At first, there is a great pain
After which you grow tired.
Then, they say you feel warm,
One last time, before you go numb.

You walk anticipating a single pine
To separate the horizon into left and right.
But the field is empty, too flat to even have a past,
Not the way a sheet hints at the night all day.
Because foxes can compass home by instinct,
You scan the snow for a faint set of tracks

To lead you where holes can be dug
And precious things laid gently down,
Covered handful at a time, the pebbles removed
From the dirt and put aside out of a respect

For our need to stall, our need to concentrate
Ourselves in the sensation of our fingertips;
Besides the intolerable world of emotions,
We have the world of stones which we can depend upon
To whiten the knuckles whenever pinched hard enough.

Where you stand, nothing touches except your feet and the snow.
In the distance, the ground touches the sky.
But the line stitching together the solid and the infinite
Recedes like tomorrow

As your fingers slowly cease to know
The inside of your pocket
From the side of your coat without the help of your eyes.
They aren’t much better, mistaking the falling flakes for a shredded message.

The field grows wider and whiter like a blade in the night.
You dream of the edge and, partly from cold, shiver.
Partly from the terror of finding your own tracks
Again and again in the snow, as if you have been talking to yourself
For days without realizing you are alone.

Terror like that is too violent for the mind;
It grips the legs and arms and shakes them
Like a dog shaking four dead birds just to be sure
They will not lift off again into the vanishing flock.

Your shoulders and the tops of your feet burn
Like the conclusion of a day spent skipping stones in sparkling ocean,
Like the pot of water intended for two cups of tea that is dropped
And rushes across the floor and beneath the table to your toes.

The moon throws off the clouds and lights up the field.
Once more everything is absolute
As in the first moment of shared nakedness
When skin is just a layer of sensation and there is no difference
Between sets of knees, no such thing as touching.

It does not appear as dramatic as death often does.
No blade reaches in and pulls out a ribbon of blood.
Your own pulse does not, unable to stop, drain your veins,
Until the heart’s great mouth has said all it can say
And, empty, shuts.

It is not like this. The wind blows. You find yourself floating face up,
In a sea of white caps with a breath that sounds familiar
Filling the small well of your ear, my love my love.
You pinch out tears with your eyelids,
The mouth full of a solid, red, unpronounceable word.

Between

I’ve thought of pulling a bright leaf from the gutter
And sending it to you to say: this is how it feels.
By the time it reached you
It would be dust in the corner of an envelope.

As I’ve watched the widow next door prepare
To send her piles up in thick, stinking clouds, I’ve thought
Of how the cooling ashes shift and spread
Across the sky, how they don’t settle.

One thing leads to another – the spaces between
A pair of sparrows bloom and collapse with ease (a couple
Of periods, all that’s left,
From a letter about burning) – because its hard to say this
Is how.

Chiaroscuro

Shadows ran across your skin like live paint
and my envy hurt. Other shadows on the walls,
cast carelessly, more beautiful than their curled iron gates,
stretched and finally left. I tried to believe
that a crack crawling across the ceiling
was just an instant in the grandest scheme.

Fenton's film was just imperfect enough
to join the double castle in the moat
seamlessly to the souls of this world,
and my envy hurt. The paper had its own life, a hand
in our artful half-truths. He let the sky expose.
The longer we wait the more the land we know
grows dark as night around our feet
and swallows our faces, then, even our silhouettes.

Strange that we should care where the light falls
or ask it to stay. Usually, it moves across the room
picking up one object then the next
as if remembering in the same order day after day.

In another frame, the light fell permanently
through skylights onto ancient heads, stuck in stone,
but without warming their ears or lighting their chests.
The pain of movement stops with death.

I'd use perfect film for this that takes no say in the world
and I wouldn't expose the scene until the light goes out.
My prints aren't finished yet, but when they are,
I'll send you one where two people are holding hands,
but you can't tell, because I've taken pictures of their feet.

Tanach

In the dark beside your body,
that curls in a fist around its dreams,
I wake with a sudden premonition
about the fear that grips your sleep:
The roof of the house, poised on a hill,
reaches up to the sky with fingers
of wild flame, as spectators watch from the lawn
the shingles breathing off into the night.
You run from room to room inside,
trying to find the last of the books
that passed to your shelves through a broken sea.
I'd fear the report of the morning paper
about whether you saved God
or who he saved if it was not all a dream.

page one hundred ninety-four

He found her on the beach,
bright and singular, surrounded by sea.
And, at first glance, pulled off his shoes
ready to wade to her across the cold waves.

He must have found her perfect
those first hours of watching:
her shirt so red, lonely amongst the ocean blues,
her face turned away like a mystery.

He would climb into her sky and repair the moon
that fluttered on its long string from the inky clouds
like an incoherent promise, waiting,
he thought, for another half a ring.

He’d stumbled upon her solitary story at the end
and thought to love her, without knowing
the sentences of the gods that came before,
as beautiful as imagination.

Afterwards

You thought one more sharp, bright moment
Wouldn't change the dark
Our lips shifted together like a pair of feet
Waiting anxiously in line for a carnival ride

A girl shouldn't kiss another girl, so I closed my eyes
When your tongue began
To open a hole and find out my teeth
Stiff as a wall with cracks for prayers
The wailing I kept down in a midnight hull

Rocked by breath and the rumble of dismantling
From the stomach beneath
You handled me like a shop of fragile curios
Didn't touch the things you wouldn’t want to buy broken
Before too much of the night
Had fallen through the dipper's scoop
You stepped off, left my mouth to heal
Around the sound of its grief,
As if one more sharp, bright moment
Wouldn’t change the dark.

First to Leave

You woke before I did to the beauty of the world reborn,
left the house, left the silent lawn,
left your footsteps on the roads unmade by snow.

You crested the hill and looked down -- nothing before you
to follow, nothing to defy, nothing except to destroy the night's work.
Winter's blank forehead furrowed a bit more with each turn.

I woke at a less attentive hour and carefully followed your tracks,
as if another step beyond the first could make it less
complete, as if I, too, would break the morning.

Hammer and a Nail

“Loose and low,” he would say
and bounce the hammer with ease.
I gripped it high at the narrowest bit of neck
making a hard third thumb of the wild limb.
He watched from the corner of his eye
at the smallest angle from glancing away
so each time the nail went slowly crooked
it took only a slight adjustment of the head.
He did not believe you could gently create
a corner, a union. He would have broken
every finger for me if he thought that would help.

Who Knows

Afterwards, I caught you in the bathroom, eyeing the stubble
that had gathered under your chin in the night like the first signs of a storm.
You seemed satisfied by how things took shape,
even gave the reflection of your eyes a vain little wink.

Tonight, I propose that I draw you a portrait in the dark to be honest
to the way that knowing works between people like you and me.
I, for one, do not pretend to know much of anything.

You’ll take it as you leave, look at it out on the street to see
what I understand of you, if such a thing can be, blindly executed.
Perhaps you will knock a moment later or never call again.
I will look in the mirror with less satisfaction at what I see.

In the Absence of Walls

As they lie beside the abandoned airstrip,
looking up, the sparrows settle down for the night
in skeletons of planes that used to carry men
high enough to make them breathless
as love, too high to sustain forever.
He claims we will find a formula to explain
how the folding up of the universe
can be frozen like a wave
before it breaks. The suns of other galaxies,
he tells her, are gathering planet dust
to a critical mass and bursting, even as we speak,
like dropped marbles, like glass globes.
They hang like enormous ghosts in outer space.
He explains that an explosion requires walls.
Suns have no walls. Incredible density is needed,
three billion degrees, before they can crash in
on themselves (like waves.)
She asks him is that why we’re out,
in the middle of a field, gazing up
at the heavens? She squeezes his hand
very gently, ever so sadly.

Search Party

Nights when the house pools with talk and laughter
jumps and flashes like a school of salmon kissed by sun, I turn away

the quiet guest standing nervously at the front door
and slip with nods through the crowded rooms, unsure
of how many will die on the way up the dam. I can count on half

an hour or so before they discover a tray of melted ice cubes in the kitchen
and my empty glass winking beside it like a single scale lost on the counter.

I search for something appropriate to call to the shadows
and follow the streets aimlessly, joint to joint, her name escaping me.

The knotted stomach of downtown rumbles with the night freights
packed full of fruits and fish rolling toward a store whose shoppers sleep.
Without checking the time, I drop my watch into a gutter

as evidence of a struggle. I try not to think of them pouring from the house
after me, since I cannot go back unable to explain where I’ve been.

The dawn will wake, hours too early, one eye at a time
in the windows of the streets where the search party calls out, knocking

her subtle name from my head. I walk to the fingertips of town,
to the widely spaced barns, the cornstalks sheered off and sharp with November,
scraping along the shins of wanderers like handless wrists.

I’ve come after her to explain myself: the cure cannot be more loneliness.
But I stop short amidst the stalks that can’t hold on, where, suddenly, she is again.

Threads

I.
We dropped stones in the brook
and jumped across.
We watched the wiry boys patch
the bridge over the town river.
The paper that summer reported cranes
swinging steel beams above a wide city bay upstate.

The ocean has no one crossing;
a new journey must always be made.

II.
A button dropped off my coat.
Stooping to search in the joints of the sidewalk,
I felt that much apart.
It comes down to half foot threads.
The tip-tap-tap of a button skittering away
has no word that I can tell you
nightly on the telephone.

III.
Many people must lay awake
running a finger tip over their tucked knees
thinking: if I separate
the touching and the being touched
I can be everything to myself.

IV.
I found the button, but not the thread,
so it sat on the bureau while the winter
reached its cold finger under my cloths.

V.
You returned, jetting across the blue,
and still we had no words
for the taste of Italian streets,
for the eventuality of lonely nights
spent kissing unfamiliar things
when one finds herself still shivering.

I passed the curry brush over the tough flanks,
rich brown like the forest floor
and bulging with muscles like roots beneath.
They pawed the ground as if to assert that in a breath
they could push out the stable's mouth.
I looked with envy into the big, impatient pools of eyes,
followed the nose to the nostrils sucking more breath
than all my blood would hold.
Others mounted and trotted easily into the paddock.
I watched them pick up speed,
the meadow grasses parting all around them -
to travel the way they did over the fields
on four steel shoes, kicking up the earth and flowers indifferntly.
I remained, brushing the course hair to a shine,
feeling the power of muscles, bows strung tightly,
a ready symphony of motion wound beneath the skin,
ready for flight. If you can trust – but I preferred
to listen to the soft breaths misting up the morning air.

Instead of a Lobotomy

I told the nurse I wanted my heart removed
immediately. She began to explain, as she checked
my insurance card, certain ramifications: a lack
of circulation, death, to name a few.

I want it in a jar, I said, like a pair of inflamed tonsils.
She leaned over the reception desk to get a closer look
– had I taken in too much of something? – or perhaps
she meant to fabricate a sense of intimacy
(a familiar trick) before she asked, why exactly?

I intend to put it on a high shelf in a big museum,
I told her, amongst paintings by men without ears and marbles
chopped by blind sculptors who have also, once or twice,
been terribly in love.

She thought to dissuade me then: not even the Moma
will allow such a thing. I’ll settle, I told her
for setting it on a piano that plays blues
if it keeps the strings resonating.

She apologized that she could not help,
so with a thank-you-but-I-don’t-need-another-one-of-those
I pushed past her. Miss miss! She called, and I reveled at last
in being the one to flea. The Doctor would understand.

The thing would be broken, any day
the pieces would spread out in my blood, and what had flowed
smoothly, unknown to my limbs, would become caught at every bend.
I would never walk or sleep with ease again.

The patients were in various states of getting dressed
or naked. If I could only find him amongst the unwell,
I knew he’d agree to the need for pre-emptive care
in the case of non-fatal conditions, of which, you would certainly be one.

In fact, he would probably agree that it should have been removed
when the arrow first went in.

The Two Impulses in the Hallway

To turn, to run.
The world is
immense,
and you've seen
a door like this before.
This is
the door to the world.

To trust your wholeness
to hinges
again. To swing open
over the fields
of wild flowers
he wants to walk you
through where
you may want
to spread
a blanket
or fly side by side.

Waiting Room

When they turned to look around
their eyes caught
on nothing so they kept on turning, sped up,
until their balance seemed sure
to go off center and desert them
to a momentous stumble.
They put out their arms, trusting
no one would come to catch them if they fell.
And just as the blade of a fan pushes the air away,
the space around them did, in fact, remain.
If a gentle stranger ever did come,
the room had already blurred
from too long searching too quickly in every direction.
Nothing could stop them from looking,
once they couldn't see.

Shiksa

They make love in a closet while we keep their secret,
barely catching each other's eye in crowded conversations.
When we join them again you are all lips
I want to kiss. Desire overwhelms my gentleness.
I hated the world at first for keeping me
from the tender moments. But I’ve grown tired
of obeying the stars and undoing the joys of crossed lovers.

If I ever got reduced to a history, they would say
that I adored you and what stood in the way filled pages
on how we are meant to love love in these desperate days
like we love race cars and recklessness,
how the world has grown ugly enough that we must embrace
whenever we can. Any other belief is a tragedy,
another triumph of separation, two trophies for loneliness.

You have me sit outside the bedroom each morning
as you remove that handful of sacred objects
from the back of your dresser drawer. You have belief
like a little hat, belief packed neatly in two black boxes
I picture you strapping to your forehead and arm –
I will ask one day, are you hoping to press something in
or hold yourself together?

I gaze out the hall window at the street and sky,
listen to the traces of commanded cadence,
what the door does not take from your voice.
It passes my ears like a slow parade in stocking feet
carrying secrets to a destination no one stops to explain to me.

Today we rose late, 3 o’clock, and the blue backing of the afternoon
revealed what a weak and scuffed up coin the moon is.
The impossibility of trees impresses me more.
Why do they never lie down and sleep?
A swallow darts through their arms,
wings lit from below by the sinking orange
like a scrap of flame that has escaped the wick.
I am too small to possess all I want.
The moon, by comparison, is just a bit of metal,
a bit of reflected light rolling. How utterly, divinely
boring, too large, too slow, slow as a melting glacier.

I begin my own prayer, in the presence of its sad face,
asking the sky like a child, are you there? Listen!
Make me believe or I will know You are no God
of love, and I want nothing to do with You.

Examination

After spending all day leaning into books
you begin to see little difference
between white and black. Both are so solid.
You get up to go to the bathroom
and as the cool water from the faucet
gets warmer by degrees,
bringing your fingers back to life,
you recognize that there is a virtue
in clarity as you grow clean.
It is not the virtue of knowing but the virtue
of nothingness, which refuses to be studied.

Justifying the Ways of Man to God

When we woke and untangled,
the sidewalks were spread with clean sheets.
We paused before descending to the street
to write darkness into the day with the comings
and goings of our restless feet;
there was no way to exist except in sin,
the winter seemed to say and say,
as we prepared, with boots and coats,
to turn its clean back black again.

I lifted the window and reached a hand
around to its outside face to collect
the bodies of angels that fell through the night.
When I pressed them to the fabric of my shirt
they left the dark, wet prints of tears.
On the skin beneath, nothing remained
of the gentleness with which we had handled
one another’s limbs before dawn,
only the slightly lifted corner of a smile.

I sat down to save a few words about how
blank spaces have the hope of being filled
and we obey. I wondered about the sky,
throwing itself against the warm windows
of our secrets, growing from white to clear.
It was as if the heavens had given up sending
clean blankets to cover our nightly shame,
and instead, someone was trying to see in,
trying to learn human ways, the ways we devise
to live in darkness lovingly.

Celebrations

This delicate attention we give
The movements of strangers or the swells
Of music raising off the street corner –
Cars and the mere players who take
The stage of the sidewalk as their own–

This attention to the details,
Of what can be described in the attempt
At making sense of something that, intelligent
Or intelligible, seems to have an elaborate
Design, sort of like praying,

This stillness of our eyes, watching the sky
Bleed and pass away or – not many people really feel
The excitement in something so mundane –
The stillness of our eyes watching
The placement of a flower on a grave,

This deliberate pressing on
From morning to night, the meals
Taken bite by bite, the exchange of pennies,
And the donning of a coat that praises both
The cold of cold and the miracle of fragility

This woman crying onto the shoulder
Of the man beside her on the bench,
Not as if the people passing by did not exist
But as if grief meant more than the world
And the need to be held exceeded shame

The way that sorrow swells up
At particular things, fills the bellies of guitars
And the circles of embracing arms,
How we wish to stop and confirm that it will be ok,
Since we also are capable of appreciating great beauty.

I. Love Leaves

I’ve tried to catch the brilliant breaths of Fall
Upon these leaves, the leaves that fall in pairs
When blowing breezes catch them like the call
Of parting geese that pull up startled stares
Of lonely walkers lost in gloomy cares.
I wish the stronger fires darkened last,
But know the boldest branch is quickest bare,
Its golden riches tossed to wintry blasts.
The other seasons’ colors can’t surpass
Crisp whisper of the wind in trees and ears,
The wild turn of hues in forests vast,
Or how my eager hands burn as you near.
I call, though without wings, as dusk turns dark,
For fear that love must leave, trace leaves’ same cooling arc.

II. Brilliance at Death

Fall ‘s the season when we know time best
Not cut by clocks but passing bright and real.
The birds depart. Cold winter takes their nests
And makes the sky a gray, cold, dome of steel.
Do we ever so intensely feel
As when upon the threshold of our deaths?
Or better know the turning seasons’ wheel
Than when its chill is rolling o’er our breasts?
Light ghosts the cold air makes of our hot breaths
Reminding us we live, respire, die.
Like bees that dart about in mean distress
We seize at every moment passing by.
Indeed, we know of time the best in fall
Or, rather, know, at last, our love for all.

First Love

I stole it in June.
I rode it all up and down the streets.
I rode it to the top of Garrison Hill,
Sweaty and breathing hard.
From there I watched the sun set
Catching on the gold dome of Town Hall.
So I suppose I stole that too.
And the fantasies of men
Carrying tax roles down the halls,
Stole the chuckle at seeing tyranny
Of order made so small.

He lay awake all night
So pleasantly tortured
Knowing she was coasting
Down into the world again,
Hollering and trusting momentum
To keep her upright as she spread
Her arms like wings.
It was like she’d grown
Into the shinny redness of the bike
Like they were roaring soaring singing
Hearts with wings.
He lay awake thinking how it felt
To race through streets,
to fly through streets, to sweat
and sing, balanced on a stolen thing.

When I lay down beside him to recount
The stolen things, I saw suddenly
he already knew and I was irritated he hadn't told me
how the thing had to be kept in motion,
how all that hard red delicate metal
needed the street to fly but more than that
I wondered why he'd let me take it,
such a miraculous thing,
knowing afterwards, one's never quite the same.

Juxtaposition

You bring an unexpected gladness into the room,
like a soft flicker of laughter in my chest,
bright birds in the joints of my fingers
that ache to hold your waist with a terrifying gentleness.

You seem filled with that fantastic light
I’m always seeing reflected, indirectly.
The world is full of these mirrors – look
at the night sky, look at the eyes of people pushing past.

It’s wonderful to touch your cheek
between day blue and night where we lie
for a moment in the miracle reds
with no idea where they’ve come from
or what thread has pulled together
the sweet juxtaposition of our faces on the pillow.

I am delighted by the tiny stars
and by imaging that great benevolent face
in the darkness from which they wink.
So far, I can get no closer to belief,
nor settle on a single form for meaning.

This sun you follow is no small thing.
Maybe some dawn I’ll ask you about the day,
the starless noon, directly filled with light.
I’d miss the glittering night, the multitudes, the mysteries,
just as I’ll miss you when I stay with the moon.

This feeling of your shoulder beneath my head
and your dark eyelashes, still and closed
above your pale cheeks, your gentle lips,
these small things are brilliant enough for me.

To the Oldest House

I want to start with small exchanges
like words in the margins of underlined books
that reveal particular sensabilities,
a long conversation and a cup of coffee at an odd hour,
a few sentences on a piece of folded paper
stuck in a shoe to test whether fate can beat
the friction of a day walking,
Finally, a small plant like a covert promise
of care or day dream about growing,
followed by a nap where no one sleeps
and less touches than on a rush hour subway.

I don’t want to be courageous or daring,
I want to be held, to wake up to find
the fragile palm of a leaf left on the desk
waiting for my breath to fly its reds across the room.
I want to respond in the evening
with two scarves and two hats,
and a pair of gloves split between us,
worn only on the outside hand.

I want it all to thrill me like a thunderstorm
entered from under the awning of a shop that cuts keys
to the innermost rooms of that oldest house.
I don't want any big black umbrellas holding off
the passion of the storm as we start the search,
for you must be able to see the difference
between the rain drops and the tears before you kiss.

Whoever You are

Of this consists my respect for you:
That rising from sleep to the morning sky,
You speak the same words that I do.
It’s not enough to be both of skin
That being cold creates a shiver within
Or to have both eyes that tear
When fingers, looking near the same, are bent,
For what is human is not universally so
And our statements of belief are all we know.
That and these rare moments when,
Pressing palm, like mirror, to gentle palm,
Our lips reflect each others lips
And speak such prayers in unison
As: Whoever You are, help us to Live.

Alternatives

The servant, Mary, placed the silverware down
on the white napkins as if they were the bones of saints
or, at least, as if bones were fragile. She didn’t dare look
at the husband, brooding in the corner chair
to say, this is a lesson.

She carried the wine glasses to each setting
like the wind buying bubbles, and when she set them down
her wrist seemed filled with a prudence that comes
only through knowledge of breaking. The young wife did not look up
to meet her eyes, eyes not of sympathy, but urging alternatives.

The guests came. She filled the glasses one by one.
They stood among the blunt faces of the plates
waiting like fists or buds to burst into red.
After the toast – to passion – they drank, little swills of purple
turning the dark caverns of their mouths the color of bruises.

One of the guests, Daisy, with eyes as intent as
if she had a fervor of trapped birds in her brain,
pointed with a knife across the table and asked the husband –
as if she had seen the moment before the curtain rose
to reveal them neatly placed, not as they had been
with him pushing his knuckles into her cheeks
until the cheeks caught a painful fire, stage make-up
for the show called passion – And asked him:
“What sort of many are you? Do you keep
a mug you’ve cracked? Do you glue back a chipped
lip? Do you toss your accidents away?”

He stayed his eyes, suddenly heavy, and chuckled.
The tension worried her marrow to jitters.
Mary took the plates with the wreckage
of supper, away into the kitchen to be cleaned up.
And the wife watched her go, the sadness of her eyes dropping
like wincing away from something good she wished she wanted.

Mary took her knowledge to the kitchen sink
and brought back a clean circle of cream
swinging in a tiny glass, ready for the dark coffee.

When everyone had departed, they stepped down
from the thrones of host and hostess, becoming again
husband and wife. They tripped over blue to the bedroom.
She switched on the light making the song
of the room and its contents sound.

He flipped it off, and the colors of the walls went silent.
He breathed against her face. He climbed into bed
and turned to the wall – something else to bury
the fist in and loose a knuckle.

She thought briefly of eyes, of hands, of ears,
of love and hate – the parts that come in pairs.
She waited for the heavy breathing of sleep.
She thought of the wheeling, dark blades of birds
wings in the night and the freedom of not being seen.

Questionable Motives

It’s a good day for Taurus’s, the magazines say so.
Are you a Taurus? Your smile is infectious.
I used to require more than the alignment of stars.
I required the alignment of stars reflected in eyes.
But desperate times call for different standards.

On the way to work, the bright palm of a leaf
slapped itself against the windshield.
I called it poetry but what I meant is
I’ll take colors for companions if need be.

For We Must Live in This World

To get close to the heavens, we have one option:
We can claim a mountain, stone by stone,
(the tablets were made of stone)
Or we can fix prayers to the door posts
And cover the crowns of our heads
as if asking watchful hand to hold us -
arm like a tether, straight to the sky.
We hang our thoughts of God upon concretes,
around our necks; our fingers play
in the tassels of our truthful costumes,
twisting them, feeling the little tickle of their swing
as we walk about the world
And the necessity of movement rearranges them.
We have one option: to live in the world,
to live in the body, to grow by kisses
with what seems other. It is (we are)
all a part of the great command to learn, live.

Being Human

In the disgusting evening, after our stiff fingers undo
the sticky buckles of armors battered by the rain
of steel and spear, I lay staring up into the dark
heavens. The suns drag their bellies along the tips of pines,
weary limbed bystanders, never catching up their sad green into the blaze.

The calm of pinky dusk recalls me to an afternoon
spent stroking the cheek of a precious stranger made known
for a moment by love, how we kicked across the crab grass
after supper into the cool green of the summer woods to watch
the tiny flicker of fireflies, hand in hand, no need of faith.

Neither the steady cricket sounds nor the delicate bulge of lady slippers,
bending their necks over the mud, compelled me to a desire of universal peace,
an understanding of graceful arcs; until the wounding, until the trickle of blood,
spreading in a sink of water, became just a tinted reflection of my blanching face
and in becoming pink, mocked how sharp a red nicked the bone.

After that departure, I saw the inconsistent lamps,
powerless over the fierce wood, lighting half a leaf at a time
or blowing the faintest scent from their pink cheeks.
My eyes filled with the glistening of memory, hopeless prayers of return
to just before we pushed our chairs out from the table that last supper.

I had this knowledge: peace emerges from a minute of night
and draws as many violent feet as any God.
We dip our fingers in a pale of water, and wipe our boots with leaves,
scattering the evidence of our murders as if admitting
that silence after a final heartbeat cares little about the variety of uniforms.

Beside me, the marks of the mail fade slowly from your skin.
We are naked, but our sides are riddled with rigid arrows,
beliefs, history. The face of the lady slipper dips in shame,
not bent to kiss her muddy reflection. Who could kiss himself
that knows what it is to be human?

We act no better than the pines, waiting for the wind
to make them lean together. We lay our limbs down
like branches, refusing to love again,
knowing that to love is to walk into battle, to walk into flames.
And our tears catch moonlight, flash like angels, still impossibly gentle.

Repetition

The hour of hopelessness has come again
humming its dirge beneath the detailed scenes –
the cycling colors in the sky, the trees, the mind.
All these years and still I’ve found no absolute,
no home in place or trade or hand. A cry and flight
make ready in the oily throat and dark wings;
one shouldn’t give breath to such desire
to follow the beckoning finger out of the complexity,
like a crow out of the trees. No, not to bring
her eyes down from the unintelligible branches,
the clapping leaves that mean nothing like joy,
and the faces also not part of some secret certainty.
The senseless calamity of unread books upon the desk
has reminded me, perhaps I cannot bare to repeat
what has been human billion times before,
this thrashing about after proof or belief.

It's as if suddenly today the trees are hung with gold.
It is gathering on the steps and in my lips
and I am kissing you with it.
You don't realize in praising my sincerity
that this is what you mean,
that I see in faces and in leaves this same glowing.

Secret (7.05)

The way she could tell it was a lie,
That the girl upstairs actually lived alone,
Is that often during conversations
The two voices spoke simultaneously.

Checkout (8.5.05)

The woman at the counter kept asking
if strangers were together.
She was either hopeful about the world's state -
not a lonely soul in town - or else
a scheming matchmaker.

It almost worked.
I gave the man next to me a second
looking over and found a shy glimmer
in his eye - the glimmer that said,
"having been hurt, I will not hurt;
not having love, I am hopeful for love."

I put my loneliness in the bag
beside the ice cream and frozen peas,
and walked quickly away.

Projecting (8.5.05)

They grow of envy, of envying the bodies of young men
Who sleep naked every night, especially those of passion,
Instead of waiting for winter’s cold season to undress them.

They envy the joints of fingers. The men lean against them
Combing locks of young girls’ hair like wind.

They’d like to be wind, playing through, invisible,
But able to break arms and fingers in the passion of a storm
Because they are small god’s and can get away with anything.

Some men created God in their own image: cruel
Yet forgiving in the face of supplication.
They expect them to bend their slim waists in the breeze.
And they do. They ache to move, will even break
When the wind blows –
Make fire of me. They can hope for little more
Than a moment as someone’s passion.

They loath the Spring, opening a dozen mouths of white
Upon each their branch that sing, indiscriminately, to the eyes
Of men: beauty, beauty, beauty.

Red Balloon

There was a small confusion at birth
which led to answers and questions
inflating with the passion of a red balloon.
Tangle built on tangle obscuring the root,
its tangle. And we ened up, hearts popped, last breath
returned to invisible wind, where we started.
The elaborate miscommunication of life
deflated, confused again by nothing.

More on Tennyson...

(after reading "Two Voices")

The man, like all great humans, appearts to have a touch of bipolarity. From conversing with suicide he emerges to a final line, "Rejoice! Rejoice!" simply because he saw a family walk to church together. To the heavy question of "what purpose is our suffering if the end is certain death?" we expect this genius to give the answer we ourselves want. We speed read in anticipation. Then he says, isn't the everyday beautiful! We are reminded that he is a poet; we are not exactly disappointed.

I saw you from behind.
It could have been anyone's head upon that back,
I chose your face.

I followed you through the city-morning
at a safe distance.
When you turned, I turned away.

I didn't dare call to you
in case my longing met your eyes
only to find, I didn't know you.

Black Kites (lit-mag draft)

I give her something to talk about, something to talk about
so she doesn’t go crazy. Walking beside her, I say:
look at those birds. And for a few blocks
her eyes and mouth and mind make black kites of them.

When she exhausts the wind and it drops itself
tired at her feet, I point again and say, aren’t they
strange? From the slate roofs, dipping power lines,
the brick chimneys, and sharp steeple, she chooses the trees.

They are, she agrees, so many arms always reaching but
only ever dropping things, great heads balding again and
again, wide women dressing and undressing so slowly.
Her black kites have tangled their strings in the boughs.

I wonder which street we will reach when her world,
bound tightly together metaphor upon metaphor,
so that no thing is without companion,
begins willy-nilly unspinning into miserable pieces.

Kissing cannot keep her whole and high but
if I left her something new each morning on the dresser –
a scrap of the morning paper, an open pair of scissors
– she might make a mystery of each one and love day by day.

Courtship

He held out an acorn to me, so I took it.
He smiled and walked away.
That was Tuesday.
Thursday, he sat down across the table at lunch
And asked me what I thought of trees
And how they throw up their arms all day
In praise of possibility.
The branches? I asked. He smiled, yes, branching,
And held out another acorn.
When we found ourselves on a bench in the park,
Two acorns later, looking up into the maple limbs,
I decided it was high time to ask him
What he thought of squirrels.
They’re either dumb or courageous, scurrying around like that,
As if they had wings, he said.
Then he held out another acorn.
I put my hand under his, closed our finger around it,
And we sat, holding on like that, for some time.

Ordinary Night (edit)

They strode through the park side by side,
miles apart compared to history.
He seemed not to remember
they had loved; she felt insane
with the wild grief of memory.

Please do not scream,
this is an ordinary night,
his still eyes implied.

The beast climbed her throat:
the hand that swung beside her, unheld,
had loved her skin and hers him.
She did not touch her fingers to his once-gentle mouth,
that uttered half of many sleepy conversations,
and woke her warmly many mornings.

In the bustle of the sidewalk
she held her lips closed with a wild claw
and he walked off with calm goodbyes
into the ordinary night –
the stars had not fallen, the stories stood
as cold as always. The moonlight fell
all the same – and reflected in her eyes
and on her cheeks, unseen.

Distance

unlocking you, undressing
you so carefully,
only to find another

layer.
we may never get to the body;
our love making
may be in the seeking -
you, too afraid to finish.

Going Numb

The end comes, is coming
for you.
So, what do you do?
It has taken your legs and started on your arms;
your fingers, once needles,
are now as deft
as fingers held for an hour in a snow bank.

What do you want?
Do you want an apology, a god?
Do you want your son
to join you
in the living room?
You stare at the ceiling
helplessly.
Nothing.
You're too arrogant
to ask ridiculous questions
like: what’s the goddamn point?
Every fool knows, there isn’t one,
even your son knows that and he’s eight,
ten, seventeen.

About the mis-scheduled doctors appointments
you say goddamn. About a dinner you do not want
to attend, god damn it, god. About the TV recording
the wrong goddamn program again,

you smack your hand
against your thigh
like a wooden paddle;
You’re in possession of such strange instruments;
that fleshy thud and no burning.

Your lips are wood
when she gets drunk
because, oh, you, you are certainly impossible,
you know.

With how much fear and how much force
do you say to your breath in the evening,
“get your coat, it’s time to go,”
when you look around the room
and see that everyone 's waiting?

The Establishment

I am sitting ten stories up in the blue building,
ocean in every direction.
For hours, I hold my knees to my chest.
I pace the room on the balls of my feet
and claw the windows going mad
to be one with my delight, or at least,
to speak the verses across the P.A.
that might draw the rest of me
out to convene for once in the hallways.
I cannot sleep. I dream. I dream of rivers in the corridors.

The water shimmers and shivers, reflecting a million faces:
somewhere above me, someplace divine,
that I cannot see through the blue roof
that survives us without emotion,
the million hearts are beating without strife.
Somewhere divine, the humans,
looking down on me, fool kept afloat in such a blue building,

and I can't whisper loud enough how beautiful it seems to me,
wild to join the sky but too weak with awe to shatter what I see.

Courting

Then everyone left for the circus without a word.
You leaned into me, whispering:
Do you think it’s appropriate, smiling at lions like this?
So I pulled you behind a corner while the others passed
And I kissed you hard on your grinning lips.
We clamored up to the attic, giggling,
And spent the afternoon among the dust and fragile relics.
Never mind the glittering and feats nor the caged beasts.

When everyone returned, sticky palmed
and sweet mouthed, we slipped out the backdoor
you donning a top hat, me, one white glove.
We arrived at the big top with its swirl and comotions.
Where the lion opened his mouth, a wicked flower, tame and slow.

You asked me, Is he lazy, or does he not know he's fierce?
I pointed to the stout ringmaster and giggled back:
Our dear father, Napoleon of Napoleons,
has spread his contagion of complex to the children.

But the children are all asleep, you said,
And we stifled our laughter with our hands
As we tugged each other up the stairs to bed,
Catching heavenly winks through the windows,
Stolen fire hoops and tightropes trailing in tow.

Pit

You came to the wood in a rage
and took to those birch branches like a storm,
peeling off sheets of bark paper
to reveal their golden inner faces,
throwing them down – pages,
empty as stone, no occult knot.

At a late angle, the sun hit the surface snow.
One can't know for sure
that grass doesn’t stay a private green
beneath the soft granite floor.

You blamed Buonarroti
for not carving deep through the skin,
for wasting away his virtuoso years
without finding the shape of the soul.
You work the branches naked searching,
blind to the damage: the arms and fingers
that will brittle and break in the wind.


In the twilight, you dropped like a last leaf,
licking salt from your bitten lips.
You dragged your fingers like a rake
to part the snowy cloak.
Into the frozen earth,
a pit for the bodies.

I wanted from you to see a season
where each thing has taken shape,
where nests are in the past and everything
floats easily on its wings.
I imitated the sure independance
of the ever-thrusting backyard grass, the baseball
diamond hard and cracked like a smiling face.

And we fell apart, you and
I. I am spring-young and do not play
to win, yet. Between the plates
(here to home) a pair of sneakers have lost
their feet. The children grow
browner with each tide of laughter.
The get nowhere - not running the bases,
not even players, without want of rules
- these bare footed gigglers, hurlers of mud, howlers.

They return to the front steps without a score,
no one having lost a thing, and still, they have had
their mischief, thier rebellion, their secret glee.
Still their faces are dirty and their feet are bare,
their first trappings pulled off by the slick world.
Not sure what's been lost, you and me.

Welcome

When you cut into your own flesh
that sweet horror of first seeing
your own blood, released
from its private blue branches
into blooms turned red
by the numbered breaths of air
and dropping wet petals,
impresses every dream.

You visit dark places where shadowed
figures torture confessions from you
drawing their bows across your troubled skin
to release the wild chords of panic
that precede trust.
You give yourself over to their silver incisions
just as you gave your left wrist to your right hand
while awake. You crave private lights,
that is why they chose you.

If you survive this, they whisper in your ears
having taken your eyes away with a black velvet binding,
if you trust, we are initiating you
to the mystery, and that were we cut
you’ll find the scars resemble
a terrible love, you’ll see
you were always blind Before.

You wake to the indiscriminant morning sun
and sob, wanting again to lay prostrate to the night
with the sharp and painful blades slipping into you
threading you in fellowship with sufferers of intensity,
Lover’s of mystery who squeeze each other’s hearts
in new rhythms and expect no less in return;
you sob because you cannot hold a candle
to the sun, so proud and too bright to see
the glorious nuance of shadows and privacy.
You want to sleep again, sleep weekly,
that when you one day walk out of those doors
that lock behind you, you will know
it is not about what you have lived through,
simply that you lived at all, something seen best
in the dark that flickers with wrists and razors
like links in a chain full of trust, full of faith
in the power of humanity to know life
as life can only be known: by facing death with love
in good company.

the problem is thinking
that the problem is
the sickness,
not what caused it.
my defenses were down.
I built a ten foot wall.
since then, I've been
locked in here,
battling starvation.
it's a sickness,
but not a problem,
and neither is the massive wall.
the problem is
your face
and every other face
that might be lost;
no, the problem is
i am coward
and will not walk unarmed
into war
or love.

Rumi said, “Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.”
The world lived simply then.
They lost themselves
without fear of being taken over.
They waited in contemplation,
watched the leaves slowly turn
their faces in the wind,
without analogy to the mislead masses.

We didn’t wield the things we wield today.
In a slow current
you can loose yourself.
These days we move
at fatal speeds,
and must hold
our guns deliberately.
And also one another's hands
we must hold responsibly.

When the water rises,
we have the tools
to rise as well; we must not
transcend until the last one
has reached enlightenment.
We must not melt, but now as then,
we should unite.

Home Burial Wife Unburied

I appretiate my oppression
because how my wings feel
unfolding
you will never know,
born free.

Where guilt tags you
for having fanned faces
that were neither sick nor weak
with the same wings
you used to fly off and overhead,
I am light as a feather
and owe no one penance.

These times beg you
to kneel down,
to hold the hand
you would have used
to cup a cheek
in honestly tender condecesion
still by your side;
after the storm of power
it is time to be humbled.
But I,
I am made
a beautiful example
for my natural inclination
to stand up.

Deserving (as Defined by the Disordered)

You are not ready
for the storm.
When you are ready
you will be watered.
Until then, weep
with the wilted arc of your body,
and if you must
die for love.

If the storm does not come
to quench your thirst,
to supply your eyes,
to caress your cheeks in streaks;
or if the storm comes
and your stem,
forgetting how to swallow,
bows further under the weight
and simply breaks

then you may rest
assured that, at the least,
someone's hands
will hide your body
from further shame
in a pocket of dirt
when you cannot
hide yourself,
being (a bit too late) gone.

Word

I held you in my hand, little bird.
I waited for your wings
to burst, ragged like flames,
from your sides.
I licked you like a mother,
cupped you in my tongue
like a cool marble an waited
to spit you onto the floor,
to send you rolling across the boards
into someone else's toes.
I put you down like just another gear
in the great sentence
and waited for you to spin.
The light fell out of your faces.
Who are you calling this time?
I pulled off you little red cap "pre"
and your shoes, "ed" and "s."
You glimmered then, naked, quivering.
Make me any age, you beckoned,
duplicate me, thrust me into the past,
un-do me.
Little mirror, little bird, sing.

to Emily

She repeatedly burned the whole house down
Because she didn’t like the back door.
Some things hinge upon a detail;
People are not one of them.
Hold her while she sinks to ashes,
Make her understand another use for matches.

You lay in a bed in a little tin box
on an old steep face, the very nose of the mountain,
and the rain thrilled your ears
banging on the roof like myriad angry fingers
hungry to get at you.
The wind smacked its palm against the window
threatening to take you off your perch,
all the way into the sea and below.
You are no god, it howled, cede this throne.

Miles away a fan purred into my ear
like a thoughtless cat on the bedside table,
not a rhythm aside from two pairs of lungs filling.
My hands rose then fell
not yet quivering with the knowledge
of their misdeed. Snow drifted, sifted down,
a benevolent blanket across the night campus’ indecency
but filled with dark footprints before I woke
so the crinkled face also greeted me.
These were angels, once.

Remind me again, how we believed in travel
as a way to grow, to understand?
It seems to have loosed night horrors upon us both,
where before we kissed, oblivious
to the world of rain. The stars held no empty promises
while our hearts beat whole and brimmed.
Our hands held only one another’s hands.

We shivered, I imagine, at just the same moment,
but across the miles felt, each, alone.
Places come between us;
we recall the prophetic line you cannot go home.
You say nothing of your travels, but mirror
the hard face often, as if to say, you did in fact fall.
And in your eyes I see myself, I am bare with no excuse,
lost upon the waves.
I hide my hands behind my back, not a pure finger
with which to fish you from the deep.

Regarding the end of Alfred Tennyson’s “The Two Voices,” which he composed in 1833 during about of depression following his sister’s death:

The man, like all great humans, seems to have a touch of bipolarity. From conversing with suicide (voice number one) in the first three quarters of the poem, he emerges to a final line, “Rejoice! Rejoice!” (voice number two.) His sister seems to have prompted that monstrous question: what purpose is our suffering life if the end is certain death? We expect this genius of words and insights to deliver us to an answer which we ourselves have darkly sought. We read in breathless anticipation. The cure to our own morose hours seems promised by his brilliance. Then he says, in other words than this of course, “isn’t the everyday beautiful!” Suddenly we remember he is a poet. We are not exactly disappointed.

Plath

As I leafed through a flashy hardcover edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel tonight, I briefly fathomed the value of full trains of thought. Here a published had felt it worthwhile to reprint her famous collection with, it boasted, fascimiles of her drafts. I told myself not to be seduced by the geniuses of capitalism making my favorite goddess of poetry into a revising nymph, and yet my aspiring poet eyes hungrily reveled in the familiar and unfamiliar editing maneuvers. I had the sensation 0f that glaciel process of inching closer to an understanding of how to possess the energy of language.

Fecundity

I suppose your definition of murder
Depends on your definition of life.

The white sign struck me, stilled me
Like a bomb out of the Sunday morning:
Baby killers.
I wanted to stop, bend over, and wretch on the quiet street -
a morning sickness of sorts.
I wanted to cry on the toes of their shoes.
The man held it. The woman stood beside him
Her thin white hair lying docile atop her head.

The yard swelled with the yellow of dandelions.
I loved to blow them – these bright things called weeds.
It felt like defying the definition I’d been given
Calling them beautiful.

Later I saw them in a light I ached to forget.
So human, these flowers unafraid to kill
The lilies and other sweet wonders
In their way across the green,
These flowers that became delicate and gray late in life.
I loved their old age, loved to see the yard like snow
In early summer, teeming with many armed angels
Ready to release their hungry spawn.

They make wine out of many things – dandelions for one,
Though probably a hundred white grape bellies popped
To make her glass of truth-
Be-told-I-didn’t-really-want-a-child.
I couldn’t have learned it from her alone.
She dressed me, fed me, told me when she’d had enough
And needed silence. She taught me to use my nails,
My teeth, my painted pretty smile.
She said get somewhere, do good.
She did not tell me much about good, do it she said,
And slinked back to her bedroom where she slept alone
In spite of the husband in the bed upstairs she didn’t love
Except for the comforts he gave to me.
My own father laid back on Saturdays to watch us
Running around the yard like wind struck pin wheels,
Growing, taking on this miracle of life.
Our skinned knees knocked the pavement.
He kissed our shins.
Our small hearts hurt with small defeats,
He squeezed us, he said, stay this good, always.
I wouldn’t have known without him,
wouldn’t have lived without her.
Indeed, it could have happened many other ways.

I thought to return a few days later and ask them
What is life,
And hadn’t we all been killers at least once?
What was life, if not something about knowing how to love?

To Night

You have gone too far
rubbing your velvety hands up my spine.
On tip-toe I have checked the closets.
They are sinister. Something’s not right about the hinges.
And the shadows are all on strings.
Who keeps upsetting them?
I’ve checked under the bed,
opened each kitchen cabinet, braced for the possibility
of horrible curled limbs and a wicked smile
instead of the stacks plates.
You keep up your stroking on the nape of my neck,
keep up your whispering about the wicked things
invited in by sleep.
Whatever I said before, please,
I would prefer to be alone tonight.

Brilliant

Brilliant! Brilliant little clatter,
I am in love with you, Night!
Your clicks and rustles,
your gentle creaks.
I could cry just to glance up
at your black thumb,
pricked so many times.

The grace of your body's many pieces,
aches inside of me.
No one could ever pull the crimson thread from you
and learn your secrets.
Your stars stay silver and do not shed a single drop.
When we beg you, have pity on our soft skin!,
you close your wings and turn to stone:
I will not be moved to flight
by human whims.
(Though we alone among heartbeats
feel full to feast our eyes on your fluttering cape.
Does such prostration mean a thing to you?)

I press my head against the pillow,
bright with hungers yet pawed by sleep;
it is the fate of mortals
stretching their fingers to the sky.
You are cruel, not even holding me
in your deep cheeks for a moment,
not even flicking your tongue between my lips
for a second to teach my tongue a shred of your elequence,
before pushing down my lids with unwanted peace.

Injustice

He gave us the weapon, invented the words
so we could use them to make our way,
like a boomerang, out and back.
These words would unlock the taste
of his grilled and seasoned T-bone steaks.

He knew what he was doing:
even the longest lived flashlights
hold off the night for, at best, a week;
when chasing goblins from beneath the bed,
triple A’s cannot compete
with the white flood from a ceiling light.

He grimaced a bit, perhaps, thinking of the owl’s hoot,
and how we would slash at the dark in fear
with our tiny beams,
how the sleepy bats would shake loose from the trees.
Fear would fall over fear just as sneakers
on the run from leafy shadows always hit a root.

But he smiled again to think
more than the light, we’d miss our beds.
When the rain dampened our cheeks
and bent us down like the pine branch canopy,
we would know of roofs for the first time.
Before long we’d see
that all the walls and wires belonged to him.

As he hoped, finally, most of all, we would feel our thirst
as intensely as when we left, then how we would miss
pipes for holding inflexibly, faucets for turning,
fans that breath when you wish them to breath,
switches, dials, thermostats,
and a million other instruments of control.

When next we howled
against his unjust tyranny
he wanted us to remember
he was our taproot to the comforts
mined at great expense from the world
that was tree-bark rough and never ready-made:
the cotton sheets washed and dried,
the cool glasses of milk
held in the refrigerator’s belly with a hum.
When we could not have what we wanted,
he hoped the words might stir,
in the yet-vacant cathedrals of our memories,
a few bells like a small rejoicing:
all the same, we have more – full boxes of crayons
and a stock of fresh paper – than we need.

He invented the words like a command,
he even opened the front door: run away,
that you might know where you are going
when you return home.

Sedentary

One day I’ll be a sedentary old woman.
(Well, we’ll all be sedentary someday, if you catch me.)
The mop will collect dust
because isn’t that the perfect metaphor for what we learn
when age forces us to sit still and our purpose comes to us
without our wrists even striving to put it all in motion!
I’ll have no need for shinny floors, being sedentary, after all.
Instead all day I will paint the ceiling
with flames from a phoenix tail.
Not just red flames, much more
has happened to me in my life than red:
there were those precious years of white,
that turned rosy in adolescence and bled
without my realizing it into deep blue at seventeen,
then paled to purple, lingered a few years in the habit of gray…
Yes, I’ll be sedentary, collecting phoenix feathers that fall
as the past beats about the room on the white ceiling.
Yes, everyone deserves a time in their life to sit
and collect, when shiny floors are unnecessary –
when everything, in fact, is unnecessary -
and watch the colors, streaming by.

Penelope

Men and so many gods loved him,
and he came home to you.
Do you thank him nightly?
He could have lived and died in the paradise
of beautiful nymph eyes.

But could you ever understand
his sacrifice, dear lady?
He went off to suffer,
had fame and following;
you remained
with nothing to do
except be loyal and weave.
You know nothing
of the wind and monsters, the shivering sea.
You know nothing of goddesses,
seeing only a woman’s flesh reflected
in his mighty eyes.

Is that why you never spit at his travel-weary feet
and asked to be more
than another deed in his crown of thorns?
You never asked why
he picked his plot at love’s expense –
for surely we carve the gods and fateswith our beliefs –
never said in the dark before sleep:
“Odysseus, why not Calypso, instead of me?”
Did you fear the words: "Oh my dear Penelope,
Calpyso could fight off suitors herself,
if she had them. She was stronger even than I!
But you, you needed me."
You feared the words because you’re weak.

It would befit him to join the rock pushers
perpetually aching with impossible deeds.
You were just as bad, sustaining
only for the beauty wrought by pain.
I imagine, I shall meet you both in a heaven
where we will all three grunt and wait forever for love

The Same Poem, Again

All the words in the world caught in my throat
when, once, I looked at you.
I could not utter a thing; the leaves
said it so much better than me in a symphony
of autumn’s crisper days and later hues: I love you.

I guessed love was not a thing one could sustain.
It seemed even then, a pleasurable ascent
to a moment of climax followed by a chilly sleep
where dreams were filled with echoes
of before we lost our breath in the full out sprint.

I cannot tell if I am awake yet, but it hurts to breath
with such rhythmic ease. It’s a strange cycle
that sustains us: grasp, hold, and, now, release.

Flesh and Bones

Now that your bones are fleshy,
Return to her.
Reach into her pockets, remove the polished stones.
With your hands, dig gentle holes for them,
small graves. These are not seeds.
The words once hit her bones
Like a tuning fork,
Making her tremble all through the night
A single note.
Remember how she went through the world
Like a blind man
Trying to startle a symphony from the trees
But striking the bare winter branches.

I can’t stand to look at her.
She is kneeling
over a crack in the sidewalk like shriveled child.
The passing students are gesturing to one another
as they talk. She is trying
to pull the walkway apart,
like she is asking too soon to know
what death is.
Why won’t she just say no,
as I have?

Dead Languages: The Second Declension with John

We will keep pretending
to be the accusatives, our past
lovers in the criminal role of nominative.
We’ll be blameless.
And we won’t talk, we won’t
turn on the light in your living room.
And we won’t stop
at the coach, or take off our shoes
We will fall clumsily
into your bed, and we will hurt
softly in the dark
as we toss about.

We will not want romance,
and we will not want to grow sweet.
We will have no favorite books
when we’re together.
And we will not kiss one another’s wrists,
or the crooks of arms.
We will be separate
but the same in the after-silence
which you will not break
with pots or spoons and mugs
when you will not make coffee
or any other gesture
that presses my body heat to leave.

Sins of the Flesh (or Starvation)

I looked in the bathroom mirror
and I could see her:
She was running through Eden,
everything so ripe, a second from falling.
She had a crazed and fearful look about her
as though all she saw were crab apples,
limb after limb,
as though she were choosing moment to moment
to starve rather than eat them,
when what she wanted was to live.

Boobs

They want what they can’t have.
For instance, they seek glory
whose flashy legs
are more golden and slender than wings.

So Eve grabbed an apple from the tree
and ran into the shadows holding it
close to her chest, red and ripe,
yelling, “I don’t want you, Man.”

Man looked down.
He never looked up,
no matter how she screamed
Or pushed him away.

All Over You

It thrilled her to walk
places where she might be grabbed,
raped, killed all by the same
two hands.

It reminded her
who owned the world.

She passed puddles filled
with the wrinkling six o’clock trees
heavy of burst blooms
She slowed and passed stiffly
thinkng, I will jump in you,
I will fucking jump all over you.

Widow

I wanted to believe that the dead stay dead;
I’d gone through all the effort of loosing,
I didn’t want to wake to find
The same old fingerprints smudging
The view out the bedroom window.

I wiped the counters down with wide circles;
I took a box of empty jars, clanking, to the basement
To hold the dark there, instead of the dust
In the kitchen, which gathered again and again
Like the aftermath of layered cakes,
Years ago cooked and ceremoniously eaten.

I thought if I left the window open,
You wouldn’t smudge it going.
The curtain waved as I drifted in bed.
Your hand, always returned
To wave, again, goodbye.

I closed the window, opening the doors instead.
The jars in the basement wailed
In voice a bit like singing.
I stood looking down into the blurry back yard
With the great elm and its great arms,
Always beckoning, as if I were welcome.
I forget these days to mention,
The streaks between envious fingerprints
Wishing on the glass to join the wind.

A Room Of One's Own

There are several options. I could save myself
the trouble of those hours spent avoiding
the fresh loaf of bread on the counter by eating it
at once rather than sitting outside the kitchen door
trying impossibly to stare it down,
or taking slices then rationing them out in bites.
My mind would be freer to roam
to a few, more interesting rooms an hour
though, I would become hungry again, inevitably;
some things like flesh are indispensable to life.

My feet must take care not to upset the stacks
of black umbrellas waiting behind the doors.
If I’m lucky they do not beat me over the head
while I finish my lunch nor stab me through the gut
with their sinister bodies, impossibly slim and able
to burst open any second at the push of the tiniest silver button.

When I get to the bedroom, my body responds
to your lips with desire; this popping open feels dirty
and natural as falling down.
The second we finish the celebration
of the non-logic of sensation, my stomach reminds me
of the beasts contained in skin,
rising and falling obscenely below our tired heads.
My clothes call to me from their pile on the floor
offering to hide the hatefully soft terrain of the body
more greedy than a penis.
Besides your jeans with the weight of your wallet
bulging in their cheeks,
there is an untied apron, some tights, a bra,
a pocket, stained with ink,
for small, nonessential things.

Soon (2.26)

for Emily

I. Singing

I remember sixteen, and, my sister, you sing it so well:
erratic with sweet notes and wrong words, everything swings,
up and up; you go too high when you can.
In each of the trees you hear a full chorus of songbirds.

Major is on a saxophone in the corner of your bedroom
with a baby blue vibrato, purring, it’s so cool.
You act reckless as me on these rare afternoons,
leaning back on your heals into the bliss

with an easy smile. You close your eyes.

One low breath from a cello – oh
and it abandons you. Your head fills
with dissolving time signatures.
The dark wings lift, scatter, and rip up the blue line of horizon.
You’re consumed, swinging down, down, and it’s too late
to save yourself; you’ve already forgotten about dawn
and you won’t be reminded. It’s only happened every day
of your young life and anyway, this black is so black
no one could explain navy blue to you.

I know the part where you stand alone in a helpless forest.
The bare branches shake like struck tuning forks,
each with only one terrible note to call after your precious, lost creatures.
The bare branches quiver like a starving hand of sharp fingers
reaching after those fragile, free bodies.

When this is happening
I know about the demure smile you must give,
that chirp of a little copper bell to please everyone
who doesn’t hear the silence
of the trees growing still. You envy the boys
who do not have to suspect the stillness
of being pregnant with flocks of bright paradise birds
about to swarm back into the numb wood
with upsetting brilliance.
You almost envy those who can love
what they love the same way everyday .


II. Minor Child

I know about the minor child you keep hidden
who throws tantrums of kicking fingers
up and down the piano.
She once played one color at a time,
but now she makes such an ugly mix
of the pure white and pure black keys.
It seems as though it should be so simple
to keep them separate. But she plays too fast,
too hard. She stops and starts. She burns.

You try to teach her to make harmonies of the gray
instead clouds. You can’t stand the clouds,
always splitting into enough volts of fire to stop a heart
or settling themselves like a heavy nothing against your ears.
She drives you crazy with her moods.
You sharpen your tears into angry saw blades
and threaten to rip the forest down.
You scream: No more of this,
I want to sleep now.

I’ve watched you for hours
when you curled into a little ball in your bed.
I’ve known what you were doing,
begging her to be silent.
There are others she will die for,
but I hope she will keep on refusing you,
you sing too well.


III. Soon

I hate the sound of shattering,
but I hate the still woods more,
so I go on swinging high. It hurts, and yet,
I think you will also love the color red.
You will have to:
the little things are buried everywhere,
and they will not stop exploding.
Birds will not stop flying,
and peace will be followed by something
too bright or dead still, always.

Intensity is an ugly child, yes.
But you’ll learn, I promise.
She will not stay a girl forever,
ripping up your afternoons
just out of sight behind the dull chime of a little bell.
You will learn how to live with her wild fingers.

Soon, the subtle shifting of the leaves
will read like a sheet music
that the brute world will thank you for.
Soon, we will both become women.

The Field (6.25)

First, they say there is a great pain,
After which you grow tired.
Then, they say you feel warm,
One last time, before you go numb.
You are done when you close your eyes.

I sang for as long as I could
Before I grew scared
And began screaming your name.
I kept expecting you to call back
Down from wherever you’d flown off,

And add one young pine to the horizon,
One faint set of fox tracks in the snow,
Something – anything – for me to hold onto
Or follow to a place like the one where you must have gone
Where the ground is not frozen,

Where holes can be dug into the earth
For precious things to be laid gently down
And covered handful at a time with soft dirt,
And labeled for time immortal,
“Here lies my beloved…”

As if the word love were still enough for prefixes,
For stone and right angles,
As if all words will conjugate into a past tense,
Or as if you really believed, as I want to,
That the dead stay dead.

They fell all around me,
dressed like shavings of the moon,
Is that all you could spare?
These fragile hisses of silver,
These flakes of memories? So pale,

Not at all like the actual sound of your voice
Or your tongue and our hands
Which touched everything
Like we had invented dawn ourselves.
When I cried your name

Maybe it hurt you not to feel pulled,
Hurt even more than the gentle melodies
Before the screaming.
Perhaps that is why you did not respond.
Perhaps your voice making promises

Had found another ear
And was moistening it with tenderness?
Or perhaps you had cut off your own ears
And buried them somewhere under the vast sheet.
I don't know, you said nothing.

The field, it grew whiter and wider.
It shone like a blade in the night.
I searched in despair with my eyes for the edge.
I called a few more times before, exhausted, I sat down.
You did not say a single word.

I explained that I wasn’t shivering
Because of the cold, but perhaps you didn’t hear,
Didn’t hear me say it is a bit frightening
Finding your own tracks
Again and again in the snow,

As if you have been talking to yourself
For days without realizing
You are alone.
I began imagining I could feel
The warmth of your breath

Which blew off the tops of drifts,
Yes, when the wind blew, there were white caps.
We were sailing a soft arc across them,
We would reach the end, the edge.
I began to imagine the rose petals, and how they would fall

Around the stone when I found it and laid myself down.
They would burn bright red, like phoenix feathers, like fire.
They would run deep and smooth as blood.
I could see them, still warm, whispering down through the earth
To your buried ears, deaf with dirt, my love, my love...

I stopped asking, finally, is that all you can spare,
These moon shavings?
I stopped asking, where are you?
Everything had cracked into flames
The moon had turned brilliant orange

Like the head of a lion; the air roared like the sun.
I had to cover my ears with hands.
It was this bright in our first moment of complete nakedness
When we pulled together,
still electric green like new leaves unfolding around a bud.

The ashes floated down from you,
Gathering in the endless fields like angles.
Once more everything felt absolute.
That is when I squinted, pinching out tears of light with my eyelids, my love, my love.

Keyhole

The gentle clasp of our pinkies
undid, and I said
nothing. I let the body go (anything
for love) into the hungry palms, the sharp
smell of red, the clamor like
a fervent lovers’ dance.

Outside the bedroom walls
the trees bellowed green,
tossed their heads against the gray.
I lay beneath the storm, imagining
in all the twisting of the tongues,
one leaf was standing still
in a keyhole in the wind.

The door knocked closed.

One last green shutter, then silence
around the crack, split up the side of love:
this failure of desire to care.
Heavily, night crept into the empty room,
leaking through the branches, the veins,

the months I lay,
the slow blinking moon around me in the bed sheets.
All the deep red books weighed down the shelves.
The curtains swayed, deceptive like a ghost,
and the silhouette of a few words hung painfully
in the throat waiting to say
welcome home.

The window looked over the casual collision of streets.
Fear, in a single breath, kept rasping:
you will never love again, the world is too big.
In the dark kitchen I swallowed each melting thing,
each ice cube from the freezer, as if
mastering the one sure dance, that rhythm of departure.

Flowered Sheets (6.10)

Yesterday, everything stayed merrily on its little shelf;
all I had were the ordinary names of things.
Joy is unsatisfying after the inhale of awe.

I cannot decide which is worse: the silence
Of well-being or the moments between
The explosions of words when you lay
Under the flowered sheet and they hold you
to the mattress like a hundred funeral boquets.

They don’t tell young girls like me how important it is
being weighed down so, so that you press against the details
better than anyone else.

Sex (6.09)

I.
There is a match in your stomach;
do not rub it awake.

No matter how soft his palms.

II.
I did not want it…
to have them flush me out
like the bowl of a toilet.
I bent myself over the bathroom sink
putting my fingers around your imagined head,
and I squeezed through the flesh.
Or maybe it was your foot, your whole germ of a self.
I hoped you’d pop open like a cherry tomato,
dribble out in stringy bits, like my monthly red tide
full of chopped fish.
I squeezed and gagged,
my face in the mirror as pale as if the petals
had fallen off a rose.

III.
She held her hands above her head
Making a wide circle of her fingers.
As the wind blew through she whispered
empty, empty, empty..

IV.
There were no trees.
There were no cupping valleys of moss.
The shelves stood, bare and light,
not laboring under the usual weight of so many footprints
left by men in the fields of snow.
They could see nothing,
like stacks of vacant eye sockets.

It looked like freedom from a distance,
No little red tether
Coiled inside one part of a symbiosis.
There were no hinges,
There were no bodies to be hung from the trees,
There were no children’s swings dangling
From the branches – there were no branches –
To give the illusion of flight.

What the Men Have Done (5.22)

It is a thin red thread that holds me
From going further
I cannot be satiated
By these starry headed daisies
Bobbing in the garden

When out there I can see
A desolate field of stumps.
I need to know
What the men have done
With the deep forest.

Back in the Hallway (5.20)

I am now sitting in the hallway,
A book under my arm with passages
I keep crossing out and rewriting in the margins.
You walked off to the left, I think.
I already tried the door to my own room.
You’re right, it’s locked.

You think it’s my rules that have caused this
Or that I’ve hidden the key in some deep pocket.
I also want to say fuck these rules
But I’ve got thousands of pages to go.

And listen, I spent two years trying
To weld the correct pattern of teeth
For opening in. I can’t ask for that key back,
It opens a door to a room thick with green
And swift eyes everywhere threatening
And tangled branches, heavy rains,
Erotic flowers giving slow kisses to the canopy.
It opens a door to a small, empty room with two chairs,
A table, a couple of books and a bed, all collecting dust.

It’s true this thing between us is insignificant
Compared to the weight of an urn.
What is living is always insignificant
When compared with death.
It’s a wonder we go on reaching towards
One another’s hands at all, casting shadows
As we stand in silence in different rooms
Looking at different eyes,
Because truly, they are just about the same
Aside from the books found under the beds.

I’m afraid we always eventually find
That our watches beat in slightly different measures,
Cut time in different intervals, so that he says,
“time is running out so must I,” just as she is about to say
“Listen to this passage!” Or, perhaps, vice versa.

You wandered back out into the hall to clear your head,
To knock on other doors, I don’t know exactly.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a bit waiting.
And, yes, then I turned out the light and closed the door.
Now I am sitting in the hallway, a book under my arm
With passages I keep crossing out.

Muse (5.17)

She comes to the doors that are ajar – chance
always plays a part in vision.
I’ve propped mine open with a book.
Just inside, I’m standing, humming
to be sure she knows I’ve got a voice. Perhaps
she’ll follow in the leaves or drifts; I’ll be there,
humming, waiting on one miracle after the next.

If she comes only to shut me up, I will close
and lock the door behind her. She’ll likely go limp
and slip like a ghost, like an empty envelope,
back under the door. I will hum louder.
I will open every window in the house
so that whatever I am doing – stacking clean plates,
reading, seeing a spider out, sealing bills – she will hear

only my dull melodies up and down the street. I will hum,
“You have failed. I am still humming. I am still
humming.” I will force her to return to talk me down
from the roof where I will be holding onto the weathervane,
swinging out over the neighborhood, like thunder,
like an eclipse of the sparrows. I will leave the door
and all the windows open. I’ll pour her tea, humming.

She won’t be taken, she will say.
I’ll point to the open door.
She will sit down at the piano,
appreciating that the only way to hear music againis to teach me.

Something Sweet

I want to affirm every thing, taste the high sky,
tell you the hundred beautiful things

I wish to scream into the great ravine
to scare the mysteries from their branches in the deep.

I want to feel the wind of their passing wings
blow a strand of hair across my face.

And when you brush it back, behind my ear,
I want you to look just a moment in my eyes.

I won’t descend the wide, dark rift
On those stairs of glass and foolish shine

But I am full to the brink with aches
Standing on the edge with you

About to leave. There’s a drip of something
sweet on my lips that I don’t want

To place. I’ll lie down, close my eyes,
and you, keep your promise, walk away.

We’ll float up into each other’s high skies, lightly,
just as a good day right when we grow tired, melts into a dream.

Square (5.01)

They labored for years towards the construction of what would be a new square.
They laid the tiles down in a precise geometry, perfect as practiced scales, no improvisations.
They rolled in stone on rasping machines. They carved the shadows into it
With drills that cried the abrasive, meticulous song of creating.
A worker lost a finger from carelessness; they lost an hour
washing the blood off the granite. The benches were a last touch, riveted to the ground

in a perpetual state of waiting. The minute the ropes were removed, the citizens, neglected
in the plans but expected, came pouring haphazardly in holding hands,
swinging newspapers, carrying umbrellas in the rain.
The sun set over the city, faces leaned together in low sweet whispers, peach colors fell
quietly in their smoothly cut beds of stone, as if the square had no memory

Of its exact and noisy conception. Only occasionally did a kiss miss its lips and teeth clank
together. In a few months the wearing down of particular diagonals became ever so minutely
visible: the mass of the thing swallowed unceremoniously into routines.
Off in a cathedral somewhere, costly restorations were underway. A worker cut
at slightly inexact angles, still learning an odd balance of the instruments in his new hand.

Father

She would hold out to us dishes laden
with expertly carved meats dressed up in last rite garnish.
Even after she had filled us, she had more to give,
sweet things I loved, powdered gently,

and I had to accept well past the point of comfort.
How could I tell her it was too delicious, not enough,
that I needed to go out for a long walk and sing on the street corners,
that I’d rather beg strangers for scraps than remain
in the bright envelope of the kitchen never going hungry?

And how many months did you treat her just like this
excusing yourself from the table, to got to bed and wait for things
less delicately made and given, things you knew left her empty?
I cannot excuse myself, but when I leave, I will leave
the door wide open to the street, and if I ever come back starved,
I will hope the house is empty, the old knives gathering dust in their drawers.

In the years to come...

In the years to come, we will meet like this,
three feet apart, quiet,
in the deepest stillest forest of the world.
The city rises its bright needles to the haze around us.
You walk out from between them,
your arms swinging loosely
like a hundred naked light bulbs out of the dark.
I hear only the rushing by of traffic.
I feel the soft swell of grief roll again in my gut.
When the hand extends,
I recoil; I want no accidental brushing
open of the deep holes, not now,
when I can no longer place this hand
where I will on my skin.

I will give you your smile before I turn.
Then the great tent of sky collapses,
the leaves fall at once; again,
whether I close or open my eyes,
dark holes blind and dance.

Leaves

Any day now, the next door widow will send her leaf piles skyward
In thick, stinking clouds above the neighborhood.
From the stoop I’ll watch
The cooling ashes shift and spread across the sky,
Without a way to say we burned as nothing I’ve known has ever burned.

I watch the spaces between a pair of sparrows looping the sky
Bloom and collapse with ease.
They are a couple of periods shaken loose
From an old letter, hidden my nightstand drawer.
I wait for them to settle.

The wind slips coolly through the empty fingers of the back yard maples
Without a whisper, pushing the porch swing
as if my memory had a gentle weight.
We used to sit for hours, our breath dancing on the winter air like ghosts.
I miss the skin behind your ears, soft like a peach.
And your cold fingers.
Most people don’t understand the brilliance of I love you.

I’ve thought of pulling a leaf from the gutter
And sending it to you to say: this is how it feels.
By the time it reached you,
It would be dust in the corner of an envelope.

Blanks

I said I would end this with a straight face,
kept a cohort of soldiers shooting, even at night,
punctured balloons that took my heart too high
into my mouth, never agreed to let defenses down

until, at the end, at such a height, it seemed clear
they had shot blanks. I looked at them scattered
across the chest’s scuffed floor like a splintered stick
finally struck against something a little too big.
Judging by how it pumps and throbs,
the effect of the blow on the heart was not so great.

Once I dared to tell you we were like a pair of roses
clutched together by our sharp green teeth
without the redemptive blazing and bumping
together of passionate red bundles above the waist;
soldiers have tendancy to exaggerate with a stoic face.
Of course, you can clearly see the holes in the breast plate,
new blooms pushing out with each pulse.

All afternoon, I’ve watched the ocean, another vast,
tumultuous beast. Shoot an arrow in, and it will sink
without a trace. It goes on forever making that sound
of from right before or after the record plays.
We rise up, a swell of sound, a rushing wall,
a great sympthony, perhaps for a year or a few days,
before we slam into the ordinary buildings of our former lives.

The soldiers take a week to gather, tin cups in hand,
and scoop the town clean. In a month, they ready the streets
for the next great parade, and by spring, they replant
the flower beds. Yet, even the rooms, perfectly preserved,
preemptively boarded up and stacked with bags of sand,
feel empty, do not feel the same, and the replanted carnations
look, on certain nights, like brutal wounds waving
at the beach without a single tooth.

Starving Artist

You say you need paper and pencil more than food,
and something to honor more than paper and pencil,

that you’d rather starve from the outside in
than from the inside out, rather look thin than sound it.

I’ve been listening to you say these things
while I stack peas on the precise prongs of my fork.

I am not an animal, I am not an animal, I hear you repeat.
I chew. I swallow. I lower my fork and I begin again, too.

I should tell you that given an empty conk and an empty peapod,
I prefer these peas. The illusion of the ocean sung forever

by a barnacled mouth could never slip down my throat
from full to half full to empty so coolly as this glass of water.