Sunday Morning in the Yard

I pick all the raspberries. A ritual now, I fill the bowl. I waste a few while pulling, wait for their stains on my hands. This is unguided presence and meditation, a keeping myself, on my knees in the bush reaching for the ripe and grown. I’m getting the metaphor out early —- the hanging fruit —- the temptation of the family on the other side, who tell me to take as much as I want; they can’t keep up with their abundance.

I grow what I get for free, dahlias and lemongrass, tiger lilies large enough to shade the weeds. I can turn a garden. I can sit with the morning fire and through the hours. I will move my chair with the heat of the sun. So let’s talk about luck, this living.

The raspberries are for my first dates, in exchange for possibility that I might spend one less day alone. These women, written before we even meet; these women, who don’t stand a chance. One arrived hungry and ordered pancakes with defrosted fruit. The beach stayed quiet while we sat: crows pecked at empty wrappers, we had little to say. She rubbed down her legs for minutes, the sunscreen thick and sweet, her child’s Cookie Monster SPF 50.

Take it, take it. That’s what I say to women. As if I’m sure of what I give. There is more daytime sex, light carving the hours. Her ass is flat and full, her cunt is flat and full; they have history. One woman is breastfeeding and my hands, on her body,  stay low. You told me to go and I’m gone, to the women who made me, in the yard listening to Janis, Tina, Whitney, Nina coming in love, my love like tugging on shirt tails.

I’ve braced my whole life and know I haven’t even hit the hard stuff. I smoke a bowl and unbutton my pants and sit with this belly of a mother, expecting. I think I must be a case study, this spending of pain. A small bee lands on my arm and I’m afraid, but anchored. I can say I’ve lived one bad year for every good one. It’s September again. The sunflowers fling open like there’s nothing to lose. I can say I break even.

I meant to place you first in your cabin above the water, for our second meeting, a Sunday morning before we picked up our kids. We still smelled of our coffee and lit a joint and stripped in front of the fireplace, our backs to the ocean. And I said, No one will believe me. And I think of all the times I came this way, how my car learned the curves of the island, the ferry deciding whether or not I stayed for dinner. This lesbian stage. We fucked like animals.

I once had a woman I named the fling of my life. I call her and shoot songs into the air. I say we felt love like a stutter. On a bare mattress in a basement apartment in Brooklyn with a gram of coke between us, I remind her of our cigarettes slanted in the ashtray, my head at the back of her neck, how hard I sang the next song I send to her. All this to say, remember me — I’m still scared to die.

I sit, a teenager with a playlist. She hears her son crying in the next room and has to go. When my son is scared and there’s no way to save us, I hold him and say he’s good. I sit, a child with upturned hands.

I once had a woman I gave credit for my life. I don’t want to say, but damn I felt alive.

And still, with women, I swill.

“On Sunday I want you to sit on my face,” you said. And there’s no other way to say that, so it stays quoted. We began with only four beers between us, and me driving drunk down a one-way street and still you came, naked on my floor with the Legos and vacuum cord to your back so the neighbors wouldn’t see, still with the basset sniffing at your arm, the stranger, me boasting us some record, of time.

Fuckers, you called us, and still, love split through. Then mother fuckers, and with a laugh. The amusement of language, the fraction of an image — the way our bodies first sank, so simple and plain, when you hushed inside me and said again, I’m here.

I’m here. I eat the extra bagel, a book of poems from beginning to end. I afford myself. Plants, of all old things, keep me aware. I don’t know that the Dinner Plate Dahlia will take two more months to bloom, that she’ll peak past an early storm and bend to the frost of the dirt.

But I think, Welcome. Women like us don’t pray for miracles. We pay.