since before i loved you,
i dreamt of your eyes:
two slices of blue gulf
stripped along the horizon,
glistening
with a million years of rain.
i wanted them before i knew you,
i’m sure.
only they can penetrate me
with the force of a thousand burning suns.
i can feel them on my lips
through the sound of your breathing.
i love therefore i am.
———————————
sometimes i find it tough to show you that you’re the only one that matters in this life. and here you are: here i am.
Posted in excerpts
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through my paperround last year i met a wonderful man. he used to walk his dog as i’d deliver papers and we started talking around the time i started writing this blog. i think he’s 82: he must have mentioned it a while back. and i’m afraid there’s nothing literary about him: his existence is one of uncouth coutesy.
i quit the paperround a while back now but i still see him every sunday. nine o’clock in the morning, like church. he’s my little christian connection: even S is nowhere near taking his place. he gave me a bible with a picture of him in his youth stuck at the back, so that i remember him. secretly, i think, he believes that it will help me find him in heaven: he believes i will go there after all.
to my friends, this man is “the old man”. to me, he is much more than that. it may be true that i meet him every sunday partly because i feel like it’s my obligation, but also because somewhere beneath my skin there’s a tendon that connects me to him.
his wife died last night. or the night before that. and there’s no more words because i’m hurting for him. because how can one even begin to describe his pain?
i had made them a card only this march: they celebrated their 60th wedding annivesary.
sometimes he told me he wondered if she ever loved him but i know that was only because he loved her more than anything else. ever.
and it’s a little late for him to tell her, but i hope she knew. i think she knew.
Posted in chapters of my life
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you can have the whole of me in this field:
i pressed my soul into its loins
and beads of sweat still glisten
on the body learning to tango
in the outpour of rain.
i will surrender only here
so take care not to move even a strand of hair
from beneath the tree where i will lay through my whole life,
as if dying prematurely,
for this is home and i forbid you.
a day will come when spring will open me enough
for sun to shine
into the roots of the old cambridge tree
and open up
the rest of me.
—————————————————————-
i’ve been writing this poem for a while now and it feels forever unfinished. maybe that’s just me, always a word out, a syllable in. and then i give up and start something else. at the end of the day, however, i always come back to this. and the oldest tree in cambridge.
Posted in excerpts
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why was the moon shining so bright last night? and the night before last. the night before that it was cloudy but still it managed to peek through. and i don’t know what to say to you. i used to moon-watch when i was studying astronomy at school.
let me fall into this stupour. the whites of my eyes will turn into two big moons to shine on the world in the darkest light. for i am sin.
all sin.
and S is catholic.
beyond all means.
and i no longer know if he believes in love, because he believes in so little by believing in so much. if he ever asks, i shall tell him this much: that i no longer know him, because what he was to me is not compatible with what he is now.
i believe in choice. to me, choice is love.
catholicism is brutal: it gives no choice.
abortion is not an option he told me. what if the pregnancy is the result of rape? i asked. she’d still have to have the child.
my eyes glazed over. i forgot who i was speaking to.
and he’s not sure if he believes in contraception: life hasn’t forced him to think about that yet. how can anybody say that in a world with AIDS?
i’m lost. what does he know of the fire of desire that drives me on and on?
i know sometimes you have to let go and start again, from scratch. but i can’t. not now.
suppose i am Kai, from Hans Christian Andersen’s book, and he is the splinter of troll-mirror that befell into my eye.
how can i run away if it it’s in the mind?
Posted in chapters of my life
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what we are in the womb is everything we’ll ever be.
take you, take me, take S or X or Y, letters galore. take them all, take some more.
we can never change so long the warmth and darkness implores us. and if we can remember the dreams we had, they’ll be all we ever know.
i’m a girl tying pieces of the puzzles together. they still fit and i still am an involuntary virus to a willing host.
i liked yellow as a child.
and i told you, if you ever lied, i’d cheat on you.
well, that’s not true.
i wish i were that simple. i wish you knew that the river of you runs through my veins, pushed up against all gravity.
and that’s all the physics i know.
Posted in chapters of my life
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glittering soot on her eyelashes 