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Celestial Terms

You love me in algebra— 
D + d = L to the Nth degree, 
and I love you in quarter notes— 
a fierce appoggiatura and a soft, high C. 
We loved each other then in 
a jumble of chords using mostly black keys, 
in square roots, and Pi with ice 
cream, and the straining of infinity. 
We passed my childhood in a 
barrage of love-fear-grief-love—our Symphony. 
When firmaments fell, you were 
quiet. You held your anger safe from me. 
At my wedding dance (neither 
of us dances) we circled awkwardly, 
and when I left the house for good 
I looked up the long, steep length of driveway 
and choked on my new freedom. 
I couldn’t picture what my life would be.  
And now, we tiptoe on the phone 
(not our favorite). But then, last Christmas Eve 
we debated math, Ron Paul, 
and the theory of relativity, 
and my poor husband went to bed 
with a titan headache, like Sicily 
invaded by the Romans. 
But it is the inevitability 
of you and me, the red-haired 
inventor and blond pigtailed girl, hungering 
for the best of what you could 
(D+d) and could not quite give to me: 

Someday we will share feelings. 
In celestial terms they’ll zip, from heart to 
heart, like electricity 
elegant with algorithms, channeled in 
raw-sung soliloquies.

In the Night 

We slumber heavy in the night 
so long as hills are bare and white 
and what is real, is pressing. What 
can you do but answer. What can 
you do but take my jaw in hand 
and answer. And what can I, but 

know you while night visions press us, hot 
in our down blanket. What cannot 
be spoken, we will speak with night 
still resting on us—your air 
on me, and my warm shoulder bare 
to you—real, real as day is light 

until we wake in morning’s cold, 
when mountains, rimming in the gold 
of cresting sun, can no more be 
deferred. What can we do but rise . . . 
that I could stop you with my gaze 
as you work your task of leaving me. 

Tangled Women 

Mother always dreamed of our perfection; 
daughters who escaped her careless jumble 
with cool minds and clear heads. A strong woman  

was (she first thought) like lines of a chi garden 
with stones laid straight, and raking gravel— 
tines in furrows, dug for our perfection. 

Then, battling with star thistles and watermelons
sprung up from seeds of wars in a tough tumble 
of coiling vine, she became the sort of woman 

who taught her daughters the raw mysticism 
of broken earth, while the sting of new soil 
stirred us. She demonstrated the perfection 

of bulbs thrown, of planting in the pattern 
of scatter. With closed eyes, she tossed her handful
in hope that we would all grow to be women 

of choice. What renaissance—the perfection 
of rebellion in us, tangled women.