Something Meant To Be Made

These are the things that live in my shoes:
Sand from the shoreline of New Jersey. A Canadian penny. Orthotics made of carbon fiber, because my feet are wide, and one summer I fell down a riser staircase while walking on my toes. 

This morning, my horoscope told me
I love you
because
I have compassion for myself. And from this I extrapolate that two people can feel this way, exchange uncanny energy, vibrate with aliveness
in their ardor,
that it can manifest as
something
between selves, the secret message traversing that shoddy rubber wire from one tin can to its twin can.

Today’s breakfast: Greek honey nut pie—something meant to be made carefully, and together, and tried, and shared.

Living alone will do this to you: Haunted by those fuzzy spots that darted around my periphery
(I never flipped on my light switches),
I gave myself whiplash trying to catch sight of poltergeists.

Now, how like a switch you can be. Now, when I take my socks off, I see you looking at my feet, dumbwaitering yourself up and through me, surely thinking, “God, what a joke evolution is. What sits across from me, scratching its ankle, rubbing its chest, looking to its side and away, smirking to itself, fierce in its breath.”

These are the things that live in my home:
You, myself, a bag of flour, six turnkeys, every shoe we now own, every sock we’ve ever lost, all of our blood, all of our minds, a wall clock shaped like Montana.

Some good small things and every feeling the poets write about buzzing between them. And between those, even still, the nuances of every feeling yet unspooled by bards. The quantum mechanics of our concord; the due alignment of each star above us, which is, after all, what we are owed.

At a Wine Tasting in Guerneville

, just next to a mid-century bungalow hidden
away from the curious cows and encroaching crops of rival vineyards,
an ancient Saluki snores in a sunbeam.

This is where my teacher tells me about microclimates,
the oases of shine or rain pockmarking the pervasive pallor of the Sonoma Coast.
Bored with her instruction and her foray into tannins,
I think up a whole world ensconced within another:
My hand inside my other hand, you know, church/steeple;
The Kingdom of Lesotho, all snug inside South Africa;
The pit in the fruit.

I think my life’s a document. Yesterday I walked
between the world’s oldest redwoods like it was nothing,
and the day before I sucked down fat raw oysters engorged with sea salt
and sprinkled with the juice of a lemon.
So today, what am I. Prince of grapes. Student of soil.

When I get up from my rocking chair, I’m dizzy;
I forget that even the purest pinot,
sans body, sans taste, sans everything,
Might yet produce something in me.
The kind of thing that engenders truth or some version of it. 

Some people say they watch their lives like movies,
Or even lucid dream, at will. They
hover, Turkey-Vulture, over
themselves from thirty thousand feet.
Now, there is a film between me
And the field of my whole vision.

Before I fall to the ground, my teacher, that grizzled vintner,
Catches the soft of my hand, even though I’d only
Be falling on the kindness of the fescue grass.
She’s stronger than she looks, so I give her the
Satisfaction of saving me.

My stomach betrays itself. My throat is a dinghy.
What’s it like to trip
on holy land? Before, she’d told me
We were smack in the middle of where all the Italians
had settled. Now this area is all chardonnay tours
for Brooklynites and Catholic kitsch and
family-style dinners for no one.

“Ah, so I’m on familiar ground,” I’d said. “The land of my people!”

Tomorrow, as I cradle
my head next to the poppies on Jenner Headway,
and listen to faraway moos as the heifers mourn over a
waterlogged carcass of one of their own, I’ll regret
saying that. No idea why.

In the Loupe

At 2:01 on Friday morning, the work was over;
I’d snuck the necklace’s clasp through the loophole I’d fashioned.
My indelicate fingers had toiled to expand what had been
Just a nasty knot, and there, after forever, it was:
The fool’s gold chain with its tiger’s eye gem, a chintzy gift shop purchase,
In its uncoiled fullness, and I wanted to scream.
But let’s give everyone their sleep.
But my fingers buzzed, and I thought of my mother’s father,
Who’d untangle beads and polish baubles on Nassau Street
Free of charge to any poor soul seeking the gentle
Work of two hands, a jeweler’s loupe, and nothing more to prove
Than that there’s more to life than your five kids. There’s the
Work to feed them the bread and cheese.
There’s his brother, there in the corner, his junior,
Bespectacled and tomato-faced, counting dollars, as
The firstborn takes the silver and sapphire into his
Palms, like alms, to assess the quality, cut, clarity, brilliance.
But when I was in my loop, when I fussed and sweated
Over that overpriced piece of metrosexual trifle
In my buddy’s parents’ guestroom, I was just
Praying for the strength to do something.
Looking upward, in mock reverence (to who, Ceiling-God?),
Straining to remember what it was like to genuflect: Just a fan.
As if my gesture will mean something to some omnipotent force,
As if I will prostrate myself for some cause,
And in exchange get a glimpse of my future.
My children and their middle names.
Each second I live on I do the work of information.
On the eve of a wedding,
In a Mainline Protestant estate,
In a strange queen bed,
The mosquitoes outside doing their thing,
Just me and the eye of the tiger.
And having thought this all through,
I placed it with two hands on the night table,
I laid my head down,
and ignoring the angels,
that was that.