Her

Graphite on Rives BFK paper from a handmade sketchbook in graduate school, 2003, Lavavoth Stuart. I look at these drawings now and wonder if I drew her into existence, called her into my life, aching for a friendship that could match my own intensity. We met the following year.

(for her)

you see the blunted edged horizon buckling into Barbados

a song drifts through the salt-licked air

a dream shedding its skin in the distance

those faraway days wore her eyes

sadness seated in the sleepy pulse

long lapse without reentry

collecting in her like sediment

she swims through the garden with a periscope view

splicing fragments that revolt at the taking

where did it go wrong, she asked me once

smuggling her words into my dream

I couldn’t answer

fastened to my captor like a second spine

a supernatural lure dressed in human skin

love rehearsed in captivity

until it learned the shape of his truth

In my garden | Things grow in my garden | Things will grow | Then they die | Then they fall away | Then they're gone | In my garden | We'll never grow old | In my garden | Where the dew never dries | In my garden | These roses | These black orchids are our friends | In my garden | When we breathe | When we breathe this air | We will breathe in these things | In my garden | We'll never die

how do I translate

this story written in blades

tossed into the embankment

hoarding her face like contraband

and the quiet industry of her careful hands

tending to things undecipherable

"complicated grief" a term for what I feel

and its refusal to expire on schedule

as if time could cauterize the barometric pressure

of a broken heart

as if rain ever asked permission

to spill open onto my soil

Graphite on Rives BFK paper from a handmade sketchbook in graduate school, 2003, Lavavoth Stuart.

I'm taken down like a sandcastle mid-tide

but I pocket one surviving image

before it swallows me

she and I once drafted large houses out of air

circled ourselves in it like endangered settlers

mourning the earth

knowing it was nearly gone

did she believe in it

this passage-tied bond of friendship

redirecting the map between us

pulling our orbits into alignment

or was it performed to keep me intact

the future curdles in my tongue

a spoiled promise saturates the air

trees folding in with a throat-worn grunt

they decay like me beneath the pink canopy

of a weighted haze

Close your eyes | Say the word | I want to hear | Come up behind me and hold on | Close your eyes | And close in around me | Say you'll do anything for me | Say you'll do what you don't understand | Close your eyes | Come all around me and hold on | I'll be your body when your body is broken

und was ist mit meinem Geistermann [1]

what of his undiplomatic grip

she registers his seismic threat

I misfire, miscalculate, forfeit her

to the marrow of his spectral visions

bypassing her for a realm not yet drafted

when I’m consumed by the fires of fate

my flesh fertilizer for this disease

from the top of an old lilac near a velvety conifer

I watch her narrate sweetness into matter

honey thickening the air, cedar entering the lungs

olfactory heroes assembling into her potions

Graphite on Rives BFK paper from a handmade sketchbook in graduate school, 2003, Lavavoth Stuart.

time’s passed and she misplaced me

like a scent that never took to skin

a letdown she would soon forget

the earlier version of me decanted and sealed

inside his architecture of closed air

my trace diffusing without end

[1] German for, And what about my spirit husband