Gabriel Gadfly's Blog, page 17

Nonverbal

Vocabulary misplaced.

Brain forgets to go looking.

The muscles

know what words are

but forgets their shapes.

An open mouth:

white noise.

The post Nonverbal appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Plunge

Every night this week,

I keep dreaming

that you throw me out

the open door of an airplane,

into 30,000 feet of blue —

You fling me out head first,

without altimeter or oxygen,

no tandem partner lashed to my back.

You cast me into solitude and blue,

not endless blue but ended blue,

a sharp-capped blue, a snapped-shut blue,

30,000 feet of blue and love

before the blue stops.

You cast me into solitude and love,

into 30,000 finite feet of your love.

This must be the weightlessness of your love.

This whirl into vapor, this vertigo.

A broad gasp of green looms up

to crack me open and I do not know

whether the stones in the ground

whether the tiny houses, the lines of roads

are supposed to be a map to find you again

or just a picturesque countryside

to lull me down.

Is this the anxiety, the panic of your love?

Your love hammers the ribs in my chest;

your love is a scarcity of air, a burned lung —

a strained muscle, air pressure blowout–

I am trying to tell my body

we are all falling here at once

but some parts want to fall faster for you.

I cannot find the up of your love.

I am all turned around, I am whirled

head over heels over head

over heels over head

and there’s no way up,

no way down but down, but gravity

into slashes of blue and slashes of green

that circle and blur and whirl.

I am whirled; I am a world of your love,

a dead weight blackout of love,

a terminal velocity, a body dropped of love.

Every night this week,

I snap to wake as body breaks ground,

your name the cord of a parachute

clenched white-knuckle tight,

never snatched.

The post Plunge appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

My Favorite Gas Station

There is a no-name gas station

on the north end of town,

11.9 miles out of the way,

out past the corner where

John Roe sits all day in the sun,

spits tobacco and sells onions

and oranges out of the back

of his rust red pick up truck.

There are bars on the station’s windows

and jars of pickled eggs on the counter,

right beside herbal male enhancement pills

and crack pipe roses. Pork rinds.

Refrigerator egg salad sandwiches

reserved for the brave or foolish.

There’s an old condom machine

in the men’s room, two feet to the left

of the pocket knife graffiti that says

JESUS SAVES and KKK 4 LIFE.

Half a roll of paper towels, no soap,

and the faucet just trickles,

no matter how the handle is set.

The attendant has a face

like the inside of a cigarette.

She runs a hand through

brown grease pit hair,

charges 5 cents more per gallon

than anywhere else nearby,

and she never says a word.

There’s no good reason to come here.

There are better gas stations,

closer, cleaner, less treacherous,

but you ought to know

that every time the needle

on my fuel gauge leans towards E,

I drive up, pull in past the jagged potholes

that get deeper every month,

to suck on hot petroleum fumes

and top off my tank,

listen to standard unleaded

slosh down rubber hose,

and to enjoy, for a brief moment,

that I am a little nearer —

that for these few minutes,

you are 366 miles away.

You are only 366 miles away.

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In Absentia

I think for a moment

you sweep past:

a smoke of rose, a wisp of heat,

a hint of calm, a whisper

without sound but scented

with your lips, your tongue,

your breath, it eddies through

the turbulence

of my everyday.

Inhale your scent,

pretend your scent

is present to be inhaled.

Swallow the lump

rising in my throat.

This is how I get through

the moments between

our meetings.

The post In Absentia appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

8 AM, Monday Morning

Early this morning,

you stepped out of the shower,

lifted your hair, still dripping

with tiny clean jewels,

and showed me the back of your neck.

You said you felt a sting sometime before dawn

and asked me if I thought

some insect had bit you in the night;

after all, we had left the windows open

to enjoy the cool breath of spring

and the whispers nesting down

in the oak trees outside,

so any manner of tiny bug might have

snuck past the window screen

and found its way inside.

I know what sunk its barb in me —

the scent of your soap,

a snap of lilac and lavender,

and under it your fresh-scrubbed skin,

still hot to the touch from the spray.

I ran my fingers across your neck,

searching for blemish or sting.

I didn’t see a bite mark,

no red welt or irritated bump,

but my fingers itched,

and my mouth itched for more

when I kissed the back of your neck,

standing in the bathroom

before you had to leave for work.

The post 8 AM, Monday Morning appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

County Road 23

The weekend over, we left your parent’s house,

and drove home in the rain,

tense and tired to our bones

from your father’s opinions about the government,

from your mother’s mild but persistent interrogations,

from your little brother and his dog Cheyanne,

both joyful, but barking desperate for attention.

Neither of us said anything,

you with your arms crossed in the passenger seat,

me with hands white-knuckled on the wheel,

weary to be home, but with miles to go.

The sun went down, and drove darker

until we rolled along County Road 23,

past a dairy farm and a baptist church

with a parking lot full of farm trucks,

even though it was getting late

even for country preachers high on hellfire.

Those were the last lights we passed

for miles, until pine trees nuzzled close in the dark

and we hit a patch freshly paved:

new asphalt so dark, so smooth it seemed like

we sailed down a river of night,

a slick of black glass that stretched

to the limits of the high-beams

and seemed as if it might crack beneath the tires.

We were both startled

by the tiny tree frog that popped into the road,

by his little jubilant leap into the rain,

his dance in light and wetness, his happy transit,

and your hand flew to my thigh

as I pressed the brake and slowed to let him pass.

Neither of us said anything,

but your hand settled from tension to comfort

and I eased my grip on the wheel

as the small green wanderer landed safely

in the pine straw piled on the other side of the road,

and then we continued on our way,

but your hand never moved,

not for the next fifty miles until we made it home.

The post County Road 23 appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

Trees of Life

I saw on the news

that scientists have learned

to grow the cells of a heart muscle

in the cellulose left behind

when you suck out

everything that makes

a leaf of spinach

     a leaf of spinach.

Hollowed out, limp white, the ghosts

of greenery can be seeded

with the tiniest dose

of humanity, a scattering

of frightened cells that grasp

the vascular scaffold

and cling for dear life —

these wisps of blood remember

another time when we huddled like this,

against the walls of ventricular caves

back before time had a name —

our cells huddle and cling

until plant and muscle merge

and chlorophyll learns

to give up sunlight and sustain

itself on the thu-thump thu-thump

of pulse and bloodflow.

It turns out you can transform

all sorts of vegetation into veins: parsley,

sweet wormwood, arterial jewelweed —

even the straight column from twig or stick

can be worried down to translucent shell

and taught to become a vessel of blood.

That night I slept and dreamt

of red vines that crept aortic at my ankles,

of lush capillary jungles, flooded, throbbing,

of a garden of wild muscle —

a place where the sun rises cardiac,

red on petals engorged, a place where,

when rain showers gently down,

you can stroll among the stems,

run the tips of your fingers across

the veins of the leaves,

and feel heartbeats in the blossoms,

in the four-chambered pistil and stamen,

in the breath of pollen, a mist like copper.

The post Trees of Life appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

The Unwanted Spring

The weather crouches

and readies herself to leap

into the basin of warmth and rain.

She loosens the towel of winter

at her waist and lets it fall.

I wish I were a lifeguard.

I wish I could loose a shrill blast

from an orange whistle,

seize her wrist,

close the pool:

lock us on the cusp

of the last cold snap,

all because spring is coming

and all the days of it

will slip by

with you in your city

and I in mine.

My hand is empty.

How can I walk

through the garden

and show you

the fresh buds ready to burst?

the purple gillyflower,

the pink ranunculus,

the white lisianthus

with the tips of her petals

dipped in paint?

The bees like little doctors

have begun their rounds,

and today, a grasshopper

tanned his long legs

on the porch rail.

Pause the seasons

until you are here

and I can share these

little beauties of life

with you.

I don’t ask much.

Let weather only wait

until we are together again —

then she can dive,

then can spring wash us

in hot greenery,

in the blossom of the sun.

The post The Unwanted Spring appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

What My Heart Wears

My heart wears yellow sunglasses.

My heart wears satin in blues, wears all the hues

of a flower garden bloomed in finger and paint.

My heart wears galaxies in shades of bruise.

My heart wears cedar faces, my heart chases places

magical and strange, my heart wears card games

my laughing heart laughs, wears song after song

until my heart sleeps and music plays on.

My heart wears long into the night.

My heart wears dizzy the flesh and scent of orange.

My heart wears dizzy in love.

My heart wears wind, wears sand, wears stars,

wears the thousand tail lights of a thousand cars.

The thigh of my heart wears fire;

the hip and shoulder of my heart wears plum.

My heart in my mouth wears desire,

my heart moans slick with desire,

my heart wears my mouth,

but my heart goes north while I go south.

My heart wears away like away is a dress,

and my love for my heart is not little or less

for my heart being elsewhere and away.

My heart will wear yesterday until yesterday becomes

the next day I hold my heart in my hands again

and kiss the lips of my heart

and the throat of my heart,

until I wear my heart and my heart wears me again.

The post What My Heart Wears appeared first on Gabriel Gadfly.

The Tabby Cat and the Dormouse

The tabby in the garden by the fence

wriggles low, tweaks his whiskers to sense

the grey dormouse

by the red henhouse

but rain falls sudden and intense:

a bucketful of cloud drops downpour,

so the tabby, bedraggled and poor,

slinks off to dry

his whiskers and sigh

at laughing mouse in henhouse door.

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