I am leaning toward

my future with little in

hand but these tools

and my spinning

shadow.

For now it is beside

me--opposing this star.

The cars slip by, this

morning migration

over the surface of the earth.

A dark bird spreads his wings

over the metallic surface of

a pond.

Beyond, one million faces

slip past in unison, there where

the sun has begun.

That will be my card

today,

I say to myself and to the

lean path of tracks beside.

That source of shadow and light

that now is everywhere--

across the sky, tracing crows feet

on our faces,

caressing the ironwork below, the

slick water's

surface.

When we open to it, it is everywhere.

That clock, that card, that light

in my line of sight;

The omnipresent

timepiece of all this.

We tick forward--cars, and birds.

You, Another Day, what do you

hold?

The day our train was delayed

I'd like not to dwell on the written word worthy

events of the day--

the body covered in the

yellow plastic sheet beside

the train tracks,

the policemen with their 

notebooks and measuring tape;

the wars, the news, the way

we are all heading, somehow.

Rather, I'll pause upon the way we 

read our papers in the train,

these sips of coffee and 

lines of sliding traffic,

the way the sun slants 

in, and the air is cold

on my morning face;

the looks across the aisle,

the smell of our human

breath, rising in one early 

cloud over the span of our creations;

The way we hum and teem across the 

surface of a fragile rock

amid the middle of a vast nothing.

That haunts me so

            much more.

This first one.

The world awakens, these silhouettes of

trees.

Planes hover on the road of

the sky.

I am fulfilling my routine

the way I know how;

dreams cling sticky inside me.

This system of living.