on the ninth anniversary of cliff-jumping

green river, washington

cliff jumping and all of it's against-the-need-for-survival giddiness
the diffusion of anxiety by the muddy bottom
the cold water
and that deep breath just above it.


writing is my excuse
to be insane
illogical
and
not
get
caught


a secret:


i don't understand the fence. "the two houses looked so lovely together," she said when we had turned the corner. through the car window, two women doing the dishes. she had slowed and was crawling, not sure if the fence had been real or imagined. one of the dish-women looked up. she noted the car, probably, the fact that there was a strange man inside, with beard and ray-ban wayfarer's staring right at her, and possibly the color of the body. i noted that it was 3:13 pm, thinking that it might be better if i knew the time, just in case she reported to the police under cause of suspician- "3:13 pm," i could tell the officer, "i noted that the occuser looked at me, a split second before, long before, i looked at her." 3:13 pm. the fence had indeed been built, between to california craftsmen, built themselves in the twenties, just one year apart, on the same corner of fort stockton and eagle. they weren't twins, not by a long shot, but both were low-rolling and slept eight comfortably, two to a bedroom and two on the living room rug. the corner house was brighter, less severe, and had a beautiful rounded frieze around the front porch. red, we called her, with her red-painted steps. blue, her sister, was fortified against howling storms, with a windowed porch, all battleship-towered and rectangled. red was warm, nice in the winter. blue was cool, a cavern of cold air in the summer. between them grew grapes and grapefruits and kumquats and endless insect-highways of night-blooming jasmine. a patio, trellised and morning-bright, directly between the two. there we would sit and drink coffee, her reading a rocky and long-winded American Journal of Geoarchaeology, and me half a New Yorker and three pages of her latest thesis. she studied too much, and too often. but she was good in bed. the fence cut it directly in half, that porticullo patio of ours. right down the middle. if we had been sitting there when it built itself, we would have ended up one of us on each side. in our own yard. they had built the fucking thing and split us up. hypothetically. the dish-woman had long-since alerted her parter (friend?sister-in-law?teaching-assistant?) of our presence. i think we'd better go, was all i could say. i didn't know that she had been crying until she looked right at me. "go back," she said. serious. and so i did. i was sure the dish-woman would dial 9-1-1, and i was sure that our good luck would result in us only being shot through the legs trying to run away." i'm knocking on the door", she said, "and i'm telling them to take it down." ladies and tenants and newly married home-buyers, tear down your walls! you are not, i said. i am, i am, i am. (her again).

i know her well. i know her good, and i know her bad. and sometimes, she'll just get up and do something that i never would have expected, not in a week, not in a month, not in ten years of imagining the things she would do. stay in the car, she whispered to me with bedroom intensity. i stayed in the car. i watched her move up the red steps, her steps. she sat down. she stood up. she was wearing white skinny leg jeans. they looked good against the stairs. i wanted to take a picture. in the glove box, the old camera that i kept there for sunsets and moments of unparelled and never-to-be-repeated beauty. of which this, the white skinny leg jeans on the red stairs, was one. i got out of the car, with the intention of taking pictures, a dozen or more, when i suddenly discovered that i needed only one. she was looking away, across her right shoulder, at a hummingbird up above the grapefruit tree, floating like they do, humming. the sun was gold, yellow, and everything was glowing in the non-warmth of a low sunset. to be less poetic: it was the most beautiful fucking thing i had ever seen. and i took it. i took it, and i meant to follow her up, and kiss her on the porch, and pound the door off of it's hinges and convince them with fists or words or lips to tear the fench down, when she stood up. and instead of walking towards the house. she began to walk away from it, and back to the car.

it is important to know about her that she had never, in the curious course of her life, had allowed herself to be photographed. until three years ago, until she met me. i searched, googled, and high-school year-booked her and came up with a big, fat nothing. her mother was dead and her father ran away after his second heart-attack, so i've got no one to lean on. i had to take her at her word. that she had never been photographed. and then, after our third date, after she had walked me home and kissed me goodbye on the blue porch, i snuck the almost nothing digital camera out of my jacket's secret-in-the-lining-pocket and took three pictures of her, walking back to her house. since then, i've taken three hundered and fourteen secret pictures of the most beautiful woman on earth. she was going to kill me.

i dove into the car through my open window. what happened, i asked, still askew from the tumble.

she was distracted. she said nothing. had she seen me.
what did you say, i prompted,waiting for her admission.
you did actually talk to them-

"yes."

the lie.

"i told them to take down the fucking fence."

a pause.

"please. i said take down the fucking fence, please."

no, she hadn't. she had sat on the steps and looked beautifully at a hummingbird.

she just lied to me.
wait.
what do i do now?

how do i tell her that i know she didn't because i was watching her. was taking her picture. that she hadn't actually done a brave and perilous and brilliant thing. that she had merely thought it, dreamed it up, fantasized it. that she didn't need to do it, that i loved watching her step those few first purposeful steps toward the house and out of my line-of-sight. that she was a practicing heroine. and that i had the picture to make it true, to seal it up for good, the penultimate vision with which i would remember her forever more.


i looked at her in profile. lips turned up in lie, eyes moving behind her ray-bans, too fast i could tell by sensing the vibrations of her muscles. i rolled down my window, and turned up the radio.

and i banked it,
and i've kept it as a secret ever since.


knowing a secret
and keeping it
is a lovely thing
and unable to be found
any more often
than her in
the perfect

sunlight.

don't ask me to.
you won't like it,
and it's much better
when i do it without being asked.

-husband to wife (which she repeated back to him, at a moment later in time.)

supposed to be going out to play,
but this just can't wait:

i want to tell a complete stranger
everything about me.

that is all.

i will go in this way

the last time it happened, we broke each other's hearts. like arms. like carrot sticks, we bit them off and they made a sweet snap and for a moment the cold felt good, and it was nutritious. and then i got in my car, and you got on your bike, and we went in the most opposite directions, ultimately in a straight line, never parallel on accident or on purpose, but as lost as possible.

i spent hours in the coffee shop, waiting for anything to take my mind off of the red brick walls and painted bookshelves and pots and pans hanging over our heads that reminded me of you. the sights and sounds of coming home, the water pressure, the lost backyard and the unbearable empty stage beneath the roofs of our mouths-

don't take painkillers, i could have said
and don't throw up after you eat
don't forget to say hello, you could have said
and learn how to fucking love everything
and i didn't
and i still don't
but the last time i really tried
i wasn't sure if it even got through to you
i want to show you my tattoo
and let you know that
even though
i'm the same
i'm really very different

life is like having a dream, where you fall in love with the girl who grew up next to your grandparent's house. but also, your apartment is infested with crawling things that disappear down the drain and wait for your bare feet. so when you wake up, you're happy to have your feet but broken to have lost that love.

coffee black

the coffee is burnt
and tastes like
layers of paint
peeling off bridges
over brackish rivers.

missive

do you think i care
about they way
things are supposed
to be done?


you are:
homemade macaroni and cheese
really good science fiction short stories
my favorite episode of every tv show i've ever loved
turning off the porch light
the breaking of winter
and
a little bit
too much


i can't write a poem
to save my life.
i can't write a song
that makes you my wife
(or at least
the person
who drinks
the extra
coffee
that i make)
i want to do something
volcanic
magnetic
disruptive
hopeful
disinterested in
my own happiness
without borders
and
without
pollution.

i wandered through the town you're from, and heard about the things you'd done. just when i thought they'd said enough, i turned around and heard you laugh. the city escaped in your breath, and everything that was black and white found color again.

for uncle joe

my uncle joe went missing last november, and his body was found about a week ago. my family held a small memorial service for him tonight, and while i was unable to be there, i was able to read a little poem i wrote over the speaker-phone. this is for my uncle, of course, but also for my cousin joey, who lost his father.

I know some people like to pray, and some people like to go to church-
well, my prayer is writing things down
and my church is walking next to the ocean
so I did both of those things this week, for Uncle Joey.


maybe there is no place for the mad ones
the different ones
the one-of-a-kinds.

maybe family is the only place
and knowing that we are all knocked off the same block
of crazy granite/
with the same veins of purple quartz
but all in maddeningly different shapes.

the geology of us
is changed now
and will change again
and again
unceasingly
as the years bring
more rain and snow and hot summers

but it is all we can do
to love this tired,
flawed,
miraculous,
disappointing,
beautiful
life
as
the mad ones do

there is no perfection
no answer
and no secret-
there is only us
and our granite family.