A curious geometry of children at play:
the ball passing hand to hand,
the jump-rope swinging elliptically
like the path of a planet
orbiting its star
the monkey bar
holding solid as the girl hangs upside down
by her knees, mellifluous
motion as she grows into womanhood
the algebra of days equaling months
equaling her days without
a father equaling a feeling she has
one afternoon when she’s thirty six
having coffee and rolls in the sunlight slanting
through pines. Far off
a cardinal unravels
a song
and a sudden impenetrable
sadness
comes over her. Life she thinks
is perhaps a series of problems
not mathematical exactly, more
metaphysical, the way sunlight can be described
as photons and as God’s image
we can never quite interpret though
we try.
Quantum
physics she loves
because inexactitude is the science
like sun motes on a summer afternoon
moving faster as her eye follows them
The angles and circumferences
that represent our lives
are mere approximations
if not lies. She measures
the distance between griefs
with an eye that wanders. The death of love
was an invisible event,
an unquantifiable action of soul against the world
that still occupies a space
huge in her life, but what of the immeasurable
little deaths, the pauses and ellipses
she lives every day? And what joy
can be weighed? The sunlight is freckled
with motes, the day zebra-like
in its shadow of birch and pine.
A man enters the patio. She smiles half
a millimeter. He sits, reaches for her hand, a distance
two planets span. She turns away
wrapped in pre-occupation, calculating
a response but wanting to continue the descent
into the equation she finds
comforting. The sun is falling through the trees
at a rate of...
The molecules of coffee consist of...
The man is replacing the calcium in his bones
at a rate of...
The years are an eye blink
of the sun, a week’s a lifetime
to the fly crawling over the sweet roll...
She sorts through the mathematics
of melancholy, yet another mode
of sadness telescoping
into sadness, days into weeks
into months, the years
another excuse for not choosing to love
the man in front of her who
wants children, wants her, will wait
while she does the math.
Blackberry Hill
At twelve I crowned myself king
of blackberry hill.
If anyone, even Buddy Schwartz whose old man kept tattered Playboys
in the attic, wanted to glide his jerry-rigged skateboard down the cement
sides
of Braes Bayou through the trickle of green sludge and crawl
through the long drainage tunnel like a breath waiting
to emerge dirty and excited in the tilted field,
he had to ask me before tasting a single berry.
I said yes to them all but it was the asking I needed.
The attic where the
nickel-a-touch magazines stirred us
was Buddy’s kingdom. He organized the circle
jerks, the oil-and-lube jobs I was afraid to join.
The pictures were like lint-covered candy, hair
sprouting in unlikely places we could barely see
in the dark. When his mother called, Buddy jammed his pants on
inside out, went down to his mom’s tater tots and beanie weenie
and she never asked. One stupid woman we giggled
and went home. Every mom was dumb but ours.
In high school my girlfriend left
poems in my locker
about the jeweled cave inside me she explored
but I had no time for the fiddle-faddle of love
until she became Helen of Troy in the school play
and I the Prince of Light, technician of her beauty,
shining rhubarb-colored rays on her golden hair,
her organdy blouse stuffed with kleenex.
After we split up, she slept with
all my friends.
Buddy I especially hated, remembering how he talked
about the centerfold girls -- sluts bitches cunts -- and knew
he talked about my Helen. I wanted to bash his head against a desk
to save her, the bubbas gathering around to see me
reduce his reputation to rubble, his wanger to mash.
But when she passed me in the hall she seemed happy on his arm
and that hurt. Buddy must’ve loved her:
he muted his flatulence, behaved himself all senior year.
Though I loved every lulubelle I passed, it was her I craved --
the jingle-jangle of her buttocks, the razzmatazz of her toes.
Thirty years later, I reach for
my wife across
the darkness kissing her soft belly where the line of hair descends
into memories of blackberries -- moist, ripe, round on my tongue.
If I’m lucky I keep Buddy Schwartz out of mind.