Lessons

     My grandpa likes to teach me things, like how to dock a boat, tie a line, or build a fire. How to be patient. How to find my favorite stars in the sky and to be a good traveler. He taught me how to back a jeep into a parking spot and appreciate Shakespeare. We get along famously and find joy in the sharing of knowledge. But there is one thing he taught me that I know I’m going to spend my life trying to learn.

     It starts like this: we’re in his old jeep, and I’m twelve, and I’m distracted. He has this good-hearted way of believing you’re always listening to him, and I have perfected the art of getting lost inside my head. He’s talking and I’m thinking Very Important Preteen Thoughts, probably about that boy’s smile and whether it means he was flirting or just being nice, or maybe it’s the new shape of my hips and, wow, I really hate how they feel in my jeans. Then my brain-ramblings fade out and his voice fades in. He’s saying my name. 

     “Dani. Daniella. Did you hear me?”

     “OH. Um. What did you say?”

     He chuckles and bangs his hands on the steering wheel.

     “I was telling you about the secrets of the cosmos and also the seventh law of the salt mine, of course.”

     “Right. Okay. I’m listening.”

     When he finally looks at me, he’s smiling, and the car rumbles as we climb the last hill before home. I can tell he’s going to save the seventh law for later, when I remember to listen. We’re on the last stretch of road before home and I’m sure my lessons are over for tonight. I hang my head and promise myself I’ll listen better tomorrow. My days with my favorite man in the world are numbered, after all. Soon, my least favorite man will drive him away like always.

     My thoughts are interrupted on their guilt-ridden road when he glances over at me and brushes his hand over his beard. His smile retreats to the lines around his eyes. This familiar gesture turns the atmosphere in the car heavy and promising, like the wind that brings the rain with it.

     “One day, you’re going to look in the mirror, and you’re going to realize you understand what you don’t know.”

     My body’s being jostled in that way only tough old cars shake you, and my mind is doing a little frantic dance, unsettled by his words. I want to hold what he means in my hands and examine it. I want to memorize it, before I lose it somewhere in the space between my ears. But no amount of trying will make me magically understand what I don’t know. These little secrets of the cosmos he so enjoys sharing with me cannot be strong-armed into my psyche. An image comes into focus - my face, finely wrinkled in the mirror, reflecting the comfort of truth and unafraid of the unknown.

     “I sure hope so, Grampa.” I sigh, as we roll into the driveway.

     We get out of the jeep and climb the red stone stairs to my house. He opens the door into the many broken things I know all too well. 

(This is the beginning of a short story, but it kind of feels like the beginnings of a memoir. We'll see. Thanks for reading.)

February 19 2013 - updated with the revised version

If You Leave

Ashes to ashes,
Stardust to stardust,
If you leave here first,
Shine down on me
So we can always continue
Our nightly conversations.

Weight

I feel the weight of loving you often enough

to want to grow wings. 

My memory is the main culprit, 

and it strikes without fair warning.

Yesterday, it was the night you moved your leg

to the center underneath the booth, all sly, 

like I wouldn’t notice you’d made it impossible 

for us not to touch, and how you held my gaze 

when our ankles kissed.

Today, it was definitely the way you pecked my cheek

before you ran to catch the train, 

glanced into my eyes and dashed across the street.

I hadn’t even thought you would kiss me goodbye.

Right now, it’s 5 am, and I know I can call someone

and he will answer, and I’ll tell him I’m feeling lonely,

and he will ask me what kind of lonely I’m feeling.

And I’ll want to tell him - the kind of lonely that exists as 

a cannonball in my stomach, rolling about each time I move.

The kind of lonely that can blast an gaping hole through the core of me,

the kind of lonely that’s the round black heaviness of your absence.

But I’ll just say what’s true enough without the honesty;

-oh, that sort of late-night lonely after a long day

when I just want a body beside me so listening to
the sound of their breathing feels like falling
asleep in a car, rushing me forward into 

places I won’t remember when I wake up.

poem - April 2012

The House on Main Street

Everything is muted here,

but muffled, not drab.

The red carpet underfoot

is softer than it looks.

The couch under my hands

feels rough and worn,

beaten by dogs' paws,

and the same people

sitting in the same old place.

The television: off-color, like

a photograph taken with a filter

knocked off-kilter.

But my words and rhymes

are too heavy here.

What lives –

simple, witty conversation,

jokes and sarcastic lashes,

love - poured

with your glass of beer.

The dog in my lap nodding off, and you -

reciting lines of films seen much too often,

laughing among faces known so well.

There are lighthouses painted

where the walls and ceiling kiss,

their imagined light shining,

leading me to this place,

next to you.

The wet tongue of a terrier on my face,

and the scent of gin on your mother's breath

as she smiles, chuckles,

hugs me to her, the dog brought along,

everything equal in her embrace.

All of this feels just like home.

poem - January 2011

Great Big Plans

I have a map
covered
with great big plans,
and half of them
probably won't
ever
get a pin
through their center.

There's so much
that hurts
in this world,
like the sound
of your tires
leaving,

but sometimes
it's a beautiful,
stunning
hurt

like the
bright fire
of your eyes
locked on mine.

Sometimes
I love you so much
that it all doesn't matter,
nothing but the wish
to be everywhere
with you.

If you asked me
what I'm afraid of,
it's that.

If you asked me
my favorite thing
about the world,
it's that.

poem - September 2012

Combination

Teach me surrender & 

teach me how to pick the lock.

Teach me open love.

Haiku - September 2012

Morning

you curled around me -
shield from the unwelcome dawn.
you alone are home.

haiku - August 2012

Petals

I wish I could pluck sentences 

from the garden of our conversations,

press them between pages of memories

filling the shelves in the back rooms of my mind.

If I could, I would

preserve the blooms of your words,

keep them for the sake of never forgetting

you - reckless, hopeful, flawed.

Stanzas of our most vivid moments

have already fossilized in my heart,

have lost all color and life - for now.

Maybe a few lines have survived our chaos.

Maybe someday I’ll be sitting a mountain,

paging through dusty volumes of this time

and I’ll find whisper-thin love-daises

faded and off white from the decay 

of our mutual longing.

Maybe I’ll keep them.

Maybe I’ll let them fall apart 

in my hand, and the faintest refrain 

of their petals falling will sing -

you love me, you love me not.

poem - June 2012

Scream

My relationship with you

reminds me of walking by a carnival;

close your eyes and

it could be joy

or a slaughter.

poem - August 2012

Elegy

Run away with me, keep going till 

we finally loosen our fierce grip on real.

Tell me, explain this life-wreck.

Answer me, are we here or have we strayed?

I swear this, promise it, some days all I want is

cigarette smoke all around, flinty glances drifting 

through the haze, smoldering love sparking burning 

through veins and the sweet basic release of skin on skin on skin.

Other days I can’t think about anything but young summer 

evenings at the creek and finding snakes and climbing escaping

into trees and crying into sudsy sinks - slimy dishes and blame for all the world's ills,

and more dishes - and running running running through the corn fields and 

tag-you're-it and sprinting heaving lurching fleeing through 

that sudden july thunderstorm pitching sadness anger bitterness into the wind 

and arms legs face into the hail.

This is for the incessant dragging riptide of my adolescent years. 

This is for the house I might have loved and the

first time I snuck out of it. This is for the 

city I wished to call home and the 

brother I grieved for while he lived. This is for the 

boy I loved then and even now and the 

sound of his voice over the telephone. This is for the 

coffee-shop on the corner of that north virginia town and the 

raspberry chai that flavored a lonely year away and the 

art studio that saved me. This is for 

you and your goddamn gorgeous mind.

And when I think that someday I might look at a little girl with a 

familiar ski-jump nose and bright old-soul eyes and know that she might

grow into someone who could write her own elegy of a young life with

the same worries and joys and losses and longings,

a knot of contradictions pierced by bright and dark strings strung 

permanently through other people’s hearts,

well it sometimes

makes me weary 

and it sometimes

gives me hope.

I must remember to tell her to travel light as often as possible.

poem - January 2012

Reclaimed

I thought I was growing up faster by giving myself away,

lending my bad traits out, wrapping my uniqueness in star-printed paper.

I realize now that I’m in the business of reclaiming myself.

I didn’t know 

I wanted to take me back.

I didn’t know.

I need to admire my hair because it makes me want to shake about

and dance and groove and spin and bounce along with my curls,

not because you once told me you could lose yourself in its twists and turns.

I long to look at my stomach in the mirror and love it 

for its soft stretch-marked record of the days 
I spent stumbling into the word ‘woman,’

not hate it for the time he took the extra food off my plate 
and patted my belly as if to say,
“no no, this is your fault, you are better than this.”

He was right. I am better than that.

I’m better than that old mental snapshot of myself, 

sectioned limb from limb into a million fragments of other people’s opinions. 

I am the sum total of all the times I’ve laughed so hard I cried. 

I am the cumulative effect of all the moments I’ve spent 

running in a thunderstorm and smiling at fireflies.
I am the gold flecks in my eyes in the sunlight, with
or without mascara. I am made entirely of the glowing moments,

like pressing my back to the grass, staring at stars on stars and feeling 

so lifted yet within my body, stretched out upon the ground.

I want to adore my feet for the places they’ve carried me, 

for the shoes they’ve danced to shreds and the cliffs they’ve sprung off,

not avoid looking too hard at them in fear of remembering the day 

you massaged the hurt out of them, because it inevitably reminds me 

that you’re not going to take my heart in your hands and squeeze 

it till it fits back together again like a hunk of clay, no scars, new.

I ache to accept that my heart is not something to be fixed,

that it can proudly wear the layered glaze of every person I’ve known,

that all the colors of their laughs and words and sweet sighs 
can mix, swirl, melt, harden -
and I can wear it around my neck,
hanging a little to the left,

like a pendant to be proud of - 
not a martyr’s bleeding heart,

but a precious gift to me, reclaimed

and to you, forgiven.

poem - July 2012

Praise

(part of the series; Love letters with Modest Mouse)

you were the dull sound of sharp math when you were alive, 

no one’s gonna play the harp when you die.

the irony of our last name strikes me today,

the name I inherited at birth - laudadio, lauda dio -

it means “praise god” in your father’s first language,

italian - a riot of gorgeous sounds I grew to love between 

my stooped grandfather’s natural stutter.

lauda dio, the epitome of roman catholic doctrine.

yes, praise god because it makes you good and righteous and holy,

until it doesn’t anymore, or never did in the first place.

after all, you cannot expand from loving, praising, admiring anyone 

who forces it out of you, who requires your dedication as a means to an end.

Better to praise the gods in our fellow stumblers, 

wanderers, strugglers and pretenders.

Better to love one another for the holy hell of a fight 

they face when simply opening their eyes every morning. 

Better to praise them for getting out of bed anyway. 

Better to love them when they just can’t do it that day. 

Better to believe that within every single person 

is the same spirit that lifts inside of you when fireworks burst, 

when thunder cracks, when your dog wiggles and runs and jumps 

and barks and smiles at the sight of you coming home.

Goddamn, if we could all love each other like that.

Better to understand that punishment is just another way to express selfishness.

No, it is not lost on me that you can only praise the god of yourself,

I felt the truth of it clock me in the heart 

on the day that fact became the means to our end.


poem - April 2012

Knowing

I’ve known horrible.

Disaster hailstorms on the heart,

break-your-soul months,

tears trapped in well-meaning jars,

landslides of secret wishes into the abyss.

I’ve known tragic.

Families who’ve tripped over

love - their every move forward

cracked the surface of good intentions,

plunged into ice-cold regret.

I’ve known sorrow.

I could tell you of a life 

I spent walking on eggshells,

the weight of my every step

too heavy to keep the peace.

But - and this is the secret

to waking up with the dawn 

and knowing you’re ready 

to live 

another day -

I’ve known beautiful.

I’ve seen that sometimes, 

if you remember to look,

the moon summons her smile 

through a perfect tree-branch frame.

I’ve known luck;

I’ve loved people with more depth than a skydive.

poem - June 2012