Golden-eyed girl, do you see what I see?
Do you see behind the veil that Life
           laughs through?
Golden-eyed girl, I would like to laugh
           with you.
But my veil is torn, and I see things pass
Like shadows in the depths of a crystal glass.

Golden-eyed girl, you are young as springtime,
Your great eyes are dreamful, your rare
           lips sweet.
Shadows matter little to youth with dancing feet
All of Life’s skeletons wear gay dresses
And youth is deceived by even Death’s caresses.

Golden-eyed girl, you have years to dance and
           wonder
Before your Life’s curtain will wear into holes
And let you see the hopelessness hidden in souls.
You have many moons of laughter, many
           years to go
Before you’ll learn how heavy dancing feet
           can grow.

I like being a mammal, the only animal who
weeps, sadness a foreplay between sodium
and water. I admire my drooping belly for
waxing and waning like a moon, stretching
over my growing son and then gathering
back together like theater curtains. My ring
finger is happy to wear a different weight
these days. Although my marriage splintered
like my parents’ did, I believe vows can make
some people open like a peony, a hundred
vulnerable layers lying against one another.

I want to rejoice that I’m finally learning how
to French braid my own hair, but it is strange
to be an animal who can remember bubblegum
sunsets, clotheslines pinned with drying flowers,
winter’s generosity of stars. All that beauty
staining my pupils makes me weep, which
makes me remember someone studied
the fractals of tears under a microscope,
so much stunning geometry spilling from me
at each onion and stubbed toe and heartbreak.
My tears’ chemistry–a marvel, a miracle even.

I used to want my heart to be an ocean, not
this river-heart eddying in the slightest pain,
but a gorgeous boss of an organ that could
contain everything, even secrets. In another life,
I might have married someone with a fishpond
heart like my father, so reliable in its seasons.
In this life I married my mother’s Mariana’s Trench
heart with its pressure, its deforming gravity.

I went nearly a decade without crying, but once
I understood my heart would always need me
to swaddle it in music and promise to be kind,
it let me weep again, whole wet pillowcases
full of grief. I bought a lachrymatory to catch
all my splendid tears and save them, because
I like that I am a messy animal full of melancholy
with working knees and a toes that crack when
I walk downstairs, weak hands and a softening
chin that makes me see my mother in the mirror,
crying her famous tears, this time saying
she loves what I’ve done with my hair.

You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now

told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god’s
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to survive, which means you are somebody’s

son. Which means if you open your eyes, you’ll be back
in that house, beneath a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

Your mother’s boyfriend, his bald head ringed with red
hair, like a planet on fire, kneeling

by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed
Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned

from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand
on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield—

motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light
beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth

spinning in no one’s orbit. & you want someone to say Hey…Hey
I think your dancing is gorgeous. A little waltz to die for,

darling. You want someone to say all this
is long ago. That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag

with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45,
that the surest shelter was always the thoughts

above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be—
how our hands hurt us, then give us

the world. How you can love the world
until there’s nothing left to love

but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away—back into the fog

-walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you
to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing

& still breathing. Believe me.

My grandmother kisses
as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,
where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes
through the kitchen window,
as if somewhere, a body is falling apart
and flames are making their way back
through the intricacies of a young boy’s thigh,
as if to walk out the door, your torso
would dance from exit wounds.
When my grandmother kisses, there would be
no flashy smooching, no western music
of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe
you inside her, nose pressed to cheek
so that your scent is relearned
and your sweat pearls into drops of gold
inside her lungs, as if while she holds you
death also, is clutching your wrist.
My grandmother kisses as if history
never ended, as if somewhere
a body is still
falling apart.