discontent (as a good thing)

there's the eternal movements of monkey, fussing, learning to coordinate, to vocalize, to stuff things in her mouth. there's how hard it is to look for work right now; the economy, sure, but more what i told d.: i want to be around people who are real.
last night in his wood book, i read about wood as signifying the real. authenticity, a claim of being made by heidegger? how monkey demands. you pick her up. she sticks her fingers in your mouth, and then in hers. her eyes are yours. you sing to her. i remember her weight on my lap, her head on my shoulder.
discontent as something about reaching, you quote. i am thinking about desire. how various it can be, when paired with real love. discontent as a necessary temporary condition, as a reminder of what 'the sovereign' -- as the building on parade street is named -- means. on the q, making my way to k-dog, there was a six- or seven-year-old girl asking her father questions about countries, states, continents, quizzing him about hawaii, whether it was an island or a state or its own country.
i watch your exhaustion. a happy exhaustion. mine is as well, however otherly originating. your monkey, your out loud desire. d's shirt i put on today, a way of protecting feeling close. what it means to reach: the risk of, the risk of, and watching words fail, or miss their mark. 'matching outfits,' the girl behind the counter yells. how i wanted to move to the country now, begin some other kind of life. and that the stability came in another form.
the way words can help me now by not mimicking, but simply approximating, by forcing me to imagine what the sadness yesterday was, what i was mourning all evening, night, morning. d. telling me he thinks of happy things when he wakes still sad. i thought of the moments before the end of my childhood, a seahorse in my outstretched hand, and he said he understood why i'd gone in search of that childhood last year.
he told me he'd witnessed the end of a child in someone he loves. now monkey is crying and you pick her back up and she unclenches her mouth. i am happy that we have children in us, that you have a child outside of you, that outside is a park whose cobblestones make her jiggle. i feel like someone's taking the bandage off of my discontent and letting the wound air. i know what it means to be touched, to decide to let all the feeling in, to feel it again and again and again, and for the first time i am welcoming the discontent, because now there is a content.

Joy

Linda said Jack said
I lived my life with everything in it. Not somebody else's life.

and: I like the feeling of being inside myself.

I always forget the line from the Mark Doty poem about watching the dolphin
Is it joy
or grief
he mistakes for something slight.

She's crying, won't take bottle
he said.

I left the reading during Megan O'Roarke
(who we liked despite ourselves)

and rushed home, not stopping for food.
wrote a poem on the way home
about leaving the poetry reading
to go breastfeed. She was asleep when

I walked in, peaceful on the couch.

You sit across from me with your screen
and me here on mine
between us, she is talking like crazy
singing almost, something wildly important.

You asked me to write about joy
maybe because of her, or my sadness the other day
about how love fails. Or because it sounds like Jo,

I don't know if I'm always living my life.
But it catches me from time to time.

I pick her up so we are eye level and her eyes fill with it
as she reaches out to touch my mouth.

the red haired woman we both knew twenty years ago.

I thought "humps" because we are both vagabonds, historically speaking. Born with wandering eyes, something in me still shifting still as this little girl named home kicks my side.
Humps, a way of storing up for long journeys. Edith Piaf in the background. Another vagabond. What it means to be between; me between country and city. A little toadstool called home gnawing at you. Collecting mushrooms, carrying them on our backs.
Remember the small animal in my belly? I thought about that when I was pregnant, like it was foresight...
I'm listening. You said she was swimming in the air, remembering her animal self inside you. This weekend in the woods, speaking of animals in us, I was surprised to come again upon a dead goat in a stone shelter.
Oh, who dragged him there...and again? You were encountering said animal for the second time?
Do you remember ten years ago when we talked about the small animal inside us too?
It wasn't a real goat this time. It was as if real in the woods of the city. A way of feeling intensely. Your animal laughing. I had forgotten, but I remember your stomach folded beautifully in three. Do you remember that drawing?
I do...and this is the first apartment in ten years where I haven't hung the gold leaf five directions drawing. I remembered you seeing and saying don't hang that, I'll give you something better. But I kept hanging it. This time I thought, well, maybe this is a new chapter.
Is there a real goat in here at all? Or are we all metaphor?
I'll give you a real new drawing. Not of a goat. The goat was real. I feel keyed in lately to what life and death mean. I'm thinking, too, of the 'soft animal of your body' in the Mary Oliver poem. What do you think of that poem? It has the desert in it and walking on knees. Camels and their difficulty, it seems, getting up and down...
It's on the fridge five feet from you right now. I thought it would be good for the man in the house. I like poems like that these days, ones with flour and lamps and nutrients, poems that make things and do things for us.
There's a drawing that E. Bishop did of a ceiling lamp that I really like. It's the perfect color, and its lines like a spider crawling in shadows.
It's been so long since we made that journey to New York from Colorado.

the animal sleeps

she does, perfectly. She likes to feel accompanied for the transition. Did I become the animal in my belly? Did I give birth to her? Is she taming? I think she is stretching out and growling of late.

The Bishop painting of the master house was beside the bed of the lover before the last lover. It's lines were thicker than what was between us which was not quite enough. It's colors like pinkish skin. I was too hungry for him.
I remember waking the lover before the last lover to show him the Bishop picture of the lamp, and him saying, You woke me up to show me that? I don't know that I was too hungry, but I was too hurt. I feel like I'm just beginning to stretch out and growl and unlearn that hurt.

Follow your tracks and draw a map of that unlearning. If only we could do that, take a breath and walk the trail that brings us back to ourselves. I am not opposed to well being anymore. To being well. Just that.

The ones that had skin that smelled like mine turned away from me. He did that in a what do they say...fell swoop? Fail swoop? No growing tired. Just a big fell swoop.

Draw a map, you say, to what we're no longer opposed to. A way of existing that doesn't constantly pain. The map would be light green, the color of just leafing maples, the color of my lover's eyes, the color of something unripe, yet so firm, so strong. There would be numbers, 7, 8. Names: Lathe, Kythia. There would be wrong turns that lead to the right end.

The color of the cool swivel cuplike chairs at the Milk Station in my dream. Laithe. I think it needs an I. The scent of old leather outside, burning wood, movie popcorn.

I did go to that reading last week, the one I found out about half an hour before it began. The small animal rode on my front. We got there over an hour late, just in time for Eileen. She heard the sound of many people clapping their hands together for the first time, looked up as if in a storm.

And yesterday in the car, I put fresh lilac under her nose. She sneezed a little, and smiled.

Lilac. My mom would give me some sprigs to give to my teacher each spring. Your animal's good pee-popcorn smell. The poet I was talking about, Stonecipher, knows of a color: golden ginkgo. The sun outside. Your glass of white. How I needed to document the interior of love as an Oak Street apartment, yesterday putting up the wallet-sized photos on my lover's closet door. A doubled interior. Like the animals inside us.

I like that it was wallet sized, the things we carry. "white wine eases the mind along the trail of the faithful body once..." something like that. from olga. lots of o, the grate painting by his ex that sits over the table where we eat, draining, draining.

It is a mediocre painting at best. There's the rub.

ooh child

Angel from Montgomery, visiting you in Poughkeepsie, the fall being what I remembered New England falls to be, filled with a smell of soccer balls, the light just so slanted. We strong women. Writing. Writhing. Laithe. Letting the draining go. Deciding to put the symbols places where they can grow, rather than deform. Lining up. I'm lining, finding the spider light, finding that I want to --

the lining we shed each month becomes a home.