My lungs stop working when I look at them.

There is a happiness on her brow that never stops, not when she blushes and breaks their staring contest to rest her eyes on me.

There is a happiness that never stops and I knew it as soon as I woke up this morning, stuck under my bedsheets like I'm nailed to a cross. There is a rain that never stops, and something shifts in her eyes; she follows him when he turns to go.

My lungs unplug like a cork stuck in the neck of a bottle I can't reach, and somehow I am home.

--painting by Chris Brodahl at the Seattle Art Museum*

Legs bent over the chair,
her pants wrinkle as she moves
rippling

My face tilts back and I close my eyes;
she bends her fingers over the table
like she’s playing piano.

Images cross over and I can’t keep track,
lost in eyes pasted over fingers
lips glued onto hairlines.

And still she moves,
staying silent but shifting
rippling

I had a dream the other night
of a farmland in grayscale,
black and white movies in my head.

My mother in her pink cotton nightdress;
bluebirds mocking me from their roost in a tree
And still this silent farmhouse, soft in its slumber.

But I can’t move when I’m asleep,
and she can’t move when she’s awake
We’re perfect in each other’s hands

I wait until her eyes are closed
and then I kiss her, her eyelids fluttering
rippling, as if to say hello.

The stars who carry an old man's face
in their bones stop to take a rest on
an uneventful day, laying down their burdens
for just long enough to make it count.

His nose is the first to go, cracking
decisively down the middle like a
half-moon breaking at the seams
of a teenager's whispered prayers.

Next are his eyebrows, splitting
at the roots into a forest which calls
like the girls at a high school football game,
just waiting for him to call back.

Then come his cheekbones, splintering
in one shuddering gasp like the mothers
who have borne a child and still aren't prepared
for the day he has to leave home.

His lips are the next to go, crumbling
into a dust that will never speak again,
like the girl he should have told to stay,
but who walked away before he could.

He breaks in the silence
while the stars still have their backs turned,
ignorning the stories that escape, shimmering,
into the cosmos from whence they came.

Blue plastic cows
munch green polyester grass
on a hillside next to a warm
pale blue farmhouse in Iowa
on a sweet Sunday last June.

You knew how to dance
in the barnyard under the roof
your father built last spring
when the sun was shining
through the clouds for once.

My feet stirred up months of dust
which got into your cornflower eyes
and turned your eyelashes brown
until I couldn't see you, just the
light shining from within.

The indigo Tuesday rain
painted streaks down your arms
as you harvested my heart
from among the tired wheat, ready to be carried off
into the flour mill, where it could get some rest.

But you left me standing there when
your father died on a Wednesday night
under a brilliant full moon after the kids had all gone home;
there was a rock at the bottom of my shoe.
The dream was never built to last.