What art can we make
from our wreckage,
Our astringent rubble?
Pebbles have rattled loose
from our ceiling
under battering from
an overhead storm—
they precipitate in shapes,
hail in abstract form,
configure in sharp lines
on our living room floor.
Debris, dislodged
from our rooftop
and settled again
at our feet in off-octagons.
Bewitching asymmetry,
our destruction.
Pebbles pose,
and we pose,
our shadows manipulate
the lighting above our display,
shade our angular spaces,
smoothing the raised lines
of the ceiling tile
accrued by our sockless feet.
Think of the constellations—
Yankee candles and their geometrics.
Their flickers at funny angles,
too removed from our mouths
to be hampered by our giggling.
Our spit doesn’t go that far.
Think of the constellations—
Don’t think of the stars,
think of the sew lines between them.
Sweater threads,
loose and frayed,
but looping each amber spec,
knotting their form to its gauze, to each other.
Buttons across charcoal cotton.
They warm us on November nights.
Think of—
constellations,
candles and buttons,
giggles and borrowed sweaters,
chilly toes and funny angles.
We sit on the in-between lines,
our legs swinging between constellations
unbothered by the winds back on Earth.
Are you desolate or free,
shedding parts of yourself?
Clutching your canopy
until its vibrancy dulled
into sleepy amber,
until its luscious frame
withered to papyrus scraps,
until its grip fatigued,
and, to your canopy,
the ground looked so wistful,
heaps of its counterparts
huddled together in rest.
Who let go first,
you or your leaves?
It must be this loss
that scrapes rings into your base,
a wrinkle for a summer in passing–
each ridge, a memorial
for the self you had
let fragment and fall.
What mournfulness you must feel,
a body to withstand seasons
and bearings that wither
once the air grows cold.
Do you also
stumble over sidewalk cracks?
Hopscotch along
skewed pathways,
diagonal lines—
your heel grazing raised tree roots,
your toes curling over indents of pebbles,
groundwork lodging
into your sneaker soles?
Do you also
mind your steps,
teeter at stop signs?
Do you carry with you
a crown of leaves
when you come back home?
You said to write
when the seasons change,
to let the forward motion
unsettle my words.
Let the phrases
which sunbathed
across the tree outside
my bedroom window
crinkle between their thinning leaves,
be swallowed by fragility.
Study the birds
that nested between its branches,
write how they rush
to distant summers,
their flight casting coolness
my bedroom floor
and the poems that lay there.
You said to write
when summer rubs shoulders
with shorter days,
to let my words chafe
between their mingling.
Maybe the air,
brittle as it is,
can carry my verses to you,
like wings
can haul bodies
to trees, somewhere,
with more promise of flourishing
in the days, months to come.
On shallow evenings, your lover takes
to chafing dried oil off
old roasting trays,
scraping dirt lodged
like clay between floor tiles
with her pinky nail.
On all fours,
her joints click in the
rigor of her cleansing.
Your lover takes
to retying sneaker laces
for a proper loop,
over and under and knotted,
not right,
takes to stepping outside
and stepping back in—
the crickets too resonant,
they jeer at her emptiness.
A sectional half lit.
A foreign film on mute.
An album has ended.
A father’s voice needles the shallowness.
In her mind,
he nestles into his armchair,
scoffs at the hollow space
and recites bible stories
she knows by word.
An hour of silhouettes:
It’s leaves like sponged paint
pressed against clean linen—
branches brushed with ebony
in a heavy hand,
and dusted with amber streetlight—
trunks like wet pastels swept sideways,
soaking into sleeping mulch.
This hour is its own shadow,
itself and its outline.
A tree’s roots lengthen
behind the drying oils
of these minutes.
When the candle wax over this morning cools,
I hope it fastens all as it is, now.
I hope it stiffens over still countertops
and stool legs, over dinner dishes
stacked like a house of cards—
the towel underneath already dry
from soapy droplets. It caught and drank
while we slept in separate beds,
turned in our sweat
a floor above.
I hope wax crusts over the dimness,
settles the quiet grey
dusting our floor tiles,
a peaceful coating,
like powdered sugar
sprinkled on Ima’s french toast—
a sweet, mindful spread.
Can you imagine a morning
embalmed in this mold,
hushed like a wasp in amber,
its stinger idle, trapped by film?
Now, sun thaws our window panes,
rumbles of a lawnmower
shake the cast of our light sleep.
Our vents can try to maintain this stillness
only if doors remain closed.
Sidewalks crinkle from rainstorms
in Jersey,
ridge between suburban valleys
and cave under flood-lines,
like my Savta’s fingers
pruned from three generations
of kneading dough
and scrubbing baby scalps
under the drip drip
of a shower head
that never fully ceased its flow.
This path darkens
under trunk-form shadows
like my Saba’s shoulders
after tending to his lemon tree,
glistens like his watered eye
downcast, strolling home
from the neighborhood shul,
Shabbat brimming his lashes.
He carries his prayers
to his wife’s dinner table.
Cobbles weld in my under-sight,
eyes set on the stop sign
at the end of the road.
Pebbles, silent and stable,
and there, like sand from the yam
grinding my shoe’s laces,
dragged into the sliding doors
of Ben-Gurion, outbound.
Is it a poem
or a silver platter
I feel in my back pocket
when the land grows still,
the red eye of the sky
slowly dimming over smoking frontiers?
Like clouds,
I build people from window sills—
fill in sketchpads of their panes
with Monday nights.
Prints of tennis tournaments
suspend from fridge magnets,
notes for filo dough
fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang—
the recipe, a family heirloom;
the cork, left behind by the home’s
previous owners.
Faces eclipse
across channels of the glass.
I step,
study a perspective painting—
Feather lines
fringe a single mother’s eyes
because Jeopardy skips
on her ex-husband’s TV box—
faulty cable from a man of faults—
and unpopped kernels fumble
between her buttered fingers,
lodge between stitches
of a faux Persian,
also from a past love.
Upstairs, a page
from a child’s coloring book.
A baby wriggles in a bassinet
between dreams
of her mother’s heartbeat
and a father’s Sunday humming,
too young to draw lines
between memory and imagining.
A house of drawings
strung up by cedar boards
on Blue Hill Street—
existence in outlines,
like an artist’s sketchbook
flipped open by the wind.