Adam Jon

When I die I’ll still be reading this poem to you
in this very moment, like an orange
sliced and sectioned, sweet and unmistakable,
even while I’m at an unmarked train crossing
thirty-two years in the future.
I’ll be in a bad state that night, but remember how alive I am now
in this moment that changed:
the vain pulsing in my chest,
the useless anxiety of my breath,
the tremble in my fingers on this page and the steering wheel.
How similar it all is,
as if I know what proceeds.
And, in one thousand years the world shatters anyway
by no implication of human or tree or train.
Started by a cosmic hang-up, stars forgetting how to live,
God dropping the China.
No blood on our hands.
No stone on our backs.
The opening and ending flash right now with pyrotechnic
black hole and planetary shards
splaying about through the future
(which is actually the present, don’t forget).
So, consider me outside of your macroscopic eyes
freckled shy as I am at thirteen,
freighted and eyes set now, and
how dead I am in thirty-two years
with a fiery train growing out of my chest.

What makes the grass grow?
Blood.

This student knows it already;
Her notebook filled beyond reason
with formulas and drawings.
academics and vocabulary beyond
my own.

It’s filled with dates and battles,
journal entries, and topographies of acceptance
of things that shouldn’t be accepted,
knowledge far beyond trigonometry, syntax,
biology, beyond happiness.

It’s filled with the cold scent of funeral homes,
Natural Ice and hash at lunch,
gas stations (too many fucking gas stations)
holidays in houses, apartments,
a hotel, and two cars,

the boy

who said he loved her
but he didn’t
In so many ways,
too cruel to even be recorded,
much less believed.

It’s all in the notebook
behind her quiet eyes.
She’s out all over,
now a color her peers can’t see.

The classmate next to her glances
across his desk, as if to cheat,
looking for her answer to sex,
heartbreak, or suicide.

And I almost stop him from the
truth, face melting and real
like Raiders of the Lost Arc.

But it’s too late.

I put his skeleton in the pile
with the others.

The bell rings and she floats,
ethereal, out all over.

Other things
get in the way.
Drinks sometimes.
Sometimes drinks, anyway,
from a mess of ceramic mugs
never touched by machine

or awkwardness,
or fear, or regret
that gets in the way, that is,
when we talk.

When we talk,
what colors do you see
bending around my eyes
like a wet ring on a table?

Is it the yellow early morning darkness
that sees you even with your wine
or coffee when we talk
in tones that pass for friendly,
connected as partners in bed
exhausted from a day or each other-
the homily of silence and touch.

But you’re two rooms
and several miles away,
hundreds maybe,
in a tumult of blankets

and other things.

What words do you want,
when we talk?
Mine are limp, saturnine,
but they are yours
if you want them
when we talk about

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-Raymond carver

We were in the living room
sitting apart stilted
with the unsaid and now said,
wondering why and if you got what
you wanted,
Your cyanic eyes seeing clearly
in perfect slicing futures.

And did you get what you wanted?

An expedient thunderstorm
exalted the day just moments before
and the ground and driveway and sidewalk–
my hair, your coat, your lips
were still fresh and damp, cleansed–
hands washed of us.
It cast it’s lighting in memory,
reflecting a lambency of August fields.

And did you get what you wanted?

Reverberations echoed in our tears,
my tears, my heart, our hearts,
trembling the faint candle sitting
on the old wooden coffee table,
weak, fading–illuminating, precious.

And did you get what you wanted?

Unnoticed cars flashed in the windows.
Unnoticed rain pressed against the panes.
Unnoticed wine disappeared with collard words.
Unnoticed sun concealed behind clouds.
Unnoticed hunger drowned in saccharine orbits.

And did you get what you wanted?

Wrap your arms around me and embrace
the tattered breath, bring flowers
to the spring. Fracture the unfinished writing
of silver stars and songs of sheltered meadowlarks
hanging deep and high above us.

And did you get what you wanted?

You loved me sometimes,
and did you get what you wanted?

The ghosts of mountains, rivers
and owls,
the ghosts of soft blankets
and softer skin,
the ghosts of tenderness, illness,
and loss,
the ghosts of pine and peat, passion and earth,
and other fragrances of you,

the ghosts of four hour drives,
the ghosts of afternoon naps,
lazy jazz Sundays,
and whiskey and wine,
the ghosts of lamentation,

the ghosts of flowers eaten by cats,
the ghosts of movement and grace,
the ghosts of surreptitiousness,
the ghosts of waning light and tears
in your eyes grieve my soul.

These phantoms form
clouds in my sundered sky,
pastel and soft,
whispering and uncertain mementos.
They form knifes
poised above knuckles
of hands reaching for you.
They form shadows of broken glass
shining from within my arms.
They form absence.

Don’t you mind
the ghosts haunting me.
My heart was born with the ghosts of love,
and it will haunt.

If your eyes light to mine,
what is carried in their gaze
aside from the movement
of the heavens
and the dirt beneath my feet?
Why do they linger,
not on my face, but on
the trees behind us,
and in my loneliest moments?

If your hair blows in wind,
hair I have touched and subsumed,
what of the jealousy of flowers?

If your lips sulk towards me
in rosehip moments,
how can the sun still drift
and rivers still cut and breach their banks?
I could drink the salt of these seconds
to sustain the life around and between us.
Why do they tremble?

If your mind wanders from us,
how do I not cling to petrichor
or the pallor of the moon,
grasping them firmly and tenderly
as one holds a sparrow?

If your heart remains.

Her second moon rises
humble and steadfast, splendid
in morning rapture,
sure of itself as I am of us.

As children possess the sun,
this moon belongs to her waxing beauty,
the luster of her eyes,
to her softness which tenders ablution.
Her magnificence, a meadowlark.

A spring wind builds
and snow cedes it’s paltry warmth
from street corners and houses
to those which need it now.

Birds return fitful of song
and green pushes deftly
through thawing dirt
as couples sip coffee from cozy chairs
watching through windows
the slow tide of spring
enter their lives again,
talking of books
and each other.

But love does not migrate;
it only comes, or goes.

It goes.

Tomorrow
I will bend and sway
delicately in the dayspring waves
like the susurration of aspens
until I break
this yoke of grief, myself,
or the soul of the songbird,
ignorant, diaphanous,
beautiful.

Always tomorrow.