Three Poems

Still Running

• Post-date & still aflutter, midnight,
• I skip up an emptied High Street.
• A man races down in a white pick-up,
• hollers, “Nice purse, faggot,”
• & I start running posthaste.

• Later, I quip: “If he had slowed down,
• I could have told him where I got it.”
• The joke conceals my fear:
• “If he had slowed down—”

• Our existence is fear. It has coded rules
• in our blood—which we cannot share
• because other fears eclipse ours—
• stand straighter, touch later.
• Our tongues are weighted to hold down truths,
• our legs ever alert, and our endurance
• innumerable years long.

• Every time a man yells from a truck,
• he raises with gravel a question:
• what triggers a person to hate
• the sight of two kissing
• who needs to own a rifle that could
• make Swiss cheese of a deer
• is tonight the night
• a man walks into this gay bar
• & gunfire is mistaken for reggae?

• As people crawl over those who are finally
• done their race, a nightclub tweets:
• “Everyone get out of Pulse and keep running.”
• I am still running. We are still running.
• We are still—

 Pianist Rising

• Does your stomach still sink with each
• footclimb to the stage as it did when it scraped
• the ground on the Mach 3
• (whose seats flip on the tips of
• rotating 100-foot arms—
• buckled in, we kiss in a moment
• the stars and the stones)?

• Before you join your partner,
• you’ve trowelled confidence over
• every fault in your face.
• You sit before the maw of the piano;
• your hands descend and ascend over molars,
• filling cavities in air pockets and eardrums,
• collaborating with each tone of the audience’s heart.
• A language more riddle than love—
• universally understood but not universally spoken.
• (You told me once: there are more notes
• than fit on the 12-tone scale,
• and I wondered if I could say what I needed to with a few extra letters.)

• You usher emotion from the singer’s throat,
• summoning now flight, now sorrow, now serenity.
• Each hollow note is paired or
• partnered above the stage, lifted
• where we were lifted on the Mach 3.
• (Pitches escaped my throat at heights
• I could not have reached before.
• A risk I’d never take on my own, unless
• I trusted you’d laid out notes as a net to catch us.

• You corrected me once: the term
• is collaborative pianist.
• Do the pianist and the singer not
• share the same success?)
• Accompany cannot encompass
• your place on any stage.
• For even in my best-laid plans, the Ferris wheel
• turns us into the sky, turns us back to the ground.
• We exit as the fireworks begin above.

 Later, You Return a Book

• Months later,
• you tell me you’re reading
• a book I recommended and my heart returns to
• months before.

• I had cast a line of Siken,
• a charm to keep you:
• It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
• it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio.
• You said, You’ll realize soon how
• significant trees are in my life,
• and I believed you bewitched.

• You’ve yet to return my anthology of Alice Munro.
• I worry if there will even be space
• for it on my bookshelf.
• I imagine I am in one of her stories:
• I dated a man once. Decades later,
• he volunteers to drive me back to town.
• I married him, or
• I realized it hardly mattered.

Photo by Flickr user Atomic Taco