heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Abider: Poems > Status Update

... I love myself as I mean to love
the real and ravaged world from this

day forward—easy, yes, but fast.
I've been given a body. It won't last.

- from "I love so many things I have never touched"

... Meanwhile, I stay quiet in this
outlaw dark, lovely to myself, and deep. What I don't
too loudly claim is mine perhaps I'll get to keep.

- from "Whose Woods I am I Think I Know"

[ . . . ] My best friend says

recalibration, grief and pleasure wires
crossed in me. I'm grateful for this
grace. I'm not the god who saves

by suffering. This season's pain
is only pain—and mine. This hand
is not an angel's hand—but kind.

    
What's the difference between tenderness

and trickery, so long as somebody's
willing to pretend to be what you need?

He wants to be loved, so he takes any sign.
Puts himself at the mercy of what paws arrive.
  

- from "Upon learning they dress up as bears to take care of the motherless cub at the zoo"

. . . Want still / shimmers, these years later: to warm / my hands on self and, other, you.

    
This is how, when I was little, when I was lucky,
I received the body of the man or was received there,
without violence. Those night, he was a woman with
an open hand. She waited for the bird of me to light.