Cordons of bottles lining the windowsill
the blue throwing itself into the green of
sea glass scattered across the white
I know
you're there
somewhere
anywhere
everywhere
between the knickknacks
I want to make something out of it
I want to make something out of you
I want to stop reaching for the one book I'm after
and always coming away with the one
This one doesn't have anything for me
It belongs, you see, to a different part of my life
with a boy-girl sticking his caveats into the stars
while we blew bonfires across the coastline
and dreamed we were in love with other people.
The book I want - beneath the sea green and the cobalt blue -
that one (I'm sure, I have to be sure, I'm sure) belongs right here
notched between my fingertips and memorized by my mouth
when my eyes won't do the trick on their own
(because seeing often isn't enough anymore; I'm chasing a taste I've never mapped before)
If the shelf is a globe then the books are countries
kingdoms where
creatures called stories change shape on me when
I'm not careful about keeping them the same
but there isn't a failsafe for these
not the way there is for a house
or a demilitarization line.
The books do what they want
and I'm finding more and more
what I want
isn't the same.
I want the newness
a vast potential where
you love the boy who loves you even when he hates you
where you
don't yell
and say all the kinds of things people warn about regretting
because if we were decent, we would.
Don't come over and say
how different things are
like he doesn't know without it
like he hasn't come so far
(don't kid yourself.)
He's growing up, he's grown
inside the knickknacks I keep on
losing
the important parts you always
miss without fail.
I want a warm house
and I want second chances
that are actually second chances and not
pretenses dressed up as things they aren't
just to make me feel better
especially since they don't anyway.
My room is in that book,
the wrong book
the book I'm always holding onto
when it's the other one I reach for
sun crashing into the histories lain in summer oceans and
green December where I never did
do all that I should have for him
(and neither did you.)
You have the same kind of splintered wood
burning up in your veins and never actually
going away.
Some part of you knows
this was wrong, you were wrong, it was never right
even though it could have been.
I can see it sometimes, in the will shoved up under a pile of dust in my closet
where the light can't reach it
since I don't know what you wanted me to see when I opened the mailbox that day.
Another knickknack?
A peace offering?
But we're only very good at lying to each other
I tell you I love you
and I mean it
because I want to mean it
I don't feel it.
I want you to love that boy.
I want it
I want it more than I want you to love me.
And I guess I want that too but I owe that boy
I don't know how much
several years
a decade
a lifetime;
I owe him
and I want him to know that I know that
I need him to know I'd love him if he
had stayed angry and backward
if he'd never gone away to become better
because I would have
even if I didn't know it at the time.
It wasn't him getting better that
made me know
realize how his love had
crept on modest fingertips
right across my impatience
right across where I
hated that boy more than I knew how to love him
and that's how I know you hated him too
it makes me want to cry
it makes me cry
it made her cry too
I think it still does
Do you know what it's like
living like something loud and invisible
straining because if you don't then no one will notice at all
but when you strain it's all a mess, it's all off, it's all never good enough or not good, period
never - do you know?
I'm reaching for the book again now and I can tell
it's going to be the wrong one again - the same wrong, the same mistake where
I didn't love him enough and
you
didn't love him sometimes at all
when we were tectonic shifts across a country
that has never brought foreignness into my dictionary
the way you have.
I love the boy now
and I know it's a little too late
I'm still making wrong turns
not writing letters
not knowing what to say as I stare at the windowsill
his picture next to your picture next to her picture
none of it ever fitting together the way I
once believed it did.
And it did,
I mean
that's why it hurts, that's why I can't let it go, why it's
the wrong book the old story where my room is my room
and the boy is down the hall
and I could reach out
and you're not yelling anymore
I'm rewriting it every time I take it down
not pretense
pretend.
I'm writing it down
how much I love the boy
and how I wish we hadn't put him through it
the part where we couldn't figure it out
that impossible chapter where
words happen
but nothing gets remembered.
How do you say I'm sorry?
I could say I remember
imagining the wood near the inlet
was magic
where the white light walked around us
and the water gleamed;
we were too little for me to know how to not love the boy
and the boy had beautiful brown eyes
and long curly hair
just like hers.
I could say I know we
took naps together at the iron feet of a woodstove
where there were strawberries every spring
and blackberries
and an aspen forest we said was
a Hundred Acre Wood
even though it wasn't.
It's not enough
but I'm sorry
I'm sorrier than I knew I could be
and I have been sorry about a lot of things but
the boy
he's the one I'm the most complete about
I wanted to make you love him
and I couldn't
not the way it should have happened
not the way he deserved
the way he still deserves.
In the dream I don't have anymore we are sitting
and it is Christmas
and we love each other.
There are baby raccoons in a box
and we are going to help bathe them on the back porch
soon, together, all of us.
The sea glass hasn't been gathered, no bottles on the windowsill.
There isn't a windowsill to put them on.
Just the back porch and fireflies in spring evenings
the cider mill at autumn for three weeks when the boy and I are
splitting donuts in half so that we think we each have two,
feeding ducks right next to the sign that says
don't feed the ducks
and winter bundled up until we can't move
with the drifts as high as mountains to us
because we're still so small and he is not yet taller than me
(this dream has me close to him, comfortable with the closeness, protecting him the way I did for a long time until I didn't)
Sitting at Christmas we open presents and eat breakfast and we don't lie to each other
in the dream I don't have anymore
four places around a tree
three dogs
the dream I don't have anymore
but I am sorry.
I am.
I wish you were too.
the blue throwing itself into the green of
sea glass scattered across the white
I know
you're there
somewhere
anywhere
everywhere
between the knickknacks
I want to make something out of it
I want to make something out of you
I want to stop reaching for the one book I'm after
and always coming away with the one
This one doesn't have anything for me
It belongs, you see, to a different part of my life
with a boy-girl sticking his caveats into the stars
while we blew bonfires across the coastline
and dreamed we were in love with other people.
The book I want - beneath the sea green and the cobalt blue -
that one (I'm sure, I have to be sure, I'm sure) belongs right here
notched between my fingertips and memorized by my mouth
when my eyes won't do the trick on their own
(because seeing often isn't enough anymore; I'm chasing a taste I've never mapped before)
If the shelf is a globe then the books are countries
kingdoms where
creatures called stories change shape on me when
I'm not careful about keeping them the same
but there isn't a failsafe for these
not the way there is for a house
or a demilitarization line.
The books do what they want
and I'm finding more and more
what I want
isn't the same.
I want the newness
a vast potential where
you love the boy who loves you even when he hates you
where you
don't yell
and say all the kinds of things people warn about regretting
because if we were decent, we would.
Don't come over and say
how different things are
like he doesn't know without it
like he hasn't come so far
(don't kid yourself.)
He's growing up, he's grown
inside the knickknacks I keep on
losing
the important parts you always
miss without fail.
I want a warm house
and I want second chances
that are actually second chances and not
pretenses dressed up as things they aren't
just to make me feel better
especially since they don't anyway.
My room is in that book,
the wrong book
the book I'm always holding onto
when it's the other one I reach for
sun crashing into the histories lain in summer oceans and
green December where I never did
do all that I should have for him
(and neither did you.)
You have the same kind of splintered wood
burning up in your veins and never actually
going away.
Some part of you knows
this was wrong, you were wrong, it was never right
even though it could have been.
I can see it sometimes, in the will shoved up under a pile of dust in my closet
where the light can't reach it
since I don't know what you wanted me to see when I opened the mailbox that day.
Another knickknack?
A peace offering?
But we're only very good at lying to each other
I tell you I love you
and I mean it
because I want to mean it
I don't feel it.
I want you to love that boy.
I want it
I want it more than I want you to love me.
And I guess I want that too but I owe that boy
I don't know how much
several years
a decade
a lifetime;
I owe him
and I want him to know that I know that
I need him to know I'd love him if he
had stayed angry and backward
if he'd never gone away to become better
because I would have
even if I didn't know it at the time.
It wasn't him getting better that
made me know
realize how his love had
crept on modest fingertips
right across my impatience
right across where I
hated that boy more than I knew how to love him
and that's how I know you hated him too
it makes me want to cry
it makes me cry
it made her cry too
I think it still does
Do you know what it's like
living like something loud and invisible
straining because if you don't then no one will notice at all
but when you strain it's all a mess, it's all off, it's all never good enough or not good, period
never - do you know?
I'm reaching for the book again now and I can tell
it's going to be the wrong one again - the same wrong, the same mistake where
I didn't love him enough and
you
didn't love him sometimes at all
when we were tectonic shifts across a country
that has never brought foreignness into my dictionary
the way you have.
I love the boy now
and I know it's a little too late
I'm still making wrong turns
not writing letters
not knowing what to say as I stare at the windowsill
his picture next to your picture next to her picture
none of it ever fitting together the way I
once believed it did.
And it did,
I mean
that's why it hurts, that's why I can't let it go, why it's
the wrong book the old story where my room is my room
and the boy is down the hall
and I could reach out
and you're not yelling anymore
I'm rewriting it every time I take it down
not pretense
pretend.
I'm writing it down
how much I love the boy
and how I wish we hadn't put him through it
the part where we couldn't figure it out
that impossible chapter where
words happen
but nothing gets remembered.
How do you say I'm sorry?
I could say I remember
imagining the wood near the inlet
was magic
where the white light walked around us
and the water gleamed;
we were too little for me to know how to not love the boy
and the boy had beautiful brown eyes
and long curly hair
just like hers.
I could say I know we
took naps together at the iron feet of a woodstove
where there were strawberries every spring
and blackberries
and an aspen forest we said was
a Hundred Acre Wood
even though it wasn't.
It's not enough
but I'm sorry
I'm sorrier than I knew I could be
and I have been sorry about a lot of things but
the boy
he's the one I'm the most complete about
I wanted to make you love him
and I couldn't
not the way it should have happened
not the way he deserved
the way he still deserves.
In the dream I don't have anymore we are sitting
and it is Christmas
and we love each other.
There are baby raccoons in a box
and we are going to help bathe them on the back porch
soon, together, all of us.
The sea glass hasn't been gathered, no bottles on the windowsill.
There isn't a windowsill to put them on.
Just the back porch and fireflies in spring evenings
the cider mill at autumn for three weeks when the boy and I are
splitting donuts in half so that we think we each have two,
feeding ducks right next to the sign that says
don't feed the ducks
and winter bundled up until we can't move
with the drifts as high as mountains to us
because we're still so small and he is not yet taller than me
(this dream has me close to him, comfortable with the closeness, protecting him the way I did for a long time until I didn't)
Sitting at Christmas we open presents and eat breakfast and we don't lie to each other
in the dream I don't have anymore
four places around a tree
three dogs
the dream I don't have anymore
but I am sorry.
I am.
I wish you were too.
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