song of myself

"A poem must sing," she says.

"If it's beautiful, it whispers in

sleepsong to its reader. The worst

poems shout across the street to whichever

bedraggled soul passes first.

Make yours sing."

With this, we shuffle in our seats,

we try to find writerly insight from

some divine place, we clear our throats

once or twice. My name is called; I read aloud.

The chubby Asian girl in an orange headscarf pulls

at her knotted thumbs and maybe sighs -

I can't remember.

"I have never crumbled pita chips in a lightless

corner of the Mediterranean or scaled the salty

streets of Jerusalem on horseback, or

tasted the leather tongue of Jesus, but I know

the inside of your mouth

better than my own," I say.

They gaze expectantly and That's all I have for now

is all I have for now. Brian in the wobbly chair

thinks it's obvious I've never traveled.

I tell him My lack of travel experience is

sort of the point of the poem, and then I'm

reminded that authors can't interject

in the critiquing process...Asian headscarf girl

thinks I'm making it up - the part about the boy and

the mouth, his mouth, presumably - but she misuses the word

"solipsism" at least three times in the next three minutes,

so I feel a little bit vindicated.

+

Now the February air is slightly less stifling

than June's classroom-breath, but I'm still worried

my song reads more like a you than a me.

I cried in your sweater. I drive by your house

on the weekends to see your mother reading

a magazine in the living room, your father cursing,

and your bedroom door. It looks lonely.

I bought you red Marlboros once, fingering a sweaty twenty-

dollar bill in my pocket as the cashier chuckled, called me

Sweetie, took my money.

I've never told that to anyone before.

Does this have to be about me?

I write about you with such ease.

I remember this morning back in the summer

because I was far more impressed

with the whitewashed sky than with any

pinkpeachapricotraspberry sunrise I'd come across.

No one up there felt creative that

morning in that

whitewashed sky.

I sat beneath a ginkgo tree that morning, G. Biloba,

and I'm not trying to make myself out to be

a living fossil or anything, but

maybe I'm covering myself in a layer of wax so thick

that it bubbles and burns and I can't help but leave

my imprint on something else. Do I fan out and engulf?

I exist in millions. It's only a matter of time before I take over.

They will study me in another million years, sitting

beneath the same gingko tree, deciphering my fossils.

+

Before we carved our pumpkins as children,

I watched in awe as my father swiftly cut through the top

and dug into the stewy center with a slotted spoon.

I washed my hands in it, the orange, stringy mess,

and next summer we ran outside barely wearing

anything at all and collected as many baby

grape tomatoes from the garden as could fit in our dirty

hands and threw them at each other, and we were wild and

without purpose.

Am I self-absorbed?

No. I'm not absorbed in all of myself yet.

I am your popcorn ceilings, your extra ninety miles,

your baby, your piece of ass, your transport

and transportation. I am somewhere between

Fort Worth and the harbor.

+

When we walk, you're there,

your mind is with the split-end branches

on the tallest tree. Your fingers don't

wrap around mine the way they used to.

We pretend to be laundry baskets,

to be candles, warm and blue,

we silently flicker forth. We pretended to be in love,

less warm and more blue than before.

I can't keep going on like this for very long,

so glaze me and open the kiln

and let me burn.