Eat Mangos

And so I put my pen
down and I open
  the window.
And so I let my heart
out to fall apart
  in snow.

The frost on sidewalks sits,
the wind is singing its
  soliloquy,
I never though I’d see
what it means to be
  so happy.

What it means to be
golden in this key—
  Little one,
when you burn so high
we know all is nigh
all is won.

You whom the night has sent,
that lovely sacrament,
    (ut animalia
viderent natum
Dominum Christum!)
     Alleluia.

When you are gone I love the simple things:
flannelettes reaching down beneath my amber knees;
hands tangled up in playful jargon;
the stumble of paints on their formaldehyde
paths as they transform
rooms into cocoons of coconut-colored cotton.

Such threads are easy to get caught on.
Did I wish you were mine? Yes, I wished many things;
instead I am sentenced to transform
words into shapes like shoes. Formerly I’d
find this lovely, perched with my knees
like new bees in a honey jar, gone

barefoot through a stream of consciousness quiet as argon.
Still I find you–you, lingering in vibrations of blue cotton
in rooms whose sundry shadows clumsily transform all they hide–
you, among the lovely leerings of earrings, and other lost things,
bundled up in-between bed sheets and thread ponies–
you, felt at the tip of my pen—you, remembered and transformed.

Did I wish you were mine? Yes, I wished to transform
your ears with the undertone of my jargon,
to bend you deep upon your knees
and lose you true in a sea of cotton.
I wished to hear you speak sweet, sweet things,
only to trap and preserve in formaldehyde

these words of yours that take form and then hide
like wounded birds in my heart. You said, “love can transform
ordinary men into soldiers and saints.” You said many things,
but I am no saint–and you, my soldier, are gone
now except from things remembered. Between us, silence spreads its cot on
rusty wings like unbutterflied knees.

Was it your knees
that, arranged so, in their formality hide
the bed and its undercurrent of cotton?
Your Clementine toes, and their trace forms
on the pale carpeting in orange, are gone;
I will try not to miss such things

too much, in order to transform the paths of formaldehyde
and to stop the jargon of cotton
against the bent knees of all things.

On your first day
in your blue dress you put on the projector a portrait of
the artist and Thomas Cole, in a landscape of shadow.
They stood poised against the irrevocable gesture of the wilderness,
like two geese in front of an endless lake;
you said someday we too would come to understand
that destiny.

And so we understood it
the way Hawthorne understood it, voiceless
like a morning at Walden Pond, glimpsed it
through the transparent eye of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and the snowy curtains
of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover’s house–
but I never understood why you
came to understand it
much sooner than any of us.

So it is fitting that three years later
I find myself in front of a John Frederick Kensett
in a gallery at Vassar College; I think of your red hair.
The ships set out across a harbor of pale sails
like so many lost teeth:
the houses stand small and inconspicuous against the black rock,
and somewhere a steam train
coughs and tosses up pillows of smoke as if
scattering your ashes all over the waterfront.
It is cold on this side of the Hudson;
fall and its golden pageant ended early this year,
the earth and I are bound by a constitution of snow.
We stand knee-deep in wonder
at the edge of a darkened wood,
where no book can usher us 
through a world sleeping deep beneath its own white weight,
like a page left blank. 

And as I draw upon that nameless threshold,
that quiet sublime,
it helps somehow to know that you, so lifelike,
have already crossed it.