To Rhiannon, Who Will Know

I crawl away from your coming,
crabwalk backward
along the white expanse of sheet.
Too fast, too fast—I'm not ready for you.
And the water is deep and calls me.
I refuse to push.

The pain spirals me up and up.
I do not care what you look like,
how the top of your head will smell,
how your fingers will curve.
The waves spill over the sand,
driftwood snagging my panting breaths.
I refuse to push.

Hours bleed into the blue sky
turning gray at the edges.
I refuse you passage,

enter instead the flooded cave.
Sightless fish, ribbons of eels.
Ghost shrimp, translucent,
scatter in the light-tipped waves.
Seaweed tangles the surface,
gray spume blows in.
The night is breezy,
rain not far away.
The rocky sky curves overhead
narrowing to channels plowing
deep into the earth.
Aeons of slapping sea
have smoothed the walls,
easing their carve.
Eyes are there, bright in the darkness.
Silence, but for my breathing
filling the cave,
pushing against the tide's urging hand,
finger pressed to finger.

Thunder gives you voice;
lightning gives you sight;
wind whispers a map;
rain tells you it's time.
You will not wait for me
to return to the shore.

Caught in a net,
I'm hauled onto to the sand,
grit in my teeth, my hair.
A hook in my cheek,
a rare creature, radiant
in rain and moonlight
no fight left.

You’re here and your slime
mixes with mine on the
exhausted beach of my chest.
Your face bruised and blunted
from the journey through
that rocky cave.
The ocean's gift—not
to be refused.



Cooking

My mother would not approve
of the dishes I cook:
schnitzel, sauerbraten, rouladen
were meals she could understand.

Couscous, humus, m'jederra—
foods that I can barely pronounce,
from a world I've never seen,
cook on my stove.

Baking pita is hard; the oven
is not hot enough for pockets to form,
but the bread is wonderful anyway
and my babies eat it happily.
We eat Moroccan loaves with
diamonds carved in the top,
warm with honey or butter,
Iranian flatbreads dipped in creamy
baba ganush,
cold sambusas at midnight.

My son loves sticky medjool dates
and my daughter crams okra
and tomatoes in her mouth,
olive oil dripping down her chin.

My kitchen is fragrant—onions fry until
brown and sweet,
garlic and sumac and zahtar in my mortar,
purple eggplants on the grill.

I play music of oud and ney,
while I chop vegetables,
the eerie wailing curling
around the ceiling.

I fight the warm dough,
tapping out the mamoul cookies
clinging stubbornly
to the wooden molds,
the strange taste of ground cherry pits
and orange water on my tongue.

My home is warm, noisy, and
smells of cooking;
my mother would shake her head
in Teutonic disappointment at the
crying babies, the dogs and the cats.

But when my family is full
after dinner, and the babies are clean
and sleeping quietly,
I pet the animals and wish my mother
could be here to listen to
my home's soft night noises with me—
a glass of mint tea, a bowl of dates—maybe
she could be happy after all.



Fractal Love

Your eyes look surprised when we make love,
brown, unfocused without
the protective lenses
that give you the air of a studious rabbi
bent into a comma over the Talmud,
or a physicist lining up numbers
to prove the existence of a star's arc,
its pull on our hearts enough evidence
that the world spins.

Stars revolve, dance to a celestial tune.
The spheres, like throbbing harp strings,
sing hymns to a god replaced by
Mandelbrot's cardioids, black hearts
formed by infinity spiraling outward and in,
vortexes swallowing the universe and spitting
it out again—infinite whale's belly,
a darkness in the dark of space.
Feathery fractal images of
prehistoric ferns expanding fast forward
millions of years,
circling a still, silent center.

That center is us, breaths slow,
ribs cradling blue lungs,
red hearts rapping code.
DNA insists on it. We submit,
spinning ourselves in tangled
braids of ebb and flow.

We only understand the owl’s raucous demands
for sex, for food, for the bounce of air
under his wings in the winter night,
frost spreading in crystalline waves along the glass.
What patterns are there, weblike,
spilling over the sill, wrapping the night sky
in its white swirl? The owl, the prowling cat,
the snap of twigs, the streetlight in the fog,
the sweep of snow on the dormant quince,
the music of the stars. Spiraling, expanding,
we join our dance to theirs.

ForPoetry