Scribbles

[This poem originally appeared on my section of the IES Abroad Student Blog. You can visit it here.]

My cat stares with wary eyes
at the suitcase by the door.
Her gray ears alert, tail twitching
against the carpet.
She watches me water the flowers
and disturb the bees,
whose business will continue
when I am gone.

I imagine the Atlantic rolling
far beneath the wings
of planes and gulls -
immense blue fathoms stretching
to lap against horizons
curving in distant haze.
At night the moon,
swollen with proximity,
will filter into the silent cabin
through half-drawn plastic shades.

By morning we will reach the Continent
and ruffle our feathers
in the air our ancestors
left behind.
Blown there by various winds
and a thousand reasons,
we will build new nests
in unfamiliar treetops.
And soon we will begin
to chirp and chatter
to a different tune,
the song not stopping
but only changing key.

I’ll tell everything to the gulls
when they swoop
and settle in the sand.
I’ll give them something
to peck and discard
among the grassy dunes
and between the warping
boardwalk cracks.

The pier breathes in creaks
and cracks, mottled white
by salt and sun
and summer visitors strolling
between the soaking
seaweed strands.

And I wonder if
I should have been a lighthouse keeper
above a roiling salty sea,
waiting for the tides’ return
above the tossing waves.

And when I looked at the clouds today,
every one was a familiar shape.
Rabbits and birds coalesced
from sea vapor, morphed
and dissipated
and hopped
across the air currents.
Their jumping knocked loose
a smattering of cloud drops
which landed, thick and white,
on my windshield.

And when I looked at the stars tonight,
all I could see
were the Big Dipper’s curves
scooping up the night
to be dumped somewhere
like time’s garbage
against the western sky.

A belated graduation poem for Roshan Shah

I.
The skipping of the kite spool
through your slim fingers
left faint troughs
in your palms.
They were filled to the brims
with the utter blue
of spring skies
and sunlight speckled
with pollen.
I could feel it sifting
through my skin,
in my hair, in the folds
of your sheets.

II.
Our kite soared
for a moment.
Bare feet pounding
through cool grass,
we ran to pull it taut
until the thin white floss
snapped in my fumbling hands.
Pyotr Petrovich stared down,
enmeshed alone
in a leafy lattice
for the neighbors to find,
his bright plumage offending
the Pennsylvanian sparrows.

III.
When late one night
we perched on branches
I told you poetry
is everything.
And sometime,
when the words were ready,
your poem would come
(as if I knew anything of poetry
or its comings
and goings).

IV.
It is now.
Give it
some slack.
Your kite is dancing
in a new wind,
coming from nowhere
and going
in all directions.

Even the fireflies hide
tonight, and light
the undersides of leaves,
dancing between the branches
of the spectral waiting trees.

Their signals waver in the wind,
messages twisting with the threads
of a thousand spider webs
below the shaking power lines,
dripping slowly in a brew
of chlorophyll and moonshine.

In the next few months I’ll be writing things about baguettes, scarves, language, and generally life as a confused literature student bumbling about Paris. You can also read about the interesting study abroad adventures of other Penn State folks (and see their locations on the nifty map) on the Geoblog main page.

Amusez-vous bien!

Painted by the talented Robyn Engel.

for Kyle Carrozza and Davey Rockwell

Let us start the revolution.
It will not be “a” but “the,”
a definition of late night dance parties
and the movement of arms and hands
and ankles.
It will be the revolution of gin
and scotch, of research papers
and lab reports
composed to the tune
of a song we have always known
but are just now finding the words.
We play them through our fingers
and our bodies’ movements.
The percussion is the rhythm
of our hearts and footsteps,
pounded into these familiar sidewalks.

Life is not like Shel Silverstein told us.
Sidewalks do not end
but blossom or fade
into crumbling concrete
and patches of grass.
It is always there,
the cracks are just disguised
and can do more damage
than breaking bones.

On these sidewalks are departures,
caught for a moment
between trees and power lines
until they’re propelled forward.
We rush over concrete
towards the city lights, dusk air
ruffling through the creases
in our wrinkled shirts and hair.
Tonight we dance the old steps
a little offbeat and stumble
into the revolution.

“You have an awareness of your self; others take notice of it” – a fortune cookie

The boundary between the self
and others cannot be defined
or separated like the beef and broccoli
from the Chinese place on the corner.
They are both soaked in soy sauce,
covered with ubiquitous grains
of rice, diffused in stomach acid
and finally restored
to the earth.