October – battles won, lost and won again
1. earl gray, imperial
Autumn riches,
Leaves and gray and gold,
Sunny afternoons ending
Quick to shout you past
The end of summers past,
The beginning of years to come.
Pour the water in, Earl Gray again,
(Imperial this time. Bergamot.)
You entered by defeat,
Uninterested in the battles ongoing,
Heavy set to
Never be
Someone else’s soldier.
Beneath: that vanity –
A vanity of undoing
What others begin,
What might be consumed,
What’s often left to rust,
To disintegrate
Through winter’s gentle
Fooling freeze.
Breathe in the steam, scented:
A wealth to be had
By tasting.
You were wrong, of course:
We are always in someone else’s
War, people you’ve never seen
Yet carry within, a little -
Distant women and men
From centuries gone
Mixed within your blood, within your heart,
Latent in your mind, present
In your dreams,
Fearful of your love,
Hopeful for your defeat and some,
Only wanting to feel, still,
Despite their own dissolving.
Leave the sugar for someone else –
You want the scent tea-clean.
But you learned,
Late but you did,
And rolled an unending
Round of heavy-firing
Artillery onto their mean-made
Theatre, into their stale-made planes,
A multiple charge from places
Held too close to be seen
By anyone, even you,
And killed reluctant no more,
And killed again until a certain
Gusto – mild and only there,
On the edge but there –
Removed the last pause,
And turned you into
Someone else’s
Soldier, after all.
Take the warm cup,
(Imperial, bergamot,)
Savor the victory
Only for the length of a cup of tea.
For even war
Pauses.
But not for love –
The fairless war you lost
In remaining someone else’s
Soldier, in your own battlefield
Of fear: did you win anything at all?
Don’t answer.
Pour yourself another cup.
2. i didn’t mean to say goodbye
Nothing else,
No scene or word or clever phrase,
No dish – caviar or
Ceci beans – no cat or dog,
Or child or man,
Or dream in the night or the day,
Not even first snows, days at the beach, no moment
Has looked into me that way -
Your look, that way.
Eyes that wouldn’t waver in fire or flood;
Eyes of colors changing, blue, black, green;
Eyes unmoved, unmoving, unturning, that don’t shy,
Don’t hope but remove by seeing every dream and
Sadness hidden, I thought, inside
My undeclared-oh-so-loud fears
That so-well defined what I would not do, or will,
Deciding only in safer spaces understood.
I feel it still, missing, still.
And such a battle I fought
And won and lost and won
And didn’t know that such-a-war
Leaves ghosts behind that
Wander outside those safer lines,
That bounded all-in-the-meantime:
Safe, I said, though the word to wrap, get,
Must belong to the world of those ghosts, yet,
And yet.
Withhold larger dreams that lead to other places,
Withheld that tear, that laugh unforced,
Without those mornings and days and nights and looks
That come from places beneath your unwavered eyes
And mine, wavering still in every mirrored look, in every
Instagram, sigh,
Only a little – you can’t tell unless you let
The ghosts pause from their wander, free enough to say:
We do not haunt the other side of night or day,
For day -
And night - have no sides, are not at war,
And do not battle: such divides are made
And held by real things passed, that
More ghost-like than we, haunt love
Viciously, hurtfully, taunting
Hope into despair, the real to fantasy, divide
The night from itself and the day, invent the nigh
That sponsors conquest not of need but of goodbye,
Goodbye, goodbye.
3. honey sum, in a teapot
I’ve become something else,
Though I can’t know what the else,
Or the thing, or the some,
Or exactly how long ago it was
When what I held, changed from
Any bitter else, to a certain sweeter sum -
The thing I hold, tea it should be,
The I that will be given,
Or even what has become
Or when that change occurred
Or if a change at all and not a recurred
Returning to a same form
Once held - both what’s within
And what I give: the return of a norm
To a something already there, an un-form,
Latent, that both what I am
And what I hold, tend, to want,
Tend toward, a tending uniform
That whatever I, I am, steps into
So easily - an I returned that I’ve been to,
That drips easily from my spout
Into the cup, darkly flavored
It was, I think, yet since I doubt
What I am, was, what is within, what is without,
I merely sense the sweetness new,
Battle-shy of warring with myself so merely
Let all I have drip freely away, a turnabout,
Yes, though a bit of a guess, if the tea
In the cup came from what I am, this me,
Alone or if what I’ve been is still what I’ve become
Like the two of them, mixed again, she and he,
Much like before, only their flavor now honey-some,
A drop, a spoonful, has replaced the bittersome
Drink that used to fill their cups
From the top, squeezing love so clear
To the bottom, from me, here, to them: a honey-summed.
