Ribbed with Willow

ABSTRACT

RIBBED WITH WILLOW

These poems explore female identity, rape culture, and sexuality through risk and curiosity in the face of a violent and dangerous reality. The speaker is analytical and strong as she wonders about herself, her body, bodies around her, and lives not met. The poems are confessional in nature with postmodern tendencies. All are written in free verse and employ a universal first person. By exploring the duality between music and words, sensuality and sexuality, and love and violence, the manuscript blurs the hard lines that we use to define the world around us and our experiences. It explores these themes with a matter of fact voice that challenges the way we see our bodies, without apology or moral judgement by using an exploratory tone. Sometimes this is done metaphorically or literally by exploring hair, bones, parts of the body, skin and comparing these to the physicality of violins, science, trees, the ocean, smoke, and more. Ultimately, the speaker offers no comfortable solutions or resolutions to these issues and social taboos. Rather this manuscript is a restless and relentless pursuit of true knowledge about what it means to be a person in this universe, which is unknowable.

Amber Cecile Brodie May 2015

RIBBED WITH WILLOW

by Amber Cecile Brodie

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2015

APPROVED

For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Amber Cecile Brodie Thesis Author

Corrinne Hales (Chair) English

Tim Skeen English

John Beynon English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER'S THESIS

I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

X Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me.

Signature of thesis writer:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following editors of the following publications in which these poems, sometimes under a different title or in earlier drafts, originally appeared:

“The One Whose Name was Writ in Water” Aquirelle, 2011 “Elegy” Glassworks, 2014 (published as “Roots”) “Rouge” Canyon Voices, 2013 (published as “Esmaralda Adora”) “Origin” Canyon Voices, 2013 (published as “Dubrovnik, 2007”) “Coping” Foothill: a Journal of Poetry, 2014 “Self-Excavation in the Third Person” Mud Season Review, 2015

For my mother, my sisters, my brother, my father, and those loving friends who talked, laughed, cried, and made music with me. These poems are for you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Self-Excavation in the Third Person ...... 1

Matanzas Park ...... 2

Circles ...... 3

Origin ...... 4

Lover in the Pacific ...... 5

Fermata ...... 6

Peeler ...... 7

What a Woman Must Taste Like ...... 8

Veins ...... 9

Another Fight in the Kitchen ...... 10

Alive ...... 12

Uterus, ...... 13

Confession ...... 14

Porcelain Nesting Doll ...... 15

Follicles ...... 16

Ode to Smoke ...... 17

Ode to a Spider ...... 18

Breaking ...... 19

Violins & Violence ...... 20

Kaleidoscope ...... 21

Mountain Songs ...... 22

Me and a Gun ...... 23

Five Fingers ...... 24

Circles II ...... 26

Jane Doe, ...... 27

Five Movements ...... 28

The Luthier ...... 33

A Poem That No One Will Ever Read ...... 35

For a Lost Daughter ...... 36

The One Whose Name Was Writ in Water ...... 38

Chant of the Musician ...... 39

A Manual for Music ...... 40

Remodeling the Bathroom if I Wasn't in Such a Good Mood ...... 42

Portrait in Ink ...... 43

Rouge ...... 44

Teeth ...... 45

My Great Grandmother as a Kite ...... 46

Betty White ...... 47

Scientific Pitch ...... 48

Coping ...... 49

Watching Rachael Barton Pine Play her Viola D'amore ...... 50

Daphne ...... 51

The Many Worlds Interpretation ...... 52

Self-Excavation in the Third Person

I open the hard cavity between her breasts and the ocean spills out, I clear the roots and debris, scour the area for decaying vegetation hold her knees together to stop them from shaking, a thick layer of clay pins her down like foundation on expansive soil, so I claw ditches into her perimeter, try to drain the erosion around her ribs and pull something out of her, peel off her crusted skin in jagged strips until the hypodermis is exposed, balance my ear on her hollow abdomen to hear the clunk of her adrenal glands working against each other like clock gears jammed between two moments, but there is a fog dragging itself over her memories and they are murmuring, so I close both eyelids and leave her in the rising water, mud swelling around her head.

Matanzas Park

Grace shows me how to sharpen the end of a paper clip with a nail file, dip it under the first layer of skin in the center of my palm, and inscribe a heart over and over and over itself, each time shaving into another level of the epidermis: the stratum corneum, the stratum lucidum, granulosum, and by the time I get to the stratum spinosum, I start to bleed and it is getting late. Grace says to keep going when I get home, I should get deep enough to scar, which I know means I will need to reach the last layer, but instead I store the needled paper clip in my pocket and wear gloves for the next two days. The blood has hardened when I decide to try again. You shouldn't have stopped, Grace tells me and I know she is right, chiseling through clotted blood is more painful than peeling through gradual layers of skin, and I want to get past all of these stages of the epidermis, destroy it, to finally understand it all. I would like to see the dermis, which has the same structure as my hair follicles and blood vessels, where the lines in my hands are formed. Ever since I went to a palm reader and she showed me my life line, the love line, the wealth line – explained how branching on these represents people entering and exiting my life, I've wondered. And if

I get to the end, to the hypodermis I will know what the inside of me looks like and how it can judge so much.

Circles

In a house somewhere off Grand Avenue, I decided to let a stranger dance from behind.

Let his leg press in and up between my thighs. It must have caught me off balance, because I stumbled back into him. His chest against my almost bare back, sweat touching between breaths and beats. I couldn't tell you what song was playing or how many people were there or even if I knew anyone, but I can tell you this:

My denim skirt was crushed between his forearm and my torso as he slid two fingers past my panties and into me. This twisted arm beneath me and the other across my chest, almost like he was helping me put on a coat. And since I wasn't quite sure what the protocol was, I opted to open myself up by the arms, put two hands over and behind his neck, held them there and rubbed small circles into the stubble beneath his hairline.

Origin

Dubrovnik, Croatia

His skin is the same color as teak my father slid under power saws and the sequoias I tried to hug on school field trips, the tips of their branches shivering, bark peeling away like the clouds above me now exposing a crescent moon as he pushes into my bones that feel as if they are bruising, and he is blurring with the ocean and the fog. His hands float over me, fold with the night. The Adriatic Sea curls in the distance over his shoulder. I want to leave this rock mid-kiss, go down to the water, because since the world is round, moving east is also traveling west, and if I could just dip myself in the ocean, I would feel Bodega Bay, the first time I bathed in it as a child, almost drowned under a current that pulled and pushed until my father's hands lifted my shoulders and sifted me out of the sand.

Lover in the Pacific

You are sea water. The undertow of your hands, a crashing tide topped with foam. I swell with the current.

The undertow of your hands nestled against and in me, I swell with the current. Each wave beating on my back, nestled against and in me, you toss me with your current. Each wave beating on my back amidst the surge of grey sheets.

You toss me with your current beating against my insides amidst the surge of grey sheets, I contort and swirl and beat against my insides, a crashing tide topped with foam. I contort and swirl and you are sea water.

Fermata

My back is arched over the surface of the kitchen table, bent up concave, one kiss fixed below. I leave whole notes on your wrists. You etch staves down my back, and we are twisted together like a treble clef, breathing a duo in the rests. Let's mark in ink these crescendos and measures that hold each beat within their curves, because there is no conductor to signal the end.

Peeler

Gunner in the trenches of bar stools and the hit 'n run, the lifer girl in the back room, consort of the hustle, waxed up to the labia, joking over the knights, PLs, regulars, and lapdance virgins, I loved the feel of paper bills scratching my nipples, folded under the straps of my bra, between breaths, curls of my hair and how much I'd make after I'd tip out, the super stripper with glitter in her eyes and rock 'n roll in her lips. Now watch the way this country turns on the stage, how artful we were, how bright and dissonant.

What a Woman Must Taste Like

She smells distantly of a slice of honeydew melon– sitting a few stools down, twirling a drop of vodka around the bottom of her glass. She sounds like the waiting of a field of strawberries safely tucked behind a fence. And I cling to the shards of wire begging for one touch of her silence, her musk.

But all I can do is smell the sweat of her one palm pressed against the countertop. Imagine what that finger tip feels like after a long bath. To be that hand when she presses it to her lips. Be the one who grabs it in the chalky light of this bar. Expose her curves and eat her until she is nothing but a rind.

Veins

Your fingertips are licking my skin, counting my freckles and spots, brushing back sections of hair, singing clichés about my eyes. They're always like the sky or dewdrops on grass. Your dark, deep irises contract in the near black, and I remember every pair that has also reflected here. They also whispered about my eyes and left long thin cracks on my body, and you are tracing them now, the blue branches that loop around my nipples and I find myself wanting to fracture again under your calloused fingers and brown irises.

Another Fight in the Kitchen

The suds pile one over the other, forming and descending. Plunging down the waterfall as I scrub a knife, my lips press into each other, never moving. You have no idea... I bury his pleas beneath the water, because the dishes and this will be over soon. It ripples as I shut it off and scrub a dish thick with his teriyaki sauce and bits of tomatoes. I didn't do anything... he barks and I breathe deeply. Imagine that if his words actually surfaced on my body, I'd be dead like five years ago. You are so... I see his arms moving, lips parted. I wish he would take this plate from me, thrash me with it, splinter it into my throat, or something. Say something, you lazy old... I am tired and I can only feel the invisible wounds on my body opening. Old scabs detonating with his syllables. I'm not the one who... There is blood in the sink, a piece of china in my left hand, Did I do that? The room slips and I try to catch air in my throat

11 or maybe the edge of the basin, Don't you love me? With my back to him I try to stand, to scrub, But my limbs are numb, Suds splash onto my face my hands slip on bubbles. And I am face to face with the linoleum, and it feels like a kiss.

Alive

“I never play without feeling that I have released or, alas, violated spirits.” -Yehudi Menuhin

I cling to your body. In the solitude of my room, I caress your etched curves, stretched into a slim crescent, run a fine finger along a swirl of interlocking browns, rough and patched. Oiling down your body, I breathe in varnish, and remember how you gleamed under stage lights the night we played Beethoven and my left pinkie slit and bled, as it glided up your neck. The spot of blood still under your strings the scar still on my finger, but we kept pulsating and moving until we finished. The bow ascended in a cloud of rosin dust, ricocheting in the tacit air. They applauded as I felt you through my dress and I lowered my head, savoring that spot on my neck where you rubbed it raw.

Uterus, you are likely dead or aging like the crone rattling bells on her ankles, her torn bones blindly searching the forest for wisdom or maybe trees, but I have never heard you ring, seen you dance, told you about my day. I've probably popped you with so many pills and guys, you don't know how or you've forgotten or I forgot you, never needed you to harvest, but please don't stop rooting inside of me, because without you here, I am leafless kindling.

Confession

I tried to play the cello once. Took the neck of a friend's instrument, but hesitated when she instructed me to put the body of it between my thighs, hold it with my knees under the c bouts at the waist, as she adjusted the end pin into position so that the top rested under my breast, the neck against mine, grazing my left ear. She showed me how to take the long bow with my right hand, cup the neck with my left and press the strings, feel their pulse against each inner thigh, inside every bone. I bent in, allowed my hair to fall across the chest of it and played one note over and over, pressing my legs inward and inward against the willow sides until it was enough to make me fear the way music can linger inside of me, playing fugues along my veins.

Porcelain Nesting Doll

If you touch me in the right way, move me in the wrong direction, I could shatter. A black scuff on my hip, twitch in my neck, sore ankles, bad knees. I've sat on many shelves and in arms, each owner has left his mark. My eyes have been reprinted, maybe if you rubbed the black away, the blue orbs of some past girl could gleam. She was made of something softer that you could throw down and make use of. When you lift me around your waist, stroke my hair, kiss my chest, I feel her in me, a heavy weight, like a battery or music box. She is waiting for you to smell her, let her out of this hard body, because sometimes I think it is me who is slowly killing you, so I place an ear to your flat chest to hear the beating within you that tries to keep up with the duple meter of mine.

Follicles

I am crying now because of this retching and fracking inside of me, call it loneliness, as I grab onto my hair and pull it out follicle by follicle so that I can study the white tear drop shaped knob on the end, because it is the closest thing to my brain that I can touch and turn over in my palm.

Ode to Smoke

Webs of air, stringing into empty spaces the way music does in an empty concert hall, splashed across the windows, lit only for glimpses. The sound of one piano key splattered like a painting. The ringlets that come out of my scalp and drop to the stone floor. The twisting waves evaporate and leave only the smell of their sweat lingering.

Ode to a Spider

The tiny cliff dancer hangs in front of me like a quarter note dangling on a staff line and I lean back to witness each tiny leg flail to aid in her ascent. She is so close, I can see myself in her eyes and I wonder how she sees me now contemplating escape, inching along the wall, climbing a thin rope that disappears within the sun's beams that reach out, twirling in gyres, like the steam on the surface of my coffee that coils up to her, and I wonder what the hot fog feels like on her starless body.

Breaking

I. Your arm is steady around me, fingering my waist, leading me on in the dark. Remnants of liquor waver in the air between us as we twist down the broken streets to your apartment, underneath the moonlight that strikes the ground between our bodies. Semi trucks change lanes beside us, cracking like bones as I grope for your arm again, so that I can remain adrift among the high rises and fences.

II. You are naked in front of me. Your veins branch between muscle and fissures in your skin, your dappled arms that reach out for me are bent, and your head is tilted so that I can't see myself in your eyes anymore. For the first time I want to peel you apart and make you grieve under my fingers until you float limply beneath me. Yield to my hands climbing your torso, and I will climax above you, pressed against your chest and it will be strange and sublime the way you lay pinned to the sheets.

Violins & Violence

There is no connection between the words that I can find, besides that sound that I can't get out of my head. Tommy guns concealed in instrument cases and custom rifles built into them. Strads stolen at knifepoint and thrown into a dumpster or after a taser to the neck outside of the concert hall. The crunch of bow on string in the fourth movement of Shostakovich's string quartet no. 8, which echoes the KGB pounding on their doors. Violins cracking and snapping beneath car tires or as someone sits back down. Even in my dreams the floors are made of the bodies of violins and I am trying to walk across them. The wood splinters under my bare feet no matter how softly I creep, my feet fall into them like snow, the strings snap and coil around my ankles, pull me down and stretch my limbs out on a rack, until I also split and crack.

Kaleidoscope

I sit straddled across the cutting board. By now, I've seen how pitch-dark I can be when intoxicated, how sapphire under a new moon and purple when hands pull back my hair. Why are you here? you ask. My shoulders lift to my ears, bottom lip pushes up so that it curls and my eye lashes buckle together like willow branches. I know answering your question will break this interlude and my fingers feel your cell phone vibrating in your pocket. I know she is trying to call you, as I pull you to the kitchen island and show you how when I am split like this – two legs splintered down the middle – and light falls the right way across my chest, it is like mirrors fracturing colored glass.

Mountain Songs

"Terrified and wounded, the prey struggles on, but, harried, dies" –Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Autumn

You told me between movements that you saw structure in everything, how mountains could be skyscrapers and birds created trajectories of framework.

I told you I heard music in the shaking underneath hills, the still flaps of wings, your heart beating under my cheek, grass brushing against my ears and it was like everything was balancing on your chest, every second I listened to it, let it absorb me, I felt I was going to roll off this hill. I told you I felt like this all the time, and maybe that's why you left. I need more places and forms and you don't need concertos being slammed against the wall. And, now I realize that if you take the words in each movement of Vivaldi's Seasons, pull each one away and push them together, they build four sonnets that I want to recite for you now, because I think I could turn them into a mountain for us, but now I can't find my way back.

Me and a Gun

for Tori Amos

How do you sing now without breaking? How do you decide to take your pain and turn it into words without wavering, without mourning? But this is mourning. Pouring yourself out for us as your hair drops in front of your face over the microphone and your lips. I want to cradle your face in my palms and question every line around your eyes as you stare out at the audience, but it's more like you're staring at something only you can see and I know it's him over and over and over. Every time you sing this song you are looking at him, witnessing him do this to you over and over and over. I can see him now and I am afraid to touch you because it is every one in the crowd who are the witnesses, every click on this video online, every pair of eyes dangling over the night. And I wonder if I would know the difference between the feeling of a gun or a cock on my back or being jammed in my mouth. Which one tastes like metal and which one tastes like blood?

Five Fingers

Sometimes I think it didn't pay being the girl pushed to the ground giggling, because it all became a blur to the point where I can't remember if it was the same man I let put his hand up my skirt on the dance floor or if that was the guy who pushed my head down even as I shivered, bare backed in the back of a playground at two a.m. or if it was the one who put his hand to my throat and sucked black and blue marks all over my shoulders because he thought I liked it, and maybe I did, but I don't remember if it was real, or if we were even technically dating at the time because it all becomes something I can't knit, a series of knots and dropped stitches, and I want to pick up those frayed pieces, I need to tell them to someone, but I leave things out, and I forget and remember half- asleep in the dark of my bedroom alone. So I guess that's why my mother told me when I was young to tap the surface of crazy casual sex with one finger at a time, that the number

25 of men I let into myself shouldn't go above the number of fingers on one hand, five swollen knuckles against the bamboo needle, and I try to name each of them, without going over to the other hand.

Circles II

Some days I want to go back to that house, find the place between the stereo and the side area where a normal family would put a dinner table and cut that square out of the grey carpet. I wish I had your number or email, so that I could send you this, but even though I'm sure you exist, I don't know you, haven't met you, yet know you inside and out and I am sorry. I'm sorry it was hot that night and I boiled into him, this man we both know now, let him and his fingers dig into me while I still didn't know his name or whether his eyes were brown or green or grey. It's been seven years since then and only now do I realize you must have existed or will exist. You walk into that house the way I did, confident and sparkling, and he wants to discover you with his fingers and you are so touchable and open to him, as I was. The only thing I regret is you, you who won't want it, who won't opt to accept his hand and that arm will become your cage on the dance floor forever beating within you for a different reason. I want to burn that house down for you, to bleach out that moment, but I don't know who you are.

Jane Doe,

16 years old August 11, 2012 Steubenville, Ohio

When you open your eyes, people will call you Jane Doe, as if you were comatose in a hospital, gown flown open or lying upon an autopsy table, where a doctor will open your skin with a scalpel, handle each of your organs in his hands, flipping it from the left to the right, swing your legs over to expose your back. When you open your eyes, your body will be fastened like your eyelashes, stitched with red yarn, and yellow hair hanging loosely around you. The couch fibers under your cheek will have rubbed pink circles into you, smearing away the scent of your father's fingertips, replacing it with something like puke and stale beer. When you open your eyes, darling, you will be the victim. Your saline heart won't let you be anything else, and love will curdle in its chamber like your book bag and dress flung to the corner.

Five Movements

modeled after Shostakovich's last string quartet

I. Elegy

We approach not like the mourners, dressed in black, but as laborers. Armed with wax, scissors, rag and bucket, Jay bends down to rub the stone with a handful of water. Between massages to the granite, I read a name, a date some twenty years ago, a quote from a psalm. He stops for only one moment to introduce me: Dad, he says, This is my girlfriend. She wanted to meet you. I ask: Does he like me? He squeezes my hand, washes and caresses the corners where the roots of the bare rose bush planted nearby must be holding the casket beneath our feet. He looks at the leafless branches and I know he thinks that it has died. So I show him how to prune the bush at the joints, so that it will bloom from these hinges. And a season later, we will pass the graveyard to witness the roses. He will let the steering wheel go to hold my hand, our fingers like roots branching out and twisting between us.

II. Serenade

Trees in autumn remind me that things die from the inside, out. Branches knot and crack, rot over and over again. I want to feel like that. I want to be covered in flakes that I can peel off in strips, gnarl and twist underground, blend into the dirt like watercolors, every year eat the acid growth in my own limbs, and maybe that's why I also want to stand in line with Akhmatova, be Dostoyevsky’s pen, break under all of it, because Shostakovich is the only composer who can make me cry while playing his music and the purest sort of beauty only seems to come from pain, so I want to be mixed up with the greens and golds, dive deep within the dark branches that dissolve in perpetual black, listen to the golden leaves that fall under my feet splintering in rhythm with my heart, outlined in black.

III. Nocturne

How many times now have I awoken to your left arm crawling under my neck, that one that makes me roll onto your chest? One ear wandering your heart's many chambers, turning around every corner slowly. The shutters above us closed, blankets tightening around our shoulders, pulling us together, my ankles appended to yours. I try to time my inhales with yours, as your nose roams through the backwoods of my hair. We need to be reminded sometimes that the other exists, that we can drift within each other by searching the contours mapped by our nerves. How many more dusks will we have like this, before the sun creeps in with icy fingers? I wonder as I watch the clock on your nightstand count hours and pretend that they are infinite, the core of a black hole.

IV. Funeral March

Email: 10.30.07: This morning I woke at 4am. The angels feel so close... Years ago - I worked at a bakery Making bread at this time every morning.. It felt then that angels come closest just before day break while the town was dreaming.... This morning thought to turn on a computer and journal after meditation....Do you remember when we would sleep in the bed together? Back to back and you'd hold my long braid from behind....

Your hair would drag by your heels as you would bake bread, would fan out behind you as you watered the lavender and bay laurels. Sometimes I think there must be a place between being alive and being dead. A time when you touch her face and assume it will be cold, but I can't bring myself to even try to grab your knobbed knuckles anymore. I think all of this, but do not send it to you. It's easy for me now to ignore the ocean breeze, to make myself a cup of comfrey tea without thinking of you, counter all the bends in the road away from your house and where we would sleep together, my hands sealed around your braid.

V. Epilogue

Put hair to catgut and transform all of this into a cold fiber, expanding with stillness and sleet. The pegs and strings vibrating into thunder rolling its tongue and the lull, each pull on the bow as steady as reaching out, palms turned up. Spruce grains and ebony speak to one another as the hollow body of the violin cools and rocks through skin and into thin bones that rattle with marrow. Passion is tremolo caught in the throat, the neck arched up with the geese flying between the player and the stars, fixed to the earth, rooted to the center where the sound post crawls between notes to breathe as the music drapes over us like faith and rain.

The Luthier

In my workshop, I pass the slab of tree between my fingers, feel each indentation, the grooves moving across the valleys in my fingertips try to hear the faint music. The type of wood makes the sound, as if the tendrils in the grains are tracks on a flat record, dictating the low density and high speed of resonance. The body of a violin is made of quarter-sawn spruce, ribbed with willow.

Soft ebony fingerboard and rosewood pegs.

Slow wood is the best type. The kind that comes from trees that sat alone for centuries growing in yearlong, Italian winter. The slow seeping of moisture into each groove makes the wood thin, elastic, like the vocal chords within my throat. Shave the wood to the right curve, place the ribs so that when you rub down its sides, it feels like you are caressing a woman's waist. I can hold a knife

34 to the neck of the instrument and whittle it until it's slender,

I know the smell of dried glue on spruce and when the violin is done taking in sunlight and breathing in moisture, which darkens its complexion and matures the sound. In the deep recesses of my studio, where the thick smell of sawdust and varnish stings my eyes, I can feel the hands of luthiers before me, guiding me to place the sound post, join the maple bridge under the strings so that they are tight and the body can't catch its breath.

A Poem That No One Will Ever Read

after Adrienne Cecile Rich

I know you are reading this poem as the darkness outside threatens your drive home and the oily concrete seems to engulf you with every passing moan of fog. I know you are reading this poem because someone shoved it into your fists and you are clenching the sides of it to see it better. I know you are reading this poem with the blacks of your eyes, watching the letters' footprints stream down the page. I know you are reading this poem while your phone vibrates beside you and jets and drones fly overhead. I know you are reading this poem from a lit screen as the train rattles the tracks underneath the city. I know you are reading this poem standing in the middle of the bedroom and the kitchen, holding your coffee and book because the days are long and you get more and more tired with every new one. I know you are reading this poem while your wrists beat with the pulse of your heart and your blood and your breath. I know you are reading this poem.

For a Lost Daughter

for Susanne

On mornings when the sun crawls through pleated white curtains little girls tuck themselves into their mothers' beds listening to the sound of the sun rising intertwined like smoke curls stringing into the high corners, twirling each other's hair into braids hanging on to the wound strand. Now the wind keens in bursts while you bury yourself under the ceiling fan staring up at the blades circling, holding in the breath of how her hair felt after a hot bath how it fell around her face got tangled up in the thorns of the rose bushes as she ran through the garden interlaced among the leaves and spider webs but when you get closer, it flies away and you are stuck

37 groping for her braid on the dark side of the bed clawing for it in the stale air.

The One Whose Name Was Writ in Water

I like to picture Keats on days like this. Strolling through a teeming wood, with a simple book, eyes upon the boughs. A single raindrop falls on his buckle as he breathes in the plump odor of Autumn. At night, dark candles flicker upon the quill. Words taunting him. I imagine him coming through my back door, opening my fridge, tasting the Cool Whip, contemplating the tune of my laptop, the constant vibrations of my cell, lightly licking an orange pill. He starts as the mail falls through the door, burns himself on a forgotten hair straightener, trips over misplaced wires, balled like a tumor. He'd write a poem on my dry erase board and stare at my bookshelf – thousands of titles jeering down at him. He'd drive himself past the sanity of his pen, longing for those tacit nights when the mist twinkled over frosty streams, lightning tapped against the window, and sighs wafted around every peeling corner.

Chant of the Musician

In playing I am always weighted to one side or the other, swaying and slipping, finding notes and reading lines, fixing grips and counting rhythms: in playing, it am always in my head or with my finger tips against the steering wheel or my torso as I walk: one two three, one two three: in playing I learn to slur Latin and French – dig my heels deep into stages too petrified to utter a single stanza, hands trembling into vibrato: in playing I learn that it is impossible to draw a perfect circle of fifths balanced between the sharps and flats on either side: in playing I assemble traffic and people, language and war – I lead the flood and at the same time follow in its wake: in playing I bend like a muscle and do not break from the person next to me: in playing I travel and forget about my home – the memories tuned to pieces and the locations tied with note stems and bow hairs: in playing I am not grounded or lifted or shifted to the side –

I am Paganini and Vivaldi, I am a B flat, I am the glissando and the diminuendo.

A Manual for Music

I. How a Violinist Makes Chocolate

To make it sound dolce, like melted dark chocolate, thick and creamy, spilling over the stage, grip the bow a little harder, push down and vibrate until you can't feel your fingers any more. Tense in the body, fingers still breathing.

II. How a Cellist Controls Climate

Be almost silent to allow the oboe's sound to waft over your head, but also be present and warm. Navigate over the fingerboard, ease the tension and taper into the note. Left hand stays firm right hand softly exhaling over the strings.

III. How an Orchestra Goes to War

You are the army, stomping down the battlefield while the flute is the angel, comforting the dead. Each battalion of strings rallies their elbows together, while the flautist leans back, loosens her lips, breathes out flats and rekindles the expanse of empty seats.

Remodeling the Bathroom if I Wasn't in Such a Good Mood

after Ellen Bass

How many days do I really tell myself: if this were the last day of my life, would I really care that the curtain rod is crooked, or that the guy at Quiznos put olives on my sandwich when I already said to put none, or that I don't have any mini tampons left which are what I really need right now because I'm tired of sticking things too large up there for no reason? And, no, I don't want to kiss you back right now and I guess I'm sorry for that, but I'm trying to make sure this semi- gloss doesn't spatter and I'm thinking about how I need a haircut but hate every hair dresser I've ever gone to, because they always talk too much, and yes, hate is a strong word, but today it's true. Because today I don't want to be nice to you, I can't appreciate your hips or your cheek or your penis that jabs me in the leg at night. Days like this can't be the last day of my life. I want to believe in a world where you can't die on a day you are pms-ing or the day after you just gave up coffee. On days when I wake up and scream at the birds chirping outside my window, but when I go out there, to shoo them, one of their eggs is splattered on the ground and I cry the way women cry on tv, those girls I usually laugh at, but today I feel shattered through and through, because what an un- poetic death that would be, in this half-finished, apricot-pit colored bathroom.

Portrait in Ink

We have already breathed in all of the spaces of our apartment. And even under the green lights of our favorite bar, we have nothing but each other's breath. So I take the pen out of your pocket and draw a bird on your knuckles. You color in the freckle under my right ring finger, turn it into a heart. I record the lyrics of the song the speakers are playing on your wrists, and you draw a mural of the city, painting in the corners of me with buildings. I want to be your paper. I want to be that place where you create.

I want us to need more than words, more than lunch- time text messages. So fill me in with your black lines stretching from my toes to the roots of my curls, back around my ear, past my breasts and swirl around my heels. I want you to blow out the cobwebs between my knees, your lips pressed against my thigh where lines expand like tree rings.

Rouge

I always loved the curve of her tongue as she would whisper lullabies to me under the cool, cotton blankets. They consumed me each morning – the comforter and her slurring tongue as she wrapped it around each syllable. When she would touch me, it felt like last Sunday when I leaned against the cold frescos at church, wishing she would turn around the corner, but I can only find her in that bed that I watched burn, flames licking the white corners, our imprints melting away like the sound of an s within mist. And now I'm the same age she was, knees in the mud of her grave, feeling the humus of the earth sifting through my hands. Talking to her name, curling my tongue slowly against the roof of my mouth, wishing

I could know how hers felt as it caressed the scalloped edges inside her rouge lips.

Teeth

We are walking down a cobbled street that I recognize from a trip to Europe. I once bought a black bikini here. Actually we are passing right by that very place, I think, but the basket is gone, replaced by an old woman with a cart full of white roses. She is bent over the corner, one hand knobbed around the handle as she stares at me with her gaunt chin. I distrust my subconscious at this point – I have never met this woman before, never seen her passing on the street, but her eyes are familiar. Jay leads me up to the cart, wants to buy me a flower. She offers one, but as it touches my fingers, the petals grow brown, crumple inward and fall to the ground until the stalk remains limp in my palm. I tell her I want a fresh one, but she insists, I can only have this one – these are the only ones I have for you: this listless, wearied thing, and that is when my mouth feels rotten, my teeth are loose and they fall out one after the other, smashing into shards of enamel on the cobbled street, mixing with the browned petals and the black toes of our shoes. When I hit the floor, I find you have rolled to the other side of the bed during the night, and my mouth feels raw.

My Great Grandmother as a Kite

for Magra

When I was a kid, kites were just kites. Our family flew them on Easter in the pasture behind your house. I held the string between my fingers felt the wind lift me onto my toes.

Pinching the bare string so hard it made my fingertips turn red, my bare toes curling into the grass.

You gurgle back to me and the nurse says that is a good thing, to keep reading. That noise means that you are recognizing me. I take my shoes off so that I can feel the carpet between my toes. I don't remember the last time I flew a kite, but I imagine it would be more difficult now. I would try harder to force myself to the earth, struggle to deny the wind. Maybe that's why you never flew kites with us. Always sat on the porch and observed us in the wind- swept grass. I would look back at you, lose the line, and you'd hold your arms out for me, long sleeves billowing in the breeze.

Betty White

I still want to be you, and not just when I'm older. Silly and senseless but still sticking muffins into your mouth like it was yesterday. Loved not because you are an hourglass or your cheekbones or your black curls turned yellow, turned white, but because you are timeless. I want to be you or at least touch your beaded jacket and long fingers curled upward in some gesture. Close enough to your mouth when it opens to sing the world, crinkles under your nose as you eject curses and kiss microphones with those singular lips marked with wisdom, your body like a dam holding back water, every joke and pun pressing against your ancient back. Your laughter echoing.

Scientific Pitch

You tune your guitar to 432 Hz tonight, and it is like a sudden fog entering my chest. 432 Hz's wavelengths are longer and balanced with the ratio at which nature exists. Your breath right now is at .3 Hz and your pulse is vibrating at 1.2 Hz, both equivalent to 432. The universe oscillates at this frequency as well; it is half of Saturn's year, correlates with the color spectrum, and predicts the number of stones at Stonehenge. So why do humans choose to increase nature by 8? And if our bodies are vibrations, thousands of nerves radiating with electrical pulses, how would our fingers, irises, and cochlea expand or contract, contort or disappear completely if our music was to change?

As you lay down next to me later, I think all of this and more, spiraling into Fibonacci sequences, until your hand falls across my chest and breaks us into new, asymmetrical sections.

Coping

You tell me that this metal work put on the tops of brick, forms a runoff for water and a crown for the wall, designing your hands together– one fisted, the other lying on top, so that the mortar between bricks doesn't separate like flour or glue when filled with rain. I put my hand on top of yours as you speak to feel joined to you again, because your words are dripping away, like there is a coping over me and all I can focus on is that word. How you've given me a new meaning for it, fused the metals between the kernings of its letters, picturing the space between our fingers in the same way, until I am unsure if we are the real thing, or the metaphor– if we are fused at right angles or just bracketed together.

Watching Rachael Barton Pine Play her Viola D'amore

November 16, 2013

The stage reaches out in great slabs of wood as she stands perfectly at the center, her yellow hair curling against the wooden instrument tucked under her chin, even her chiffon dress folds over like flecks of gold in water. I imagine her left leg underneath the skirt as she adjusts her weight mid measure. In all my research I cannot find what it is made of, but something in me believes it is also wood.

Perhaps the same type as the resilient violin that trapped her between two metal train doors and dragged her body down the tracks, knotted her left leg and split her right knee. Yet, she stands erect, swaying between her right elbow making halos of sound, and her left fingers tapping the fingerboard, speaking to the sympathetic strings beneath, which whisper tones all the way to me at the back of the hall. So I imagine her leg carved like her viola: two flaming swords snaking up to the blinded cupid on her scroll, because there are only thirty known people in the world who can play music from this instrument, and she would be the only one made out of the material that she rests against her hip, as she takes a bow.

Daphne

Did you regret hardening yourself, cooling your skin to a crust, stretching fingers into laurels, leaning in and out of the wind whipping around your hips? If you were to go back, turn around to him, instead of transforming, would you still crave the way birds claw your branches? Yours is the type of trapped passion I want to understand and that's why I see you peering out all around me now through the slats of bark in every tree, place my ear against you to hear the answers, and push my lover against your trembling bark, because I want to tell you how awfully holy it could have been to press yourself against him, to hold his fingers to your breasts. Come into me now, wrap your bare arms around my waist, and let's walk out of this knotted forest.

The Many Worlds Interpretation

Place one mirror against another and stand between the image of yourself and the rest of you. Move one arm up, the other to the right: this is infinity. Now, jog around your old neighborhood and picture your route in mirrors. See universes. Photons of energy bouncing away into the street, echoing around themselves. What do you have faith in? I am sitting by Lake Sonoma again, drove down

Dry Creek Road and walked to this place through the trees. I passed my memories in glass, mapped on the water where the trunks of trees, with their heart wood scooped out, break the lake's surface like arms and I am thinking again about Hawking and what he said about God being unnecessary for life and how maybe we only have this one existence to understand every molecule and moment. Beyond me, a woman is rowing in and out between the hollow branches. She twists and leans with the weight, navigating under the places where two moments diverge.

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