The Yellow House

Arles, France

In one breath, a block of stone
hollowed, windowed, and painted
yellow. Summer, watercolored,
soaked through panes
of the sunny house.

The sky was usually turquoise,
painted in patchwork and seeping
through an archway shaped like a keyhole.
Above the rail station, though,
it was sometimes indigo tinged
with warm gray.

Your rooms were shaded,
suffocated in green shutters,
drawn glowing deep cobalt
from the insides. Your brush
could breathe only in gasps
of fleeting curtain flutter.

Oilcloth bed sheets lie stained
in struggling slats of light.
Diagonally across the road, a garden;
beyond it, gleam of moving water.
From that open mouth
of the Rhone, you hear
only half of what always-flowing
summer water spoke.

In a mirror above the wash basin,
chin bristled by drying sunflower petals,
you watch you, formulating
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
A background of tangerine and blood orange
tells us it will not be there forever.
You sketch.

Colorado

Listen, you said,
rolling the window down
in still morning, winding
the crank of the gramophone
of this cold new day.

First, just the hush
of evaporating sand,
crumbling adobe—
we’d been watching the pueblos
thin around us all week.
Orange wisps swirling
upward into quartz sky.

We waited in near-light
until, from the depths
of some unseen celestial cave,
it came shivering up the backs
of the snow-dusted canyons,

a careful copper light
inching over the vertebrae
of obsidian mountains
etched into the horizon,
sun finally flowing
over the bone-dry mesa
in one trembling yawn:

some god’s whispering
life into day.

Museum

A swarm of stuffed hummingbirds
broke free from their pins and plaster,
flew quick and calculated, single file,
through a crack in their plastic casing.
Soon, the buzzing reached
a fully synchronized hum
as many tiny wings beat back
invisible dew above our heads.

At first we were all alarmed;
small girls ducked and shrieked,
parents yanked wrists and ran,
and some stuffed antelopes and chimpanzee skeletons
scrambled for the door just as the vibrations
reached a deafening level.
Most of them made it out through
the broken window or the fire escape,
but we had nowhere to be until 3:30
and still hadn’t seen the traveling mineral exhibit,
so we decided to stay.

The hummingbirds headed immediately
for the glass flowers. We conferred and estimated
that their ranks were somewhere in the tens of thousands,
and once their beating wings neared the display,
glass cases and delicate Honeysuckle shattered
in the vibrations. Undeterred, some birds
ducked into the mouths of blossoms
of a big blue Delphinium;
others headed for the delicate Columbines.
All the while, the Trumpet Vines shrieked
and some liberated Gypsy Moths
swam into the forgetful head
of one particularly hungry Nepenthe.

We found our way to the minerals
and took cover in the commotion,
hunching inside two halves of a tall geode—
all purple and sharp on the inside,
many-toothed like some sea creature’s mouth—
until the buzzing lulled to a distant whine.

Wading through ground diamond dust
and many fallen phosphorescent wings
in the dusty model of an abandoned museum,
we knew the futility of holding onto
something so tightly it turns to sand
between your locked fingers
and is a monument only
to disappearance.

LIFE

I turn twenty-one on my last day of college (May 6th, 2009). At my birthday party all I really care about happening is: cupcakes, "Rosalita" by Bruce Springsteen and a sign that says IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.

I am Emerson College's poet laureate. Sort of. (I was chosen to represent Emerson at this poetry festival/contest/reading/jerk-off thing at Boston College in April. I will nervously read poems and then get published in a chapbook. Word?)

I want my kitchen to look like this:
Also, this weekend I think I might paint something. I have wanted to start again for a while. I haven't painted or drawn since at least three years ago. But I hadn't played the piano in more than that amount of time and I started playing it again a couple months ago and now I can play the first page (four lines or so) of Clair de Lune again. I am a prodigy. Except the lines on the treble clef are still Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Also, I am five.

And now I will stop this (LIFE) and post some poems because I haven't done that in a while. Maybe because they've mostly been big compilations of suck lately. Maybe?

Orchard

Dusk sky draped loose
over arching boughs, its reddened ends
tucked deep into valleys
behind hills worn with age and rain.

Stained glass shadows
sprawled in the grass.
A light wind, sweetly rocking
the blossoms off the vine.

Orange, acorn-shaped:
heavy fruit hanging,
lunging groundward.
Some fallen, skin peeling
with innards slick
like the skin of an eel.

Picking one, the quiet ache of the unfamiliar
like the first time you saw the Pacific.
Like the first time you ate one,
overripe.

You came home cradling
a pile of big beating orange hearts,
one small persimmon flower among them.
White and silk, petals thin and veined
like the weaving tributaries of Sunday River.

Untitled

We rose like two
blue balloons.
You, especially
full of hot air.
And blue because
that's the color
of bursts and flickers
I see when I close
my eyes from cold
and crying on the slab
of city sidewalk
I lost and then found
my coat's blue button on—
and the same small square
where I stood while you,
silent and still
on the other line,
deflated.

West

Colorado was beautiful. I walked barefoot in the snow on a mountain and saw black swans and met his family and rode on a train straight into the bottom of a gorge.

Just so you know,

my poems have been not so good lately because Joshua told me to write twenty poems before I go to Colorado. I go to Colorado tomorrow. I have six poems. The next poem I write will hopefully be about the Doppler Effect. I've been trying to write a poem about the Doppler Effect for weeks now. I've decided I'm going to start writing normal things (things like this, things like the thing I am writing) in here because sometimes I think normal thoughts, not always poem-thoughts. I can't wait until Colorado. I will climb mountains.

This week I read this

many times over.

The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
into the pink flesh of the sundown.
The end of another day
in this floating dream of a life.
Renown is a mouthful, here and there.

(sometimes it is almost perfect)

December Poem

The last few days of the old year
are the most static by far.
Slow mold growing
on old meat; hard, stale things
days before the taking-out.

Nights before the new year:
gameshow re-runs and
falling asleep in my jeans
around seven. Waking in the dark, then
whole days of left-overs.

After dinner on
the twenty-sixth, we wound
each music-making thing in the house
at the same time.

Tens of simultaneous dings
rang together: notes
lonely themselves,
cacaphonous at once.

The last one left playing
Greensleeves, sole and eerie,
unwinding slow, stopping just
before the finish.

Frying Eggs on Christmas Morning

Still dull blue outside,
a dawn drowned in
deafening street light,
blinding cricket-buzz.

Mornings I know
the kinetics of being
torn apart: stiff white,
bleeding yolk.