If I was to filter the sea
and sell the salt as knowledge
in its purest form,
the tide would still keep rolling
and the rocks below would show—
and yet here I am, picking out
bits of sand that stick to history
and creating my own replacements
in the great sterilization of the world.
By Heidi Turner
and so, my eyes alone
can ask for your forgiveness.
By Heidi Turner
If, after all is silenced,
you find no music plays above us,
it seems no small prayer
to pray that of early quiet:
that silence fills my ears first,
that I may miss the doomsday,
that I may still be filling space
with my ignorant rejoicing.
By Heidi Turner
In the corner of the afterlife where poets gather,
Emily Dickinson has started a petition
to have me thrown under a carriage: in due time
poor Keats will be forced to point out
that carriages are hard to come by on this side;
Eliot is amused but entirely unimpressed
at the little references I make to him
and everyone else—the format itself is foreign, uncouth—
and of course, poor Poe is left to wonder
what great crimes the stars conducted in what far away wars
to be commemorated in at least a quarter of my work,
and no one, especially the ladies, knows where Billy went.
By Heidi Turner
Lady Justice weighing laughter
and popcorn on scales built
for questions monumental,
photoed moments out-of-focus
that somehow captured the warmth
of sleeves in mid-summer,
the coughdrop wrappers
Hansel-and-Gretel’d from my bed
to my car and back again,
Jupiter approaching, soundless.
By Heidi Turner
The line between dancing and walking
where you, my Potential, is concerned
is thin and thinning – music plays
(or does it?) and the rhythm of life
slides between and around us,
laps against the shore of my story;
the lines we strike in the first measures
will be defined if, at some point,
I turn (twirl) swiftly toward you,
if one of these days you reach for my hand.
By Heidi Turner
She holds the door of the prison cell,
smiles in apology
even as the guns raise—
click after click; I see
my lifetime in the seconds
dripping from the face
above my chains.
She will not abandon me;
we are still together, dancing
in matrimonial sackcloth.
Ashen, I imagine
our parting is only belated consecration.
By Heidi Turner
The kind of art I like is the sort
where the name escapes me—
not only the artist’s, with his afterlife—
but of the piece itself, and of the subject,
“trees and fire, a half-finished child,”
words rejected by my conscious mind,
intoxicated by the existent thing
that the other tourists pass by, embraced
by other universes only yards away.
By Heidi Turner
One and then three and then five
Butterflies danced in the wind,
caught in the shade
of the tree beside the old train station,
They looked so satisfied in wandering,
and perhaps that defined their royalty:
sailing the skies on sky’s terms
instead of flying, pointedly, back to L.A.
By Heidi Turner
There is nothing – has never been –
anything between me and the sky,
a problem I encounter every evening
as I fall through the clouds,
walking deeper into myself,
into destiny, into certainty,
into the light of lights,
watching myself following the tracks
and making wishes on the past,
ending and ending and ending
and no one sees the hours slip weightless
from my hands.
By Heidi Turner
rI saw the end of ordinary
too late to give you warning,
and you saw only the world awash,
compared it to the daylight,
questioned if cathedral tinting
could follow us through the fields,
and danced alone to profound music
that only I, cloistered, could hear.
By Heidi Turne
The gulf below me, the river inside me,
the walls around me, the space within me,
expand and shrink without regard
until I am left with the endless sideways
heartache that broke me in two,
holding pieces out to you, wondering
if there is a way re-lay the bricks
as a road leading somewhere
that someday you might want visit.
By Heidi Turner
The key differences exist
in the kind of invisible contact
we have made, in breathing,
in gasping, in the heat,
in the precise tone of the light
that pierces through itself
at every impossible angle,
and, of course, in the overlap:
the way you one day disappear.
By Heidi Turner
“I taught myself to tie my shoes,”
and that is how it feels
to leave without double-checking
the deadbolt,
half-hoping someone,
that you, will come back
when I let myself in
with enough take-out for two.
By Heidi Turner
The sky belonged to me
for all the years you held
the shoreline, kicking sand
up as you danced the signal
that meant I was flying too far,
and now that you are silent,
I wonder where I am
when I sail into the clouds,
and wonder at the sunshine
reflecting from the broken water
on the rocks; and I ask the silence:
“Does the sky now belong to you?”
By Heidi Turner
If today, you’re alone, working late,
if you’re too far away, drinking wine,
and you know all too well you won’t make
it back to celebrate the day in time,
if the future you dreamed of has died
in a past that left you behind,
if all you’ve dreamed of is waiting
offstage in the money you’ll never find,
if you know no one knows your full name,
or if all you’ve ever known is the worst,
remember, tonight, the miracle happens:
the news we’re all waiting for reaches you first.
By Heidi Turner
When we met, I didn’t say much;
I wanted you to think I was thoughtful,
that I was listening to you,
reading your body language,
attentive to the way the hairs
on your arms lie straight and long…
In fact, I was building little bridges
and finding little matchbooks
in the overcoat of my subconscious,
keeping fires alive, trying to trap the past
on its side of the river Styx.
By Heidi Turner
When I listen to the melody
you whistle, I hear Heaven
peeling back the clouds,
tissue paper galaxies tearing
through deep space, the sky
between your lips and mine,
but when I hummed along, filling
your song with rhythm,
its nature revealed itself:
the end of the world,
a requiem silenced in a kiss.
By Heidi Turner
There was a time when secrets
saved me, cloaking sins in silence
I donned daily, years I spent
entombed in masqueraded
holiness, sustained in vaudeville piety,
until the day you reached for my cloak—
“Who touched me?” I screamed,
praying you were mistaken, and you
insisted, reaching again:
I stumbled forward, genuflecting—
an unintentional sacrament,
and all because you believed
I, of all people, could bring you healing.
By Heidi Turner
I said, “I am alone,”
at the exact moment
you pulled me out of the sunset
and into the quiet world,
out of shades of red and gold
and into the pale pink nothing
that lives between my scars,
“I was alone,” I said to myself
while you held my hand
and sectioned off the darkness,
giving names to every star.
By Heidi TurnerI
