Poems That Passed Me By While With You

Black cherry, unmarred beneath truck tire.

Peach- rose, slapping reflection against window, like palm.

The second bouquet of flowers you brought me,

how their petals fell in a periwinkle sigh as soon as I unsheathed them from the wax;

how I wrapped the metaphor of this in a wax of remembering and placed in a vase of white tonight.

The owl asleep in the Redwood at noon,

wearing day as a blanket.

All the scones I've unstuck from all the pans.

How my hand beneath them feels the same beneath words. Incredulous, proud.

I didn't make them, the bakers are wiping their foreheads in the back,

but I arrange their fragile edges and unrepeatable faces into columns

and say "you're welcome."

The polaroid a girl took of me and the boy I nanny,

our faces fading by noon into skulls,

the paper curling like little fingers around nothing

on my nightstand

The boy that I fell for last July. How on the first night,

I dreamt that our bodies were the roots of nearby trees,

and that our dreams danced like close canopies.

Between trunks, a tree house,

building in silence.

Maybe in my past life I was the pen in Neruda's "Sleeping with you on the island,”

almost identical:

 "Tal vez muy tarde

nuestros sueños se unieron

en lo alto o en el fondo

arriba como ramas que un mismo viento mueve

abajo como rojas raíces que se tocan."

Spanish. It’s secret way of hiding me, showing me. Translation as hand, as wall.

A few more things.

But mostly, my Body.

Temblorosa and tender

Reborn on the sand.

My Body,

A child bright in new uniform

Begging for another chance.

My body

A woman,

A rose, a branch.

My body, ever-ready.

to be anything

But itself.