circularruins

Once upon a time, when 'once upon a time' was how stories got told, I was an idea careening through my mother's blood like a cyclone. I careened, pilotted sans discipline. It took 9 months to invade her, defacing her body with paracital swelling.  I crashed right through her that night, until I became more life than tissue.   I was muted, in awe of the hands that held me.  It was love. I learned to walk, chewing my pillowcase to pass the day away--  I soon grew tall enough to see faces.  Again, I fell in love with the hands, and the eyes of them. They were stellar; I thought this was the universe I'd heard so much about.  And I still do.

It must have been love that commissioned this house to be made: 1965.  The photographs, black and white still-frames— paper faces—seem to show it.  Depicted, a woman perched upon a man's lap (exposing her heavy ring finger, sixteen), each resembling my siblings and I—different periods.  They live quietly in the past.  The children of them, squabbling on the glossy pages, barely in focus: one of them my father, before he grew tough in both voice and fists. The creek there, before it could have ever been                                     anything of a creek to me. The pre-school block house stood grey, a space cleared on a hill, in one

And on came the morning, my eyes reading the unfailing sunrise like a long-awaited letter.   "Asleep since kingdom came, and went" I said to the flowers of my pillow, my ever-allegiant lovers. "Too long have I dreamt, and so long      since dreams filled       my wakefulness." And I woke; erased each fingerprint on the glass of each and every window, here.   And I spoke no words until this           morning. (I did not hear, 'til you whispered verve across each burned bridge.)                                        I thought it like taking                                        those first progressive steps

Mopping: mapping the terrazo of business floors. (5 cubes forward, but none back to home.) I learn to take my own, my weight            (my fate), stuffing barcode stickers in my pocket from the floor. And with each spurious scratch of my broom, the blithe and chivalrous compadre, I watch my hopeful head distort in speckled hyper-gloss. (I smell the exhaust of burning wages.) And I sweep, sweep, sweep away a decade under each bruised shelf. Forlorn, folding myself in the sacraments of a workday: a cocoon of caffiene, unswept twilights, singing under the breath of my vacuum. And I stretch, stretch, stretch my i

The morning sparkled, shone, with my defeatus awakenings; I dreamt of making a desert out of you. The day creaks, bends, like an oak around the wind: a false lover stole your bed in a dream last       night.

I arrived at your door with empty pockets that sagged with the weight of phobia. (I tired desperately to sweep up this trail I'd been leaving; I was embarrassed by the mess I was making.) I tore your ring from my neck in juvenile despair, clenching it, war-fisted: I threw it to my malicious thoughts, entwining. I came inside your tomb, but only momentarily. You had always said you wanted to be buried with that charm.

        My life as a tree, figuratively, was a woman's life.   The time between my birth and my death—my growth and my decay—was a time in which my surroundings brought me many pleasures and many burdens.  I grew from thin to thick-skinned, a twig to a trunk; I loved, I learned the languages of each paradigm— And most important of all, I grew old.       Without permission, the seasons gave away my hair; it shed like serpent-skin—a receding sense of self, leaving me bald, as it blanketed the autumn floor. I gave you my children, to warm your homes in the winter, and watched as yours played in the proof of a never-ending cycle; the one you

Roots Over a year, I have spent with you, long enough to acquire my own bedroom in your house.  I met your mother before she moved out; we talked about skiing as she made apple pie. I saw the household appliances diminish as she gathered what was rightfully hers, leaving behind the things that belonged to you and your father: a few paintings, both TV's, and the hairspray that nobody even bothered to use.  I remember the first time you came to stay the night, and we smoked in the old yacht house up the road.  You grew beneath my skin, stretching throughout my heart like a weed.  Yesterday, I planted your memory upon my windowsill, watching