{airplane ramblings. read Li Young Lee's memoir, "the winged seed."}

August

the self of jade and lightning is another self entirely, one who does not – cannot – apologize or waver, who does not alter when she alteration finds. Shakespeare knew her, the genius self, no conductor, all burn. the child in the airplane seat incanting come night. come night. come night reaching for the overhead light, the knowledge and simultaneous bliss, the turbulence beneath us, each. teasing out desire from need, the skin grows taut again, loses that barbarous fleshiness, the extra. how much it costs to be certain, how many glasses of wine in the dark with a best friend’s cigarette, voices raking the walls, screens, to the fence and up, there is refusal here, I am a teacup or lost ocean, discarded bay overgrowing, the lagoon where the mermaids comb their seaweed hair and carve their woman wrists with sharpened seashells. all this, held in the bilious sea of stomach, rockinghorse heart; to not want, what a heaven.

the daisies have pitched all their petals, no more loves me, loves me not, no more wishbones or checking our palms’ mutable lines. the self of jade and lightning goes eyes open, molding hunger into her own spine. her bitterness is not salted, not lime. good morning.

*

nothing holy has a chance. nothing held so gifted or dear, no unscripted minute. but the script itself disintegrates, a satchel of lies and riffraff expressions, love a sad shadow of the last building we entered together. I want to make a statement now, about distillation or the symbology of treadmills, something sloppy and obviously metaphorical to drive you away. all of our hymns are conditional. half-built bridges we cross in our sleep. I don’t want a crucifix to be the last thing I give you, but we don’t get to pick our omens. not when our birds of prey are pigeons.

*

are we ever prepared for landing? with whole neighborhoods plotted neatly below, couldn’t we just stay, without the nausea of dropping, without the descent to pillow, to pill, to look each other in grounded eyes and say want. pattern. desire overcome by desire, weed over weed over daisy, reluctant cactus. all going. what water here, your choosing, mine, whose hand gathers the park trees like broccoli, each trunk stem snapping, a bouquet? to whom do we offer it, four hands bleeding? if not to each other?

*

to want options like infants. to talk about marriage like a mermaid raking her unpassable hair straight. the leg asleep is the body’s most honest part. suddenly you remember to say I love you in messages.

if I give you this wall, will you eat it back to daisies? to less than the city we circle and land in, dissolving in hierarchies of steel? with all the smoke, who’d not be lost? but I am found, love, and sick from the mirror to project buildings shaped like crucifixes from above. sick with knowing and knotted like a highway. if I waited too long to tell you this, it is because I love all your bones. forgive me; even now as I fly toward you where you are not, I watch the buildings and ignore the ocean.

*

I take the long way home, congratulating myself on my own frugality, the few soft bills unpeeling, knowing this another suspension, in no hurry toward an empty room. everything is as heavy as fruit here; tonight the moon will be a plum under which I will unpack, marry the shoes left uncoupled across the evening linoleum, make soup. I will paint and try for whole minutes not to think of you, to remember what I knew about alone, before your smell burrowed (invited) into everything, even the wall I want to eat down to seed, to the last tooth and its joining thread, the skin flap refusing to release. what’s growing, what’s emerging underneath? listen, love, I’m trying to ask you everything.

___