February

My goal is to determine the extent to which you can feel

something, like a winter, or the lateness of heaven,

or linen lavender sheets. And if it could be like something

else. A February exactly like the fact that they used to

use real coffee mugs on planes, white ones with pink stripes.

Linen bed sheets like hydrangeas or swollen gums after wisdom

teeth surgery. You are like being cold. And how hooray

is a finger dragging itself through pink frosting. Or

how pink frosting is today, and Alex saying that finally

we are walking home in the not-dark. Which is a feeling

like how I always needed a coat in the winter back when

you could still see the stars in Denver and a sunset makes

me feel like a church full of people clapping their hands

for God or Joan Baez barefoot singing take the ribbon

from my hair. I love how February makes me think of

the knots in my hair and how they were like pink ribbons,

but you never undid them––just loved me hard enough

to make more of them. I love February and how you want to

swim with me. Touching is another way of remembering,

and I used to have a cow I loved named Nutmeg––you were

right about trains and the night and how moons look

like rose buds. February like hellogoodbye. Like Tennessee,

or Texas, or the backyard with yellow flowers. February

like winter, the best season for chocolate ice cream by yourself

and thinking about glass. I get a particular feeling when I see your

eyes: the way a house feels when it is painted one color all over.

I’d let you pick my color, so long as it is blush, the one covering

the breasts of all the women trapped in the Dutch renaissance

or the inside curl of a grapefruit skin (itself an open hand as if

asking or asleep or in the rare perfect February sun.) Anne,

you were right about Van Gogh. You were right about pain.

But I was right too when I decided to have none of it,

to be naked while I drink my tea and not wear jeans again

unless they’re yours, and I’m wearing them to the bus stop

in the early morning because nothing has ever felt

so delicious as something that has been touched (incidentally) by you.

The advice I got this February: if you do not understand

something as something, can you try to understand it as

poetry? God? Marionberry jam? Your body all of a sudden?

Tonight: I do hear bells. I do not feel any of the nails in my body.

I am your color. Your cold fingers. A movie in bed

at seven in the morning. Of all the meaningless boys,

you are the only one who ever talked to me

about the velveteen rabbit. Sugar. Horses––

and their silver hooves in the frost. I want to

know you like I know the low beauty of the rain,

a guitar, the muttering of syllables by old men at night.

The last time you had your hand on my rib you told me

that I was relentless. I have not relented. I will feel love

burn through me like dark liquor. This poem is for me

because it is for you.