Safe As Houses

LOVE CONNECTION, pt. II

There’s blood between my legs
And in the grass outside your house I came
You’re salty to the taste
And if I squint just right I can see his face

With back against the grass your girlish weight
Does little more than leave me sore below the waist

The night refines your face
Your mouth agape, I strain to keep mine straight
There’s blood between my legs
And our hands, our glands are both on a rampage

Pressed against my chest, your tender face
Does little more than leave me sore below the waist

This is no easy lie
But in trying times I go down without a fight
This is more wrong than right,
But it’s hard to see the difference in this light

Your tongue between my teeth, it’s tepid taste
Does little more than leave me sore below the waist

I WAS THE DANCER

Soiled, my jeans lie in heaps beneath me
Blood mars the sheets, and they stain so easily
Swollen wrists, knees, and you swelled inside me
And it took nine months to destroy my body

I was the dancer
My head filled with laughter
And then the disaster
You came sometime after

I was young then
Full of grace then
But oh, resentments

L. O. V. E. scratched your name into me
F. A. C. E. and its traces of me
Curls round your cheeks, Christ, you looked just like me
When you took nine months to destroy my body

Now I’m your mother
You tore me asunder
And years after labor
It’s all I remember

I was young then
Full of grace then
But oh, resentments

OH DAUGHTER/DISASTER

Oh my daughter
Legs in plaster
Taught to keep her
Knees together

Oh my daughter
Skin grew over
And taught to walk some
Three years later

Oh my daughter
The fragile features of your mother
They’re buried under
The plainer features of your father

Oh my daughter
Life rushed from you
And split in ways you
Weren’t meant to

And oh my daughter
Such crushing pressure
At half the age of
Your poor mother

Oh my daughter
Your ruddy cheeks will never weather
And buried under
The fragile features of your mother

ONE FATHER, ANOTHER

Tend your figure
Religiously
Stillborn sisters:
You buried three
Survived by stumbling divinity
I came to you both accidentally

Haunted wombs
And barren seeds
Yet through the term
You carried me
Conjugally conceived
He had prayed you’d bleed
And your second child
Came with a pair of teeth

And round his ankles you were tethered me
You must have known he’d leave eventually
Because everything you love leaves

THE WEIGHT SHE FELL UNDER

When they pulled you from the tracks
Your body splayed and split
Your chest flushed bright
As it was in life

When they pulled you from the tracks
mindful of your separate halves
Your face relaxed
Lying flat upon your back

Your body blushed beneath such crushing weight
Stolen in your awkward stage
That you never would escape

The same stain that decorates your chest and face
With a scarlet mark of shame
When you’d stutter out of place

And when they pulled you from the tracks
Your eyes gone milky white
Strangely alive

Strange
This would come at the same age
That your mother took his name
And labor pains
Would collapse her fragile frame

The city lights reflected off the bay
From the streets where you were raised
And taught your place
By those stifling younger days
Now that’s all been washed away
With the color from your face
Tracks traced in paint
From a woman raised to wait

And when they pulled you from the tracks
Your body splayed and split
Your chest flushed bright
As it was in life
When they pulled you from the tracks
Mindful of your separate halves
Your face relaxed
Lying flat upon your back

SURVIVED BY HER MOTHER

After class, you would drag me
With protest to the empty
Cherry tree, to tend the ground there
Once a week, respectfully

You would speak to me of the carrot-headed sister
Just beneath my feet, as solemnly you would
Stroke the ground to tuck her into her
Silten sheets, some six feet deep

With the months that passed before you
Could afford to mark the ground beneath the cherry tree,
I learned to wait in your sheepskin seats
And dig my teeth deep
Into my knees, to dam the creeks above these
Ruddy cheeks that betray me

Now you’ve signed your name across the space beside her
And tend the ground where you will lay
Apart from everything but your carrot-headed daughter
Beneath that cherry tree
Eternally

KEYHOLES & CURTAINS

As long as we keep dancing, darling
And the words i say still mean absolutely nothing

You’ll keep yours with him
And i’ll keep mine hidden
Safe as houses
Behind keyholes and curtains

Lock the door behind you, darling
And box away those awful feelings
A new entry in your strained litany
Of things that make you hate your body

So save your breath dear—
You don’t have to
Because your weighted inflections speak volumes
And your cranberry cheeks betray you

So just keep yours with him
And i’ll keep mine hidden
Two strangers bound by nothing certain

Safe as houses behind keyholes and curtains

FORWARD TO FORGET

Memorize the angles of your face
And tape record the way you say my name
Relate the way you smell and taste
To tangibles no absence can erase

Forget about the words you’ve said and meant
As words mean very little in the end
These memories made fresh i will defend
And i promise that i won’t forget again

With feral fingers I will trace
And render all your features in their place
And pray that in the fruits have dogged faith
There’s something fatal fate cannot outpace

The shallow rise and fall behind your chest
A vacancy that lingers like like the debt
Collapsing in the cadence of your breath
A lifetime looking forward to forget

Were I to exploit these memories
(e.g. the space that’s just above your knees)
(i.e. indulge some vulgar need)
I’d hope that you’d forgive me

THE FOUR PLATITUDES (A BRIDGE SONG)

We resolve to meet
At the bridge beside the beach
Where the air would freeze our speech
And the trains would pass beneath our feet

Lips dry from licking
Still, you never question why
Night upon night we come here all the time

With eyes that take no lines
And transgressions justified
Resigned to take our lives
By the age of twenty-five

As your hands brushed my thigh
The sound began to rise
And the cars underneath
Pulse in perfect 4/4 time

And weren’t we something in our prime?
Before times fitful blight left footprints on our eyes
And the light stretched just right to finally tell you why
Night after night we come here all the time

STOLEN CHILDREN

Were that I the one that died in place of you
Rather then prematurely paralyzed by you
Would you have worn your grief like laurels bestowed upon you?
Or misuse the gravity still felt by all but you?

You know that I wouldn’t mind—
I must have lied a thousand times
And how I wanted to die
Just to sanctify my strife
And as that I’m being honest,
This was all that I wanted
Most of the time

Could I offer up the years i spent resenting you
For the nine years of my life that went away with you?
On the ground above you I’d lie,
So solemnly contrite
And i could finally forgive you,
For every time you saved my life
We may have both come unwanted,
But you were all that she wanted
Most of the time

Through all the years I casually exploited you
And still it never occurred to me I was approaching you
Or that the last six years of my life were overtaking you

With an indifference divine
My life down I will lie
You were only a kid then
Just one of God’s stolen children
Blessed with less time