Without commas in her gaze,

the little girl dribbles colons with each breath

and swears an exclamation mark

is a lollipop:

“Is growing up for real or make-believe?”

Dot dot dot, I gasped.

A question mark is a fisherman’s hook.

I’d taken the bait of uncertainty, 

when she offered me as consolation,

wrapped in quotation marks, a single Smartie.

         for Aya at fifteen

Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself 
upside down across the sofa, reading, 
one hand idly sunk into a bowl
of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on. 
I think they are growing gills, swimming 
up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl, 
my slim miracle, they multiply.
In the black hours when I lie sleepless, 
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face 
is the bright lure I look for, love's hook 
piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.

How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip

Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell

When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it

Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret

Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched

Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children

A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without

How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and meticulous architect
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain

Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate

1.

We came to the island. We stayed in the house.
Rain and sun. Bougainvillea. Pink cedar.
How many shadows slipped along walls
or whetted the leaves of century plants?

2.

We saw clouds from the windows. Far boats.
You left the bed and came back shaking.
Your mother, her white hair, or something
whose shape would never, at last, find you.

3.

Night palms clattering like hungry bowls.
Crazy whistling of the island peepers.
We walked to the water. Walked back.
We walked to the water . . . walked back.

             or better

when the training dedicated

            to what lines my eyes cast

braids me to that skein

            then I know I’m a thing

that can take itself away

            maybe etched with the man

on a horse leaping

            into the lithographed

German windmill’s open bay

            refined, involutely resolved

to curving inward

            while touching the outside,

screaming isn’t looking

            like when my mother died

of being a woman,

            poor and eventually

American, the nerve I had

            to fold time

in my mouth as if to call

            back an escape line

from a life

            and who would think

to hide in a windmill

            and the horse

amenable?

            I really was

looking at that print

            thinking without rancor

of what fraction of hateable men

            I’ve known

and been

            who work so hard

at fleeing into private chambers

            only to find

some uninvited thought of me

            eyes closed, whispering

exactly there, spectral

            and unwanted as I am,

It’s just easier for me

            if you’re not around