Algebra

It is amazing what a scandal can be caused

by a black dress, a woman’s bare shoulders,

and an artist’s insatiable greed

for beauty.

I know, he said sorry.




I wonder if you can hear us, 6 generations and an ocean away,

a woman at whose feet men’s hearts became like eggshells,

fragile and falling and breaking…

a restless and inconsistent soul

the belle of your world

and so quickly reduced to tears

by embarrassment.


I’ve never thought of shoulders as particularly sexual,

but I find myself questioning the nature

of temptation now--

a tilt of a head, an escaping of a knee,

the slow bend of a delighted smile;

are these where sin is found?


I touch my tongue to my teeth in a grimace and

watch you again--

you’re staring over your left shoulder

like you’ve heard a sound in the other room,

lightly catching your dress

like you might be ready to move towards it

and walk right off the canvas;

you have on oddly incandescent paleness,

perhaps you are your own light source-- like a lamp,

or a moon.


I wait for you to move

for what seems like forever,

but the canvas doesn’t stir,

and I find myself staring at a mere memory,

a woman stuck in a gray room and a black evening gown.

You are Madame X-- a woman

Sargent first painted to life

and then hid away

and finally repainted and rendered nameless in a patched up apology

neither of you knew he would have to give.


Perhaps this is what is remarkable about painting:

it is a form of capture completely devoid of slavery,

a form of imprisonment with boundaries of neither space nor time nor factuality,

the arrest

of a single moment-- a half-fictionalized memory

that is made uncannily true

by the sheer effort requisite in its creation.


And so partway between watercolors of war and a painting of Monet painting,

somehow you were caught, so beautifully,

and placed in this empty gray room of a canvas, which was hung

to horrified cries of envious shame

--a small price to be paid to be

set down in History

as one of Sargent’s greats--; but

to a young lady like you, the weight of your beauty

will never be light enough to bear.


I have often wondered how shame trickles down the spines of young women,

leaving them in a cold shiver of silence;

the fear of being accused of beauty is only matched by

the fear of never being beautiful enough.

Fear defines womanhood,

encases it in careful planning and careful words,

nodding heads and covered shoulders.


But he slipped off your shawl,

his sharp eyes searching for a more human

celestial body

to paint.

And under his brush,

you became brave in your beauty,

And so he let your light shine before men--

and your shoulders, I suppose.

But it is a strange tragedy that this

caused you such terrible shame

that the only thing left to do

was to strip the picture of your name--

to make you Madame X:

as if you were

Sargent’s best algebra problem,

instead of his best painting.


So then this is perhaps the true problem

with black dresses and women’s shoulders--

it’s just a bit of algebra:

and the artist leaves it up to us

to silence all the voices of accusation

and calculate true beauty:

to find the value

of X.

A Love Poem (for a friend?)

It is in the stillness at the end of the day,
In the final breath before I get up
to get ready for bed,
that I feel my love for you
tugging with the weary weight of gravity
on my heart.
The hum of the refrigerator,
the sting of how I miss you,
and the single dim light of my living room,
seem to be the last constants
of the night.

Hearts are such strange and childish things
To feel with such abandon
And to want so selfishly,
And to love so stupidly,
And to fear loneliness-- or hurt, or our ability to hurt others--
so irrationally,
And all this so compassionately:
How beautifully human we are.

I have been carrying you in my heart all day
like a morning routine,
or the smell of old books,
or the stark sight of a green mountain under a blue sky;
it is arresting,
overwhelming,
a silent secret burning a hole
in my back pocket,
a sudden flip of the stomach
that hits me like a homesickness,
even when I'm already home:
You are so heavy to hold.

But, oddly enough, I love this about
loving you;
as a poet's philosophical nonsense:
it is the gratitude we feel
at the honor of getting to love; it is the weight of it
that makes it worth it.
And though my prayers for you are too nebulous and giant to fit into mere flimsy words,
it would seem presumptuous to want anything for you anyway,
but to carry you a bit longer.
So I don't mind how tongue-tied I am
in the silent depths of my heart. Honestly,
I don't know how to do this anyhow.

This is how I imagine we love,
Like desperate drunkards sopping our way
Through a constellation of moments
That have no map,
Mixing our metaphors into
Our drinks
And wondering if,
when Jesus commented on the blind leading the blind,
He was only talking 1 parts about pharisees,
The other 3 parts about-- well, everyone.
Hearts and heartbreaks are universal, love like
plastic threads tying us all together in our memories,
melting into sticky knots
and making abstract art out of the whole business;
I sometimes wonder why
God didn't make our souls a little less fragile,
A little less messy,
a little lighter to hold.

But then,
I suppose if our hearts were
so nearly titanium,
we might not be quite so human anymore.

And loving might not be so worthwhile-

and this poem
might never have even been necessary.

But when is a poem ever,
really
necessary?

Nostalgia

Fall arrives suddenly
With a brisk morning and a blue sky
So clear it seems fragile;
And with it gut-fulls of memories 
I didn't know I still carried
From a previous life of mine:
a déjà vu flood of anticipation-- for what?, I wonder --
My affection for walking on new England's hurried streets, 
The sound of Haydn's string quartets,
And the taste of pumpkin spice lattes.
But this morning, I watch from my hill 
As the sun climbs
Over the nearby blocks:
Mechanical mover men, sleeping houses,
Silent streets and the song of homecoming birds on my back yard tree--
And I wonder how it is possible to be so grateful for home,
That your heart yearns
for the very present that you are already in.

Mountains (from Salt Lake City Airport)

From the sky
The Rocky Mountains make me
think of crumpled paper,
Wrinkled sheets on an unmade bed beneath a faded late morning sunshine,
Or sometimes the raw edges
Of scars on skin.
Mountains are the history of Earth's violence upon itself-
A territorial warfare waged within the earth's core,
Or the painful adolescence of a planet in process,
Or maybe the lovemaking of land itself;
The paths they trace across the continents are faint sketches
Of a time that only God and plankton can remember.
I think they are also reminders of human smallness:
There are still some places in the world
Where the walls and barriers that bind and separate us
were not built
by human hands.

I think it's funny how mountains vanish
If you get too close:
A vast wall of rock that towers over you
Like a stone skyline
From several miles away
Becomes simply a steep path sloppily lined by trees; or just
A next step up the rocky stair.
The only way you know you are moving
Is the weight in your legs,
and if you are high enough,
The raspy confusion of your lungs.

I once loved a man
Who was in love with the mountains;
He breathed better in the penthouses of the world,
on only the fumes of oxygen.
Perhaps he was immortal, a God,
Meant for the sky itself.
I lost him, I think, in a city
And in cellphones and in the silence that distance makes probable; but then
I wonder if he lost himself too.
I wonder if he has found himself again, and if he has found someone else to love his mountains-

And then I wonder
If we always pass on the things we love
To the people who love us,
Like yawns-
or head colds.
Or, in my case,
mountains.

Homecoming

It’s the air I missed.
I remember every time I breathe it in
as the taxi ducks into the I-90 tunnel,
a hint of humidity and the rocky smell
of a city.
This thick breeze
fills my nose and mouth--
I vaguely worry
about exhaust fumes but it tastes familiar, good, close,
so I close my eyelids heavy from air travel,
and listen to the low murmur of the cab driver’s radio.
I watch him through my eyelashes:
he deftly changes 4 lanes to get to exit 18. I am relieved
he does not talk to me.
He takes my directions easily,
I wait until they are useful to give them.

I find myself coming home here,
to a city
where people are comfortable in silence
no pretense to transactions,
no passiveness in their pride, their toughness, their knowledge.
This home still surprises me-
but it is a stopping place for a soul,
and its people love so thoroughly--
their tentacles always close enough to catch and to hold you;
I think it’s funny how always we reach out for each other like old bruises, checking to make sure we are still there,
constantly, consistently
with an attachment that I think is love;
perhaps it is the winters that make us so warm with each other,
but that doesn’t really make sense.

The taxi drive home is for recounting the trip in my head,
storing away the best moments somewhere they will still hurt my heart sometimes,
and I already miss the mountains,
the thin, unnecessarily clean cobblestone streets of Europe;
the feeling of relief and wonder and the freedom
of befriending inconsequential strangers.
I feel a pang of longing in my throat, so I
look at my phone light up, remember
that there are other things to be homesick for, to come home for.
One text message makes me smile. I check facebook too,
and like something.

I pay the driver without asking how.
We wish each other goodnight; I think we mean it.
I unlock the door.
I unpack, turn on the hose to raise the water level of the hot tub.
I sort through two weeks of mail, save three letters and recycle the rest,
and finish making tomorrow’s to do list.
I pour myself a glass of water, take out the trash
in the summer evening breeze,
already back into the rhythm of home, forgetting
that I even missed the air here
at all.

When I Die

When I die
I hope I pass the way fall passes into winter,
in a burst
of smokeless forest fire
that leaves only hallowed skeletons behind--
reaching heavenward, in their
haunted nakedness--
Saving my glory and my beauty
for the final days before I rest,
I will briefly know greatness
Before God brings me to the ultimate humility.

I will pass on into the unending
fullness of life
Where I will become a writer of psalms
And I will know what twelve part 
harmony sounds like.

I do not know what heaven looks like,
But I know that those who are closer,
when you measure by wrinkles
and years,
are small treasures,
to be admired and listened to--
if only for their rarity.

To Bear With