Heartbreak

Sometimes it happens cleanly,
like a chocolate bar snapped in half
to be shared:
One eats it at once greasily, messy-mouthed,
the other folds it in a piece of paper, saving it for later,
and walks away,
lightly touching his pocket.

The thing you don't expect about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge

The thing you don't expect about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge
is the silence ---
the rush of wind and cold are incidental, really,
easy to ignore
compared to the solitude available only
when suspended in an unlivable medium,
however momentarily.

The water is not soft -- much better
to imagine it as a blue block of glass,
ready to shatter pane after pane up over you.
But the sound,
the sound of the secrets it whispers
before it plugs your ears with its cold clear fingers
is, yes, quite silent.

On my great-grandmother

How you only filed your fingernails,
never roughed them with clips or cuts,
only gently sanded each one smooth -- or
so my grandfather says you did, admiring, remembering
this ladylike gesture
which set you apart,
sets you sitting (in my mind)
delicate as a china cup of cooling tea
rounding still each nail
into a perfect pink saucer.

Biology

As two sticks, rubbed together,
intuit flame
so our blood remembers,
reminds our bodies
to friction.

We never knew how well we knew each other already
until touch recalled,
and breath stirred recollection unrecovered,
generational:

This immemorial shiver which offers
why either of us (any of us) are here at all ---
for more.

The Catching

When my heart, that gasping silvered trout,
has been pierced by your shining barbs
and lifted by your invisible lines
and lies trembling
with life in your wise grasp ---
then you will find your fingers
iridescent, and your palm
cold.

It is a thin thing you hold in your hand.

Abyss: A Villanelle

I feel a leaning, as over an abyss
of empty dark and drink my vertigo
black, and vast -- I hear the electric hiss

of lack, the ringing in my ears of miss-
ing sound. Swayed by its silent flow,
I feel a leaning as over an abyss.

Unstrung, the earth decenters, bucks and lists.
Uncertain now, bereft, I start and slow.
Black and vast I hear the electric hiss,

the static crackle, the separating kiss
of parting memories in a now near-vacant show:
it leaves me leaning, as over an abyss.

Once met by fill, this absence -- like a fist --
rebounds, recoils, deals a stunning blow
(blackening, vast, I hear an electric hiss

of coursing, startled want). Just this I know:
I am now where I never thought to go.
Black and vast it seems, an electric hiss,
and feels a leaning, as over an abyss.

The felt leaning

Though I blogged here throughout my undergraduate career, and am now more officially blogging here, I have need of yet another. I am happy to move on from the disorganized rambling that was my last blog; I am happy to discipline myself to try for pertinence and pith on the group blog. I don't much miss my personal blog; I do, however, miss a place to post poetry. Hence, this blog. I hope it will be an added incentive to write. It is a sincere aim of my life to write good poetry. I am committed, at least, to the aiming.