White Whale Crossing

Whales, Mermaids, Magic, Brazil

2012-01-18T16:19:00.005-05:00

Imagine whales extinct/ no songs, no more clicking whale-chatter,
no more flumes, waves, wings. No breaching, not even in Brazil,
no dancing and no honey/ for us sailors reading backward and forward
through the history of all mammals. Now we are blind to polestars,
to our own seas and seasons/ a thick wool of pollution wraps the world;
eyes, mouth, everything stuffily built

to encourage smoggy thoughts and physical break-down. Build-up
clogs out everything thicker than chat.
It's like language but distressed, our whale-less world
roaring towards extinction. The machine approaches Brazil's
ecosystem of supermodels, beaches and soccer stars.
We've come to break their hearts. If we may be so forward,

we've come with the Olympics. Forward:
computers weave with only that one command. Databases design buildings,
causing all the mermaids to give up thoughts of land and starry
eyed people with nothing to look at but the enchantments of chatrooms
generating illusions in little white jets to Brazil.
Computers will learn to be the birds and the whales of the world.

Mermaids hear us/ their ghosts haunt and sing to the listening worlds.
Mermaids hear us/ sunk on ship-fronts/ hair, nipples and thrust/ forward.
Mermaids hear us/ shell-to-the-ear, whispering lore Brazilian.
Mermaids hear us/ through a listening device they break, re-break/re-build.
Mermaids hear us, like so much lizard skitter and chatter.
One hundred thousand silver stars

say that mermaids still exist, star-gazing,
trying to save the whales somehow, for a world
that does not deserve whales, nor song, nor love. Just chatting
little ladies and soft animals, freak-showed and fast-forwarded,
where will you go when the world lacks water? Rebuiling
whale-ghosts come from back in time and ask: Can you, Brazil?

Can any country bring the whales back? Mermaids favor Brazil;
the best pressed ghosts, the sights and air and splash and stars,
all night flashing on the site where something pre-distressed shall be built.
What else can we expect from the greedy mouth of the world?
We ate all the whales, forcing the flood of extinction forever forward.
What about God? You know what they say about him: he's all chatter

and no Brazil. God believes in the orgiastic world,
in stars beaming the green light, in beating forward,
boats against/ the current builds/ borne back ceaselessly into the chat.

Christmas Poem

2012-01-07T12:43:00.003-05:00

Collapsed, she can't subscribe,
as she falls, pales and clots. We watch as she turns terrible.
Then that awful angel stays up all night eating shortbread;
waiting on the Boogeyman,
waiting on Santa Claus,
either or both, she says one is as likely as the other.

Each cancels out the other,
she says. To this theory I cannot subscribe,
not even for (just barely keeping his eyes open) Santa Claus.
Go back to Winter and bleed. Dawn comes, cold and blue and terrible;
bring on the newspaper's nightmares, bring on the daytime TV Boogeyman,
with angels we eat maple shortbread.

Let's say it's because there is nothing but shortbread,
let us say the author of the collapse is always going to be the other.
I'll have a decaf double latte over Baghdad, says the Boogeyman.
Tell them we will not subscribe.
(This life is no one's life.) Tell them we are terrible.
Say it's because there is no Santa Claus.

No one can see the structure here but Santa Claus
and all he's got this year is pale, bloody shortbread.
Dawn comes and the blood clumps inside her like tree branches, terrible
twisting with both fists and reaching towards the sky. There are other
ways to reach, new ways to describe, old ways to subscribe
to this pale internal piracy. Blame it on the Boogey(man)

because he lacks branches. That's right, there is no structure to the Boogeyman,
no blood/bone/skeleton, he is a fearful jelly. Santa Claus
on the other hand, is all thick trunk and total subscription
clustered like knuckles, balling and releasing, in snow-bright blue dawn. Shortbread
eating all year round (this life is no one's life) in the other
place, the Tropic of Terror.

There is nothing so terrible
about the Boogeyman
in fact, it's just another way of saying Santa Claus.
Pass the shortbread
back to Winter, reject both the heat and the cold, in Spring we shall subscribe.

Collapse the blue and terrible (just barely keeping his eyes open) Santa Claus,
give the Boogeyman his pale gift of shortbread,
meanwhile, the tree branches beseech the other in the sky, the snow tells us to subscribe.

To The President of France

2011-12-18T07:59:00.002-05:00

The girls put the fly in the spiderweb
because they are girls, curious with hands
fast enough to catch (despite the multi-faceted eyed fly,
so small and so quick) they are so clever
and true to their own satiety
to want to watch

the moment when the spider fattens itself.
Girls, they feed they spider, girls
if the President of France knows more people with cancer
than models he has fucked,
always feed your punishments
with many-eyed crimes

because someday in the incognito of heartburn and sunglasses,
everyone you know will be dying of cancer too.
Bodies fill with blind tumors, oh, what good
are eyes in all the murk of this world anyway?

Abracadabra

2011-12-08T18:06:00.002-05:00

Dueling omens put a spell on fashion,
they threw in divination of the future,
complicating the delusion of money
and poisoning manners. Last night

I drempt of money mania.
Knave/ madman/ magistrate/ rogue.
She says it's called "The Southern Divorce"
(making it sound fashionable, like a perfume or a style of dress

in the abracadabra of it all)
when a woman kills her husband.

While ruminating on the first days of 1900,
wear a shawl because it is cold in New Hampshire.
Learn a new waltz this year./ Waltz by the sea.

Have erotic railroad dreams
in which you are a mine. Coal, iron, steel,
come from you/ come back to you
everything huffing and rushing and quick.

Stuffing Person Whipped

2011-11-26T14:09:00.003-05:00

cakes spring
cream on
sauce toast
tarts satay pigs

sables foccacia and local organic
smoked, sliced, Scottish in our own

served with our country
misty knoll sun-dried spiced manchego

with our Maine
with our Tartar

stuffing person whipped
creamed gratin

local organic
local organic
local organic
local organic

haricot

Vermont our own
our own

*denotes vegetarian

When We Are Poor

2011-11-21T10:02:00.002-05:00

When we are poor, one hardcover
at the bookstore is worth two paperbacks
so we try not to look at the secure covers too long. Later
at the public library it translates unconsciously
(my purse full of call-numbered paperbacks)
and we never question it, telling ourselves
we read what we've earned. (Paper my back
because I do not own a home.) We spend
our wickedly lonely days eating pound of pink
lipstick and listening
(rooms full of voices) to all histories (in all languages)/ hear;
pains of regret/ pains of extinction.

Try writing the great questions in hot pink lipstick on the mirrors
(of the soul) Is there a God? (and)
Who wants to know?

The Tumor That Was Actually A Wing

2011-11-17T12:49:00.001-05:00

Putting her arm around the tree, she leaned into the quickening;
roots, branches/ her hair hastening to bark,

she was starting to the stick to that tree from the empty space
where the tumor that wasn't a tumor

had been disconnected/ pulled out
and it was found to be a wing, lost/ longing towards every bird.

Portrait

2011-11-09T09:50:00.001-05:00

Bones.
Breath.
Story.
Heat.

Triptych

2011-11-09T09:44:00.001-05:00

Whisper a portrait in miniature,
kiss everywhere but the small mouth,
steam across the sky/ in shout sounds.

Paint the miniature whisper,
do what she says with that small mouth/ kiss
and shout over the sound of steam.

Whisper, whisper/ paint portraits in miniature
kisses small but everywhere the mouth
shout across the sound, across the steamy sky.

Towers

2011-11-01T14:46:00.002-04:00

Here is the world: Mother Enter and Father
Exit, in puddle iron latticework. Abandon your city,
abandon your home-made parachute
in favor of radiant energy.
Cosmic rays, come
scrape the sky, and mean it.

Ask generations of math
questions of pig iron,
questions of wind resistance.
Here is the hex: a cave wall picto-recipie
for a very pure form of structural poison.

We begin with a small sample. Does it work?
Are you immune to bites, to jumps? Only one way
to find out. I will set the stakes up high,
we can perch your tent on top; your snakes, your Jesus.

As the Eiffel Tower spreads her legs,
you take/ my perfumed hair for granted.
The iron lady in an apple-mythed world, fucked,
between/bites, you take
the high road/ only one way to the sky, you say.

The world is made of towers
and so many ways to fall.

There is always a fire

2011-10-16T22:57:00.003-04:00

At first it was all quantum vs. classical,
momentum vs. position, until we found
abstract matrix expressions and
we formulated new questions then, like:
What do you do when your house is on fire?

Answer:
If you can move fast enough, time will slow down
to meet you in the middle.

There is always a fire
but it's not always your house that's being destroyed.
It's essentially the stranger-on-a-train theory:
once you're out of sight, once no one who knows your name
can see you, then you'll be just another stranger on a train.
But if I can run fast enough
there's a certain speed at which time will slow for me
and I will lunge for the caboose.

reality layers

2011-10-16T22:45:00.001-04:00

the war effort consisted of goat cheese with ash
(I had ashy knees throughout the entire war)
the ash effort was worthy, the art we made was not
(I made heat-art with my body, with yours)
there are layers in the way we read reality
(everything you say is in code)
the air is thick with reality
(air layers around us)
love wafts up
(sinking ships)
love sinks
(care-)
less
(oh)

Appetites

2011-10-09T11:58:00.002-04:00

Disregard tactile mistakes made with paper
as all the trains arrive based on the magnetism of the stations anyway.
Watch as they spin on their orbits
dazzling in the clear light: there are no more schedules.

Time moves backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Keep telling the clocks that.

Then say: Do not explode. Do not give up.
Keep ticking anyway, though it is not the truth.
Develop appetites for food, for sex,
you must keep on spinning/ no matter how uncertain/ this whole spinning thing is.

Describing Physics

2011-10-07T00:34:00.002-04:00

Orbits of electrons describe
the dancing of planets around our heads

if you sit very still they will fill you with spin
and if you spin very fast you'll find the door to their cave

where stillness breathes
but only by night, when

the universe looks itself in the owl-eyes
and sees the stillness and the spin, dancing

which both repels and abstracts
orbits at night, toward

the dance, the dance:
around my head, around yours.

Her Pirate History

2011-09-20T01:03:00.001-04:00

Lobster-red lipstick/ the face she makes is either sexy red grimace or heartburn red/ red silk on the underside of crimson velvet/ red blood in the mouth of cringing Byron/ fingerless red gloves/ eggs Rhode-Island red/ brown and white ponies with sharp red morning roses woven into their braids/ red stones round their ankles in decorative circles/ she exhales red petals into the blush of day/ when she opens her mouth to sing cardinals echo in their red velvet capes/ they match reds but their voices bear no similarity/ when she sees red she can breathe red/ she will touch red with her red tongue/ golden threads twist red/ the red of a match head/ red head/ red wreck/ red meat/ red of birth and death/ red of plastic and red of cars/ redolent fingers dipped in red ink/ red stains from red drinks/ red ribbons pulled between red-painted toes/ red bites from red snakes/ new warmth from red hued bourbon/ red of failure/ red of success/ red feathers and red hairs/ red cheeks in cold air/ ruined red/ party red/ end red/ army red/ redwood/ red beans/ Redbeard/ sunset red/ red dripping on the floor/ Russian red/ red trees bleeding red apples/ red letters making red words/ red curls catch red light/ talk red talk till the ripe red sun rises/ every instrument has a red tone/ every prison a red cell/ she is red for him/ he is red for her/ she calls red in her sleep and it reddens her dreams/ search the register for true red/ pick through every red twist and manifestation of redness/ nervous in red hives/ red shoes and hats and hairpins/ red insects full of red blood/ red brick houses full of heat/ out the corners of her eyes the red walls change their brightness to moves in the music that only her red ears can catch/ the red of rain/ the red wish to live/ red vine licorice candy/ the exposed red nostrils of a sick horse/ a red rear kick/ red step/ red-blindness/ a quiet red bell/ red moon shining on red sand beaches/ red fox/ red ants/ red picnics/ red barns with red animals inside them/ the red to remember/ the red loss/ chemical red/ red ties/ red blossoms/ red paper/ cinnamon red hot candy/ red flecks floating in golden irises/ red problems with red cures/ fickle red family/ red doors open to red theaters where they read red plays/ red suits/ red tickets/ red uniforms/ red breasts, hopping around the green lawn on the first day of spring/ red hot chili peppers/ reasonable red/ useful red/ the minister of red/ red chance/ a sultry scoop of red powder/ red velvet cake/ red clay/ red wine/ scraped red knees from falling off the red bike/ a red wish for july sky-fire/ a red fish for a red table/ cut dead by red relations/ red carpet for red slippers to tread red steps/ she’s so red/ reading red leather-bound books/ red holly berries on slick black Christmas branches/ the red whistle of the red train/ even if she was very, very, red she could not stay/ red rims of eyes/ red veterans in red graveyards/ abundance was red and lack of abundance was also red/ red leaves fell from red maple trees/ at the end of the red road is the red queen and the fire-fairies/ everything will be paid for in red; children, countries/ everything bleeds the same red light.

American Drama

2011-09-18T19:18:00.004-04:00

Flag. Boy Scout. Mountain Climber. Play.
He wakes up and knows it is all a play

or a movie, because the audience is so silent and so still he can't see them
but the cameras are everywhere. Each person he passes on the street

has a pair of high-res camera eyes. Flag-waving
he wears the costume of a Boy Scout. That's why bearded men stare at his face.

In the play he is a mountain climber. That's why.
He acts all the way to the top of the mountain

that's when he first knows he's alone. The girl
at the counter is giving phone directions

grey building; sign out front; the north side of 3rd street.Here
comes an ambulance wide like an open mouth

bleeding sound south, towards the college. It is so easy
to pretend this is a movie about college, or a play about America.

Blueberry

2011-09-12T13:21:00.003-04:00

Sleep the twilight of the nipple,
in the twilight of the arm, sleep
until dawn takes shape around suffering
and day takes shape around joy.

Noon hangs true, halfway through
loving you, the world goes blue,
in the twilight of the berry,
in the twilight of the branch.

Song of the Concertina Lemon

2011-09-01T09:05:00.004-04:00

A beaker of bleach
bangs the bell of the ship, she is

blind but for this color yellow,

because she walks in beauty with the night, her daytime eyes are dim.

So I paint myself in sunshine, for her/ every morning

buttercream beyond legend/ the blondes of combustion

in the history of poetic nitroglycerine/ the day-true

story locked up in the sunflower sun.

My bright whalemoon

hung true halfway in the twilight

and halfway in the night.

I would die and be a lemon tree/ all fruit in her sight and she

would tell me through my roots

all the water-secrets. Yes, dear

she would whisper gold-truth into hard old ears.

When she died, the stars shut their eyes,

and all the world dreamed in black.

That day I left home for the whale road.

Cetology

2011-08-25T14:32:00.003-04:00

The Pequod’s weedy hull

the barnacled hulls of the Leviathan;

appreciative and understanding

revelations and allusions

are to follow. no easy task. the classification

of chaos, nothing less

Listen

utter confusion (sperm whale), says

to have ones hands among the unspeakable foundations,

ribs and very pelvis of the world;

What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this Leviathan!

Will he (the Leviathan) make a covenant with thee?

I have swam through libraries

I have had to do with whales with these visible hands

lungs and warm blood;

a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.

There you have him.

The Leviathanic brotherhood

the grand divisions of the entire whale host.

Sperm Whale

used for light,

an ounce of rhubarb

in the course of time,

to enhance it’s value by a notion so strangely significant.

Right Whale

the most venerable of the Leviathans, he is

The Whale; True Whale;

it is the whale some pretend to see

they precisely agree

the Right Whale.

Fin Back

a monster

Tall-Spout

the whale so often descried in New York

in his baleen, His great lips

his name, a conspicuous object projecting from the surface.

He seems a whale-hater as some men are men-haters.

a tall misanthropic Leviathan Cain

bearing upon his back. the fisherman or hump or fin

to defy all whale-naturalists in his anatomy

into the bowels of various Leviathans

the whales bodily proceed.

Hump Back

is often American. He has towed a peddler;

Elephant and Castle distinguish him, a hump,

oil

baleen

gamesome and light-hearted

making more gay foam than any other of them.

Razor Back

off Cape Horn

of nature both hunter and philosopher

coward, Let him go.

Sulphur Bottom

Gentleman with brimstone

the Tartarian tiles

profounder seldom seen; the seas study his countenance.

He is chased; he with rope walks

Prodigies can say nothing more that is true of ye, Nantucketer.

Grampus

a proverb to landsmen, a denizen among whales

possessing all the grand distinctive features

He is moderate

fifteen to twenty-five feet in length,

swims in herds;

hunted, for light.

regarded as great

Black Fish

the Hyena whale, voracity well known

an everlasting Mephistopholean grin on his face.

He has a peculiar Roman nose.

the Sperm capture the Hyena to keep

for domestic employment—as frugal housekeepers,

some of these whales will yield

Narwhale

his peculiar horn sixteen feet in length,

it does not seem like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish,

the Narwhale employs a rake Charley Coffin said

an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale breaks through.

But cannot prove in reading pamphlets

of the Unicornism in every kingdom.

Queen Bess did gallantly wave her prodigious long horn

in the castle at Windsor of the Unicorn nature.

Killer

the Nantucketer

the professed Naturalists

we are all killers

Thrasher

He mounts the Folio whale’s back

he works his passage by flogging him,

some schoolmasters get along in the world by similar process.

Both are outlaws even in the lawless seas.

Huzza Porpoise

All over the globe I call him

They are the lads that always live up before the wind.

Heaven help ye; his jaws in request

among jewelers and watchmakers.

It is you that a porpoise spouts.

It is you

Algerine Porpoise

in the Pacific.

he will buckle to a shark

I have lowered for him

Mealy-Mouthed Porpoise

the only English porpoise,

less jolly

quite neat and gentleman-like

sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue.

distinct as the mark in a ship’s hull.

he just escaped

A rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales,

which, I know by reputation,

by their forecastle appellations;

following whales according to Leviathanism stated at the outset,

be here, and at once

see that I have kept my word.

This is an erasure poem which employs the entire Cetology chapter of Moby-Dick. For more erasure poetry please see The Place of Ahab posted earlier this month. I am currently engaging with Moby-Dick in a series of erasure poems as well as tweeting a line a day on Twitter--follow me at WWhaleCrossing.

When I looked up

2011-08-24T12:16:00.006-04:00

attractiveness in the dictionary
it said: attractiveness is not always chemistry. Look up
when it rains, when the sunflowers are throwing themselves from side to side,
then look down, at the ants all over your sneakers,
attracted, chemically, just look down
and love them.

Sweet Pretty

2011-08-14T20:26:00.001-04:00

Sweet pretty the bees buzz beside me

they nuzzle but they don’t sting.

Have you ever felt a hundred

live velvet bodies yearning and twisting

through you to get to the queen?

A galaxy of eyes. Perhaps, yes.

Insect eyes know that every star is looking back at you

but not every gaze can be turned into a door,

some are always tunnels and will always go underground

while other eyes send you sideways

leave you shimmying towards the edge of the world.

There is a skinny, velveteen edge,

it’s not possible to see it without falling. Every eye that sees the edge

gets the look turned back on itself: click:

now the lock, click, the next time the door opens

there will be only sky past the threshold

and all thresholds dissolve, no matter how you scream.

So try not to scream

and don’t write macabre notes or poetry,

sweet, pretty and sad.

It doesn’t matter what you do, actually

they will always say you jumped.

Perhaps, yes. Perhaps you did.

The Place of Ahab

2011-08-11T14:18:00.005-04:00

The place of Ahab

the vacant post;

the rocking boat,

When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool

black bubble at the axis

the black bubble upward burst;

the coffin life-bouy

shot lengthwise from the sea,

Buoyed up by that coffin,

sharks, they glided by

the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.

The devious-cruising Rachel

after her missing children.

The Tree Eaters

2011-07-31T12:12:00.002-04:00

sit at fresh picnic tables and drink mint juleps, saying:

old oak tastes different than young,

though anything I can snap

between my teeth and cluck with my tongue will satisfy my mouth

but smell drives the drives and feeds the fires.

Cucumber tastes nothing like it smells, but very much the way it looks.

Cantaloupe is the smell of true childhood love.

Old books smell different than young books and you sit there,

reading with your eyes, like vision is the only thing that matters.

I can’t taste fire

it is just a sound in my mouth.

A hiss and then that simple silence: the sound of the heat sinking in.

A terrible weight of pain through my jaw

destroying the bottom half of my summer-song.

So I start to nibble the picnic table with my top teeth

and it tastes exactly as it smells. I tap out, in Morse code;

cucumber, cantalaope, mint;

someday summer will be childhood again. I half-smile

and all the sunflowers bloom and turn in agreement.

Good Day

2011-07-29T09:50:00.001-04:00

Start with a million dollars, start two generations ago

in a New York that no one

would recognize now. Elephants, yes

and giraffes. Left to your real life

which didn’t begin until your first safari when you heard the lions

singing in London/ singing keep on keeping on

a hundred years ago/ it was Christmas, right,

but there was no Christmas, only hibernation

(no orphans, only Dickens’s imaginings)

and the bears were fighting all the time, right,

then they would make-it-up with dancing. Keep left.

Who doesn’t like dancing?

When you get back to New York everything is NEW and you

crave constant civil crush.

Blonde drama. Colors changing. Hooves. Lost sunglasses. Loss. Song.

Then the dancing bears lay down to sleep

beside the white piano, turn right,

get on the ship, sure, just keep on keeping on,

or, if you prefer, everything is gonna be alright.

On the ship you caught the fish that jumped silver straight up out of the water.

You taught the fish to talk, to smile

and they would sound like cab drivers

some nights, saying : listen buddy, relax

at the end of the day if you got five dollars left, I’d say it was a good day.

So you’d tell them where to go. Left, right/ other times you’d teach

them a word, blush/ and they’d hang on to the word like a hook in the mouth:

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck./ Just say it was a good day.

For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen

2011-07-19T14:11:00.002-04:00

And you may fall downstairs with me
With perfect grace and equanimity.
Or, plaintively scud past shores
Where, by strange harmonic laws
All relatives, serene and cool,
Sit rocked in patent armchairs.

-Hart Crane

1
Something smells sadly
of cat piss and cigarettes this morning, though
two nights ago it was all blue herons
and drunkenly kissing dim-eyed boys at midsummer parties
in perfect dresses. We will dance you
around and around and behind ourselves.
Which self is that/ smelling so sadly
smoking/ and cursing at cats, when just
two nights ago it was all blue dresses
and drunk/ in the age of herons,
dim kisses, times of much
wet touches in the muck of heart/home pond
you can’t get there
unless I tell you where it is. Here’s a hint:
it disappears when we’ve gone a week without rain,
and then the sad captain will offer you his services for free.

2
Muck and plenty, water and turtles/ put
there in the heart-shaped pond
behind the main house, down the treacherous slope,
steep but clean, dangerous but beautiful,
so slip your high-heels off, so
wonderful to see, so terrible to touch
heart-shaped turtles take square bites
and the grass is hard and brown
until you get to the murk and then it’s worse.

Kid heroes must die for the sacrifice to mean something.
A goat is a fake kid and a slaughter is a gift.
The giver gets a chance to make this year’s harvest the best
and all the remaining virgins look so much more beautiful
(but much more nervous, more prone to breaking
in the nervous hours, and loud)
letting everyone know: THIS IS NOT A TEST.
It gets so bad, women are afraid to have babies,
so they hold them in.

3
Then the bridal party comes along, changes the form. With texts:
If you don’t do this for me, I will put my cell-phone pictures
of you throwing him into the volcano
on Facebook.

They make lists until they fall asleep
and then make more lists in their dreams.

No, the singers can’t walk with Helen—they will be up in the wings
they will all be wearing the same thing
and they will sing.

Drifting off to sleep, her beautiful mouth works the darkness
—ordering her bridesmaids—
Helen names names...

Teeth

2011-07-12T15:16:00.001-04:00

Rena J. Mosteirin
(1983-2083)
Eaten by a shark.

Soundings

2011-07-07T11:23:00.002-04:00

1
Planes, fireworks, thunder/ when America
is at war, we should refrain
from celebrating like this. The sky is too much,
upset like a child with candy-store eyes and a full-sick belly
running sparks on the neighborhood.

In times of war the sky should hold all breath/ roll no thunder
planes should stay on the ground/ children in the house/ and we should refrain.

2
Take the urge of run and the lift of flight
the ur of burn/ world, whole
farm-war, forest war, valley-war/ when America
wars we take word-sounds and make them flat-fast to the page
with letters standing in for sounds our mouths won't make/ burning old names
with new fire and if the smoke blows East, we dance farm-war wise,
if West, we will drink our coffee forest-war style,
if the smoke blows South, all the slave-ghosts rise in valley-war
and if the smoke blows North, all the whales sing to sound the smoke out
and the operator translating from the whale song
(the song which took shape in smoky air and sound waves pulled through the water
into words the whales caught to keep)
learns the whales fear
that war will put an end to all ears and to all music.

3
The crows are all a-caw today/ what do they say and why
do they turn the pre-dawn sky into a flutter of caw and crisis,
the campus into a tabernacle of shiny black squawk?
What of the long power of feathers/ spread lovely on the ground after flight,
or was it fight? It is now all aftermath, either way.

We will fill their hollow bones with squid ink
and dance them in letters, whole words across the page, our own
inky incantations mimicking the biggest crow left as he barks the sun up
from the other side of the world.

After Making Ecstatic

2011-06-19T22:21:00.002-04:00

1
After flight I am always wakeful;
After flowering/ delicious;
After gardens I am fence-lines, tree-songs, bird-paths.

After rain/ always ice cream.
After making ecstatic love/ poetry.

And yet/ nest.
And yet/ soil.
And yet/ the sky.
And yet/ ice cream.

2
If the ocean is the voice of the Earth,
then here is how humankind attempts

a tree: heart.
Fire makes clear the possibility

for a foundation, establishes red while orange gestates new
and the heart roots through

as the sun digests, all yellow./ If we make armroots and legroots
if breath is carried from the lungroots to the bloodroots,

if my head is all purple eyes and white cloudy cauliflower brain,
if the heart roots entirely throughout the body,

then/ here
then/ now
then/ you
then/ me.

Red in Tornado Times

2011-06-13T10:59:00.002-04:00

1
Bourbon is a dull light in the murk of my blood. Bourbon is rain
on the flat, waxy leaves of the tropical trees in Kentucky.
After a storm, bourbon steams through the streets.
During sex, beer listens behind a door
and bourbon is the old quilt, rumored
to have your great-grandmother's wedding dress lace
faded to shreds somewhere, and a square
of her bridesmaid's red as well.
Bourbon makes me drunk behind my eyes.
Beer makes me drunk in front of my face
and leaning into its darkness.
Ten years it lives in that barrel, turning brown
with sap, with bark
--flavors taken from breaking down--
into sugar, into fire
into hot sparks of red flare in my mouth.

2
Red cardinal on dun colored dead leaves.
White opossum noses through the downed
trees, rat-tailed but sniffing like a kitten. A rabbit hops a swath
through, just a visible cotton tail and then gone,
the opossum takes this as a trail
and the cardinal hops in the opposite direction, witness
their homeless behaviors, this will continue until a new index is made
step by step and smell by smell, until the forest is readable again.
Home is nothing like yesterday
much more like tomorrow.

Tornado Cuts A Smile Through The Night

2011-05-27T09:50:00.002-04:00

Everything yesterday grew is stem-snapped today,
flowers are floating in the flooded streets
each a dead eye. Don't trust
anything this thick atmosphere whips up. Wind comes in the night,
with speed that breaks my sleep. Here's the game:
when the tornado siren goes off, take a shot
whiskey is best, but anything you've got around the house will do.
Rock me to sleep in the closet, Wind,
the whiskey makes it easy but you make it fun.

Memoria

2011-05-21T12:06:00.002-04:00

This bench makes me a child
as my feet don't touch the ground, dangle; the white smell of sunscreen
makes me a child with a piece of hard candy in my mouth
neither sucking nor biting/ letting it melt
the way old stories melt and pour
into each other/ wine through the mouth
and the hard candy of memory melts
turns my jagged dog teeth blue.

Bells and bells and bells
the sound is silver hungry
the sound is sacred.

God is always hungry.
An empty belly burning towards doing something foolish.
My heart is green
a hummingbird's tender shake
just a quiver of a body, looking at you
I can see your hummingbird heart, same as mine.

As we get older, the green loses her luster.
Older, she is the wax green of a crayon, then
the sharp green tip of a colored pencil
then an old green leaf and then ash, nothing, not even a memory anymore.

Mushrooms come in a rush of rain
until the yellow-blue sky wakes you
and you start to build your heart again, grain by grain
with the green of grass and the buzz of wings,
the heart-bud gathers electricity to itself.

Identical:
robin heart and my heart
(bouncing in the grass)
horse heart and my heart
(with pounding hooves)

and your heart and your heart and yours.

Oh Home

2011-05-17T13:09:00.003-04:00

See how they dig down now, years later, what's left?
An empty grave/ old lace curtains/purple flowers
a little boy eating apples until he gets sick.
I've been here before.

Of course I can't remember the words.
I'm stuck with the tune only, as time makes lace-holes in my memories
of the shore. There's no one here, just stacks upon stacks of silent crimes.
Ocean keeps making sculpture from everything,

keeps drawing the same thing in the sand.
Oh ocean, how you give yourself away
someone's bound to notice the pattern.
(Are you sure you want to do this?)

When they finally see the design, then you will speak through it,
your wet mouth will know a hundred different ways to say home, tell them that,
tell them I went home.

To Her Hands

2011-05-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

Lonely hearts behind high-buttoned vests
Turkey-Trotting in pouf pants with deep pockets for bidding on bachelors.
Red snowflakes on yellow wallpaper, curtains covered in dogs
followed by men, mounted for the chase.

Flowers wearing hats and thinking of love.
He dances alone in the silence of the night.
Love pinned to the brim.
She dances alone, singing to her hands.

Soda fountain. Ivory soap. You say that to all the girls.
Smell of liniment and triangular flags. The girls all twinkle back.
Paper flags strung up, dance in lines, when there is wind, and when there is no wind
the flags settle back into their geometry.

Paint the house light blue and white, then see what happens inside.
She is my sister in sickness, Ma, go to her
push her in wheelchairs on weekends. No one knows germs properly
yet. Ma suspects there's something small at work here. Little animals plotting
inch by inch invasions. That's what sickness is: invasion

through all the space left by lace. Negative spaces.
Sickness grows in the lacks. Sickness in the dips of ribbons.
The difference between people and paper
is that people can dance when there is no wind.

Ballet Gorgeous

2011-04-28T12:25:00.002-04:00

Leg-tight boys lift girls
all-strong/ clean limb-ed in the ballet gorgeous.

Cling-dressed and faces painted
girls in arms and boys leg-tight.

Colored lights and paint-greased faces.
Girls and legs and arms and boys

and girls in arms./ Ballet boys girl-tight
painted faces and limbs clean-strong

sweaty hair sticks to lips greased
dresses cling then flare/ limbs cut clean.

On Being Breathless

2011-04-18T12:08:00.002-04:00

Wide open windows at either end of the apartment
will allow the tornado to pass through without ripping off the roof.
This is what one gets, living on the top floor,
this and a back porch up in the flowering trees
from which to look down at the small city and smile
into the wide open
wine of the wind. In France they say the Mistral
will rip the ears off lambs.
I've never seen a lamb I didn't want to kill, God says.
The wind is slamming all the doors in the apartment now.
What sacrifice will appease the whistle? What will it take,
what here would God want?
(I've hidden away my beautiful lambs.
I cling to their oily ruffles when I am cold
they sing me to sleep every night.)
Ignore the sounds of breaking,
hush, lambs. Hold your peace.
God will forget.
God will rush on.

A Curse From the Bestiary

2011-04-11T13:52:00.003-04:00

When this horse bites the white sides of another horse
the bites run black with blood and new vacancy. In another country,
men make horses fight in black and white.
Two bites like two dead eyes.

Bird, you can caw-haw-haowa but that's just crying. That's not flight.

The little boy with the face like a fox screams.
In black and white he bites your face
as men make horses fight in another country.

The sun comes out and the colors bleed back into the picture.
Sweet vacancy under a tree of blooming faces
sweet pear trees dropping rotten fruit on tombstones,
as he stands there looking like a small fairy-tale prince.
"A curse on you, a curse from the Bestiary," he says quietly, pointing.
Once you dreamed becoming a magnolia tree/ blooms as big as faces
but that was not to be. He could have turned you into a fainting goat
or a bird with no wings and no song. Now this is your future:

all of your lovers will turn into horses
with hunting men on their backs coming for you.
Your mother will sit by the window in the light of lamp oil
burning holes like eyes into the white side of the night.

Kiss to Kiss

2011-04-07T14:45:00.002-04:00

A kiss on the palm /lasts/ like a plain silver ring
(on the fourth finger)

take notes/ on the trees about to bud
(trees of white kisses dropping)

down as I sleep the sleep of petals, whitely
lip by lip by lip.

Bird Painter

2011-03-27T11:33:00.002-04:00

I will not work cages into the pattern anymore, or birds singing to no one,
in a fit of flight they hold back my heart.
Bird-hearts mend slow; glue and stitches, hollow bones, sinew and tracks,
a fine-spun air, the gentle exhalations made while painting.

In a fit of flight they hold back my heart,
I paint escapes, then cover everything in
a fine-spun air, the gentle exhalations made while painting.
I could cover over canvases with wings and fly.

I paint escapes, then cover everything in
yellowed wallpaper and I set it all on fire.
I could cover over canvases with wings and fly
but this flight is made of such old pulp/ I touch it, it starts to disintegrate,

yellowing the wallpaper and I set it all on fire.
I will not work cages into the pattern anymore, or birds singing to no one,
but this flight is made of such old pulp/ I touch it, it starts to disintegrate,
bird-hearts mend slow; glue and stitches, hollow bones, sinew and tracks.

Diorama

2011-03-19T12:22:00.002-04:00

How did the sheep get in
the church? They keep coming
until they pack in/and we are/ wall-to-wall
with sheep. No room for pews.

They are not sheep, just cotton balls
glued to Q-tips, some with faces
and others without. This is not a church
it's just a shoebox/ I painted
plastic wrap with tempera to look like stained glass.

Did it work? Can you hear them singing hymns?

Mountain Man

2011-03-12T16:07:00.002-05:00

Rockscapes layer on/ like clouds here/ close your eyes, see
it feels like a horse--especially here--where the lichens make a sort of mane.

When the branches clasp hands above us/ it's time for the litany of falling leaves.
Mountain man, there is a heaven/ ringing the mountain in floating clouds

like the way you hold me/ arms wrapped around/ rings to measure by
these bell sounds and embraces/ together we become the river/ too quickly deep

your horse follows my hound/ and we both drown.

Drinking Song

2011-02-27T13:39:00.002-05:00

1
I sing the cows
I sing the wetlands and the cows
I sing the wetlands and the cows and the dirt roads
all twisted and eccentric, endangered and idiosyncratic, yes
I sing and they answer me.

I can't play cards with you anymore/ you take the losses too hard.
Every big day is the same/ every day is enormous.
Lost count of the days/ I have seen/ solemn queens
and dancing madmen. I will vote them off my island.

We go back and back and back, pulling the blankets
up over our noses as foamy layers of roar
suck our toes, trying to take us out
to the ocean where the big storms are.

I drizzle and I steal pies
I try to write down the truth before the lies come on
slow-dancing lies, come on/ just, come on/ just come on...

2
You stumble around all afternoon drunk on sunlight
and bad directions (lies) until you find the driftwood path
just past the zigzag clubhouse/ dense flower bushes and no sign
where the path goes. Be careful when you smell
the flowers, they are bloody sea-rosed and singing boleros
to the sailors. Look, the birds don't fly here. Be careful
or you will get lost. Be careful also not to give anyone clear directions
here or you will have to share your doughnuts with them.
Oh the glazed, coconut-covered rings, just sun-warm now!

Maybe the strangers who stumble upon this place by accident
late in the afternoon will offer to share their wine with you
and you can dump your heavy tears out into the sea
(you've been holding them so close for so long)
and now the fish are all drunk on your sad sweetnesses
and now you soar/ with the fat, white gulls/ leading the charge
on the bloated dictator-crabs/ dive-bombing because
this is the cycle of things/ this is you/ caught in the act
of ocean-worship. You would sing if you could
but instead you make sweet-sea tea, doughnuts out of sand
and wine from tears fermenting in the sunlight.

You would sing if you could, but instead you lie/ sweet, saving, essential lies.

Mighty Gideon

2011-02-18T12:26:00.002-05:00

1
Race the waves, race the seagulls, press the starfish
five fingers deep
with the soles of your run. Who shall stop you?
This town is just storefronts of wood and paint, here
comes the town drunk in the strongman's wheelbarrow,
they are both singing.
Surely you don't run from this?
Pick a name, my girl
pick a ship and don't waste life
time fighting the constable or the words. Run,
fight with your feet. Jump into the sea. Will it be at sea?
Will it be storms my girl? A squall or a fight with God?
Will it be a man, a duel, a plank
my darling, will you die a pirate's death?

2
In the swamp where snakes curl and heat
rises in/visible waves from the water heavy
and termite nests wrap around tree trunks, there is a boat

tied to one of the gnarled roots pushing
out, above and into the dank water. Painted
in sloppy old-fashioned letters on the side: Mighty Gideon

is somehow still afloat as the river passes low
south toward the ocean to see the sun
disappear and the lights in Port of Spain rise,

all tropical and urban as the heat pushes through
into evening. This is her boat. The girl who talks with snakes and stars,
a new pirate in an old world.

Whale Rise

2011-02-12T11:29:00.003-05:00

Dress patterns came today from France. Layers are all the rage.
You say so in your telegram, and the onion skin layers of nutrients
feed her who has made a house of your body, layers of walls
made clear in the ultrasound. Flowers are climbing up the trellis, rising
while hollyhocks sit huge and rich and blue, in white enameled ceramic
on the table in the front room of this underwater castle.

Silk rich and blue and white this year
and it is you, leaving knuckle-marks in the dough, letting it rise
with rage at having thus been pushed down, rise as though
it could extend up to kiss the feathers of birds in the branches
feasting on song and sunshine. Everything you need to know
you left below, carved in stone.
What a voice that canvas has, what a wail
comes from pulling this ship through to the other side of the world.
That sail cries like a baby at night, but never rips.
We'll be living upside-down soon, I expect.
What animal will you be then?

I shall be a whale.
The sun will come sparkling through the trees like an Earth-sized citrine,
and the ocean will reveal itself
as day/night/sky/left/right/roof/floor,
all of the ways it is possible to be surrounded,
to be loved the way a home loves the body in it.
The sea of animal kindnesses makes whales rise
on joy. Love is currents of warm silk
in cold, rough oceans. Love is a calm.
This is what I want for us:
to wake as whales
and to know it.

Girls for Gorgeous

2011-02-07T10:30:00.002-05:00

Let your hair down, goddesses, the pipes
play as we make merry in the afternoon garden, lace
up your sandals and I'll wear all the dresses in my closet
one on top of another, and crowns of white flowers. Today
we dance in the sun and tomorrow it's back to herding sheep.
The shepherdesses are all named for goddesses and flowers. Flower names
deceive, because it's their lovers who wilt when they are cast aside.
The ponies transport the shepherdesses who are girls forever. Girls
for gorgeous loves. Amaryllis, Rose, Plumeria
learn to dazzle but don't forget how to fly
lace up your hair and do not cry. June turns
cartwheels in the grass. The French for sea and death
sound so similar from the mouths of the flowers. The angels
saved the flowers in the springtime of their suicide,
begging the help of their dark winter.
Wild flowers, you are always everywhere. You use the Earth
to grow into your poems. Come Spring, let my loves
sing themselves into bloom again.

Prescription for Despair

2011-01-31T23:01:00.003-05:00

Three portraits of the same woman hang
in one dull room. In the first she is surrounded
by children. In the second she is jumping off a bridge.
In the third she is giving guns to children. How they squeeze
up next to her. How they smile. Bang bang.
Trying gets in the way, she says. Just do it.
She is your mother.
I am your gun.
A raven pecks at the snow on the side of the road.
Beside the raven a fat squirrel digs.
Rainbows circle out of wet oil
enlightening this black street on a dull day.
You're trying too hard. Long live the million-heiress.
Rainbows oil-slick out from your wet heart.
What snow would you not melt for me?

Smell of Snow

2011-01-27T14:26:00.003-05:00

Casting open the bright back windows, this is what she wants to smell:
orange blossoms, olives, cypress, bog myrtle, jasmine, garlic and mist.
Instead it's just the smell of snow. So much snow. Too much.
Who was the first in this family to figure
planting a stand of dense trees thickly
would protect the grape arbors from that specific wind?
Nothing so sweet as the smell of snow.
It is the smell of nothing. The smell of that sweet past:
a laughing, unbroken horse
and hedgehogs having a party in a cave. Then a nap.
Safe as houses. Melodeon music. Smell of hawthorne and history.
Jaunting, wagonettes, strawboaters, snow.
Mouth-organs, side-cars, thimble-riggers, snow.
Snow is what we've kept. Snow is what will continue.

Otters In Lilac Blossoms

2011-01-18T09:44:00.003-05:00

Well that's one way to enjoy a war. Follow the parade, the horse trail, the hawk-eyed and save the city. Exaggerate, say: "They call me Money." Take two more than you need. Call it change.

Change the nature of your fears. One warrior dreams gently. Dreams tell you to take the canoe because it's faster than otters. Follow the sunrise. Exaggerate your aim. Save the gun, wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge.

Save the flicker in the woods. Save the trumpet. Exaggerate the differences so you can know what the enemy looks like right away, and she will know you, sexless pioneer, as otters fall in love in the lilac blossoms. Who to follow? What maps to take? What stays here, poor dear, what brave fellow feels familiar?

Take the moon out of the sky and save the sun. Follow the follower. Change the map while one weeps water and the other weeps an exaggerated blood bath.

Exaggerating otters say the trap
takes he who walks the same trail twice.
One otter says kill, then the same otter says
save. While the scout says,
"Change trails if you don't want anyone
following you down."

Follow the otters into their homes and they'll give you exaggerated reports of powder and provisions running low. This will surely change the fervor of the reinforcements. Take the war office. Save the otters. One trap kills all.

Change nothing. Follow what gets through.
One cloud over the moon greatly exaggerates the darkness. Danger
takes belief. Save your own hand. Save your own beautiful hands.

Wrecker

2011-01-11T12:22:00.002-05:00

She hates people from India.
Why?
Because they don't kill animals.

Here there is no ocean
to reflect the sun back in scattered
handfuls over flowers and trees.
With time, all parts of the shipwreck become sand.

Shook out like chicken feed, that sunlight was.
Coastal light ducks
under the waves and sucks
ancient salt-preserved meats from shipwrecked bones.
All wrecks end in the suck.

Splash shapes cut the air and are filled with wings.
Whales taught me how to swim
(all wrecks end something)
whales taught me how
(all wrecks end)
in my dreams with the happiness that only animals can have.

Sugar and Bones

2010-12-15T11:22:00.004-05:00

(a pantoum)

I'm going to paint an angel on a kite and fly by your window at dawn.
I'll tell you it's the end of the world
and I'll turn water into bourbon to prove I know what I'm talking about.
Let's fly away on painted devils and Christmas cookies sprinkled with angel dust.

I'll tell you it's the end of the world,
and you are equal parts sinner, saint and sugar addict.
Let's fly away on painted devils and Christmas cookies sprinkled with angel dust.
Tell that to the blood,

you are equal parts sinner, saint and sugar addict.
Go see the witch. She will know what to do.
Tell that to the blood.
If you want to fly, you must first shoot that angel out of the sky, she says.

Go see the witch. She will know what to do.
Drink some bourbon first. It will steady your painted hands.
If you want to fly, you must first shoot that angel out of the sky, she says.
Let's take your measure, in sugar and bones.

Drink some bourbon first. It will steady your painted hands.
I'm going to be wanting your soul.
Let's take your measure, in sugar and bones.
Do I have your word?

I'm going to be wanting your soul.
When the end of the world comes, will you be my miracle?
Do I have your word?
Lighthouse witches make bourbon eclipses. Take the vow.

When the end of the world comes, will you be my miracle?
If angels wore bells, they wouldn't be able to catch you by surprise.
Lighthouse witches make bourbon eclipses. Take the vow,
little mouse. The end of the world is stomping up the back steps.

If angels wore bells, they wouldn't be able to catch you by surprise.
By breathing you have cheated. The moon is huge,
little mouse. The end of the world is stomping up the back steps.
By your breath, it is the end, so cotton your ears and kiss my mouth.

By breathing you have cheated. The moon is huge,
and I'll turn water into bourbon to prove I know what I'm talking about.
By your breath, it is the end, so cotton your ears and kiss my mouth.
I confess: I painted an angel on a kite and flew by your window at dawn.

Six Ships

2010-12-10T13:02:00.002-05:00

(First Ship)
Time was you could hear the skunks snoring, drunk
in the hollows, wearing my scarf for good luck, invention
was all new. Ways to make treasure, to make light and keep it, renewing
the value of the light in objects: rubies, emeralds, anything gold, pirate
teeth and dry whale bones breaking the implements of the working farm,
remember this used to be an ocean here, before the fish learned how to fly.

(Second Ship)
Hey, he's trying to make a bicycle that can fly.
It would have worked too, but he's got a screw lost, he's a drunk
pretending to think-up labor-saving devices, a man who's never had a farm
but somehow has a wife, and needs to keep her, so he must keep inventing,
oh the ideas that come from this man, this son of science and pirates!
Is anything growing in that dark heart of his that her light can renew?

(Third Ship)
Galloping consumption, eat your supper, influenza in the night, renewing
the disappointment of realizing that you will never grow up and fly
you might never grow up at all. Diseases come like angry pirates.
Once they have boarded your ship, they get blood-drunk.
What swords shall you swallow to slay them today? What medicines invented
so you may groan, old, learning the old disappointments of this old farm.

(Fourth Ship)
Sit, sew, snore. Time was you wanted to live at the lighthouse. Screw the farm
with it's promise of salvation. Make a bicycle built for two. Learn to renew
childhood dreams of going to sea. But you let go of the rope. Not an inventor,
not even in your day-dreams, not even in your night-dreams are you allowed to fly.
Someday you might be free. Maybe when you are older, when you are drunker,
grab on to the Northern Lights and fly, fly my drunken pirate.

(Fifth Ship)
Grab on to the rope, you collection plate pirate.
The church is drowning. Slip it round your neck. A new roof over at the farm
is needed, a roof and a hook to hang you on, you old drunk.
Kill you now, but the church needs a new cemetery, old one's full. Town renewal
I hear you knock. Why are you here? I can't teach you how to fly.
I'll tell you something though: the Northern Lights are my invention.

(Sixth Ship)
Pirates in rum, like it was a new invention.
Time was, nothing looked better to you than the life of a pirate.
Bicycles here are built of straw. You never went to sea. Never flew.
Learn about King Arthur's court. Learn how to make the farm
run better. Learn the Spanish word for flying machine. Begin your own renewal.
I gave you my secret. Put it in your spirit cabinet. Use the Lights to get drunk.

Shivery and the Stag

2010-12-04T13:24:00.002-05:00

With glacial intensity we have cut and carved these lives
in the middle-of-nowhere school for poets and critics, royal dreamers
we drink hot chocolate on snowy mornings from purple mugs
playing records, fucking, crowning everything with laurels and cold stones.

In the middle-of-nowhere school for poets and critics, royal dreamers
we find the right song-fit, the right mouth-feel for I love you
playing records, fucking, crowning everything with laurels and cold stones.
The royal stag darts by the thick glass of the window

he's got the right song-fit, the right hoof-feel, darling I love you
shivery, I reach for you, as
the royal stag darts by the thick glass of the window
flying out of death.

Shivery, I reach for you, as
frozen white ghosts flutter down and all our footsteps walk backwards towards us
flying out of death
all of our old loves dressed up in winter weather, come to sing carols from beyond.

Frozen white ghost flutter down and all our footsteps walk backwards towards us
we drink hot chocolate on snowy mornings from purple mugs
all of our old loves dressed up in winter weather, come to sing carols from beyond.
With glacial intensity we have cut and carved these lives.

Days of Candles

2010-11-14T16:25:00.002-05:00

Days of red ribbons painted on the wallpaper in front hall and other dizzy-beautiful
patterns. Out the window the graves in rows
each have a daisy wreath reminding you of the lace
at the throat of every lady this season, fastened with a jewel at the neck.
Days of dust in the best houses deemed respectable
because it's been in the family for years. Days of the bedtime story
that could soothe away a sickness. Days of braids,
ribbons, straw hats and baskets, hold them high as the front of a horse
slowly becomes visible, pulling a load toward the only church on the island,
one side pinks in the sunset,
as seagulls swoop their angle is measured against the spire
to predict the weather
as the horse draws closer.

Days of sewing circles and quilting bees
box socials, magic lantern shows and moonshine.
Days of sick children and a hundred different ways to say fever,
to say diarrhea, to say death.

Days of hand-made traps for every kind of animal.

Days of flowers growing everywhere and dresses of flowers
or ruffles meant to look like the foam of the ocean,
nights frothy with stars,
mornings of moons,
and daytime breaths of stardust, the pollen of goldenrod in the afternoon,
nights in wicker rockers on the front porch pretending to sew
or knit so you can hold something smooth between your fingers before bed.

Days of an intact ozone layer and wreaths of daisies on deaths.
Days of out-through-the-window-to-jump-into-a-waiting-buggy-crime.
Days of getting caught up a tree like a cat, of tangled skirts and hold on tight.
Days when the dog with night terrors gave the town bad dreams
with his horrified barking making every night longer and longer
until he was shot.

Ladies Yoga at 3

2010-11-05T11:14:00.001-04:00

The bee, the flower, the butterfly and the blue
I saw them for you/ I saw a whole field and kept what I could in my eyes.
With nothing in my hands and empty pockets,
twelve ladies are not locked down, for the next hour. Breathe colors, breathe

mountains, sky, sea that holds her breath and counts with us, and
the bee, the flower, the butterfly and the blue,
we grow trees in cold concrete rooms from nothing. We become trees and mountains,
with the nothing in my hands and the nothing of empty pockets,

we begin. Breathe. Learn this and you can do it in lockdown. Breathe
mountains, sky, sea that holds her breath and counts with us, and
a guard. He’s got a gun. And a list,
we grow trees in cold concrete rooms from nothing. We become trees and mountains,

ordinary corpses, under graves, under flowers, bees, butterflies and blue skies,
we begin. Breathe. Learn this and you can do it in lockdown. Breathe
relax into it. Breathe. Don’t be afraid. That man in the doorway is not God. He is just
a guard. He’s got a gun. And a list.

Three in Gold and Orange Tones

2010-10-24T10:15:00.002-04:00

1
I come inside out of the shower of orange leaves/ their sound is dry
and their sound is falling/ I am a bell

or the sound made by two cut rocks that still fit together
hung from strings: architecture

I am constantly hitting myself in the same place
but everytime it makes a different tone/ so I continue to swing

I am a leaf stuck to the sleeve of a sweatshirt
I am wearing the sweatshirt/ the sweatshirt is wearing the leaf

I am the sweatshirt/ the wearer of the sweatshirt
and the leaf/ I am two orange bells singing to the sun/ two halves of a broken rock

each half needing the air and the strings and the wind and the broken place
to make afternoon music in gold and orange tones

2
and their sound is falling/ I am a bell
I come inside out of the shower of orange leaves/ their sound is dry

hung from strings: architecture
or the sound made by two cut rocks that still fit together

but everytime it makes a different tone/ so I continue to swing.
I am constantly hitting myself in the same place

I am wearing the sweatshirt/ the sweatshirt is wearing the leaf
I am a leaf stuck to the sleeve of the sweatshirt

to make afternoon music in gold and orange tones.
each half needing the air and the strings and the wind and the broken place

3
I come inside out of the shower of orange leaves/ their sound is dry
or the sound made by two cut rocks that still fit together
I am constantly hitting myself in the same place
I am a leaf stuck to the sleeve of a sweatshirt
I am the sweatshirt/ the wearer of the sweatshirt
each half needing the air and the strings and the wind and the broken place

and their sound is falling/ I am a bell
hung from strings: architecture
but everytime it makes a different tone/ so I continue to swing.
I am wearing the sweatshirt/ the sweatshirt is wearing the leaf
and the leaf/ I am two orange bells singing to the sun/ two halves of a broken rock
to make afternoon music in gold and orange tones.

World of Pearls

2010-10-19T12:10:00.002-04:00

Mark Twain makes hawk eyes at me.
His moustache is exactly the size of my left hand when it is spread.
Moustaches tickle mouth to mouth
I bet Mark Twain's moustache would taste like tobacco,
his scalp would smell sorghum sweet
and his voice would have it's own gruff music.
I can tell by his steamboat captain eyes, full of electricity.
(Twain and Einstein often get confused
these days, because they had the same hair.)
Electricity tastes like burning.

All day at work, she's chattering like a retarded bird:
He said I was pretty
He said I was pretty
He said I was pretty
(Well let me tell you something honey, if you don't know that you are pretty, you got something more wrong with you than throwing up in the alleyway leaning sway-backed out that door off the back room. YOU'RE PRETTY. USE THE FUCKING BATHROOM.)

His moustache is twice the size of my left hand when it is spread.
Sorghum is a grass that can be made into a syrup,
it is an angiosperm like magnolia and crab apple.

Walt Whitman slept over last night, she says
and after sex he began to weep. He said, I'm not crying
my eyes are coming.
Because she has dyslexia, she reads the word "scared" as "sacred"
dyslexia and a Catholic past
before Walt Whitman
the only one watching was God
he was watching all the time and he liked it when she
stuck her fingers down her throat.

I love you anyway, world of Mark Twain and car accidents
world of Whitman's poems, world of pearls and shells and wood beads and music.
Like the sound of the ocean at night, my love is all there is
to hear and the sound makes it possible to see
whatever you want/ in the sparkle of stars on waves/ I love you anyway.
My heart is blue and green, Earth-like in my chest/ there is room
for all of my mistakes, there is room
for your mistakes too.

Fall Fashion Preview at the Country Club

2010-09-28T23:44:00.003-04:00

First we stand in line with our wine tickets, waiting
with the stay-at-homes, all talking to each other about the same shit:
she looks good/ she looks fat
her kid has a newly-invented disorder.
Who are you wearing?/ Who are you? One glass of white wine
each/ "This isn't Chippendales, ladies,"
says the MC/ then she says, "These women don't get out much boys.
Welcome to the cougar den." They howl. You howl. Three hundred women and three men.
They fill up your eyes with their lipsticked mouths howling.
The sort of mouths that leave stains on coffee cups and wine glasses.
"Slip that wedding ring in your pocket," the MC urges.
The smell of cigarette smoke from outside drifts in and it smells like burnt toast.
You imagine driving through a blinking field of windmills at night.
Robots perform surgeries now
and there is still so much future left. You really want to hold on
to your cultural heritage. Your pain is dumb.
Their pain won't stop screaming. The problem with windmills
is that they make you stop wanting other things.
Once they've filled up your eyes with their night-blinking-rows
you don't want sex or power or money or sugar.
The things you used to want make you sneeze blood.
You imagine driving through a blinking field of windmills at night.

A Wedding Dress For The Moon

2010-09-16T17:09:00.002-04:00

As oaks we are not sightless
though we haven't got any eyes.

We are trees at night.
We are rows of night-oaks.

Night-oaks and storybook arts,
how would I ever grow without you, my love, you are princely roots

you are the Earth-diver, negotiating the soil
you are the air-bringer, oxygenating our two night-hearts

breathing and making breathable air
while the owls beat us with their old wings,

these two stalwart hearts know
the clouds are making a wedding dress for the moon.

Birds in Sunset

2010-09-14T11:16:00.003-04:00

1
The velocity of take-off corrects my posture (upright of enemies, mine and thine)as she forwards fast and withdraws her feet. I trust female birds more. They build the nests and they lay the eggs and they get the worms. What do male birds even do? Are they the singers? The horizon line glows whitely like a break between chapters.

Chapter One: Earth
Each stick weakens her beak.
Earth is all spangled green and day-lit ocean.

Chapter Two: Sky
Everyone gets a free copy.
Every egg pushes into her back.

The eggs can't do anything. Male birds take the eggs and make bargains with snakes. I don't want to make anything. I don't want to make anything like that.

2
Clear air/ sunsetted rim/ squid-ink clouds
bruises of cotton and smoke/ laterally drifting...

The nun
(one row up)
black hair/ white hat
(called a habit)
holy bird

shrugs a white cardigan of clouds over her brown shoulders
(her white cane is scuffed silvery at the bottom)
we are flying into the sunset togehter
(even though I have not yet figured out what kind of)
bird I am.

Boost Pump In White Weather

2010-09-01T14:51:00.003-04:00

Eight metal soldiers bind

the boost pump to the wing

the oval striated with black silver

as the lightning cuts straight down through the sky

close enough to flash the wing. There was a prairie dog

running down the grassy strip beside the plane

and as the plane sped up, she sped up

but then we took off and the prairie dog stayed.

Maybe she kept running, maybe she wished for a boost pump (whatever that is)

could she even imagine this white desert of lightning up here?

The storm and the way we are sharking through it. Above the storm there is the whitest desert

where some clouds float solo and others stick together, huddling, trying to make grey

in that sandy-silty-soup of white. Beyond there is a bright blue

and there is a vague green beneath us now, no longer a storm but land

with glittery shakes that might be lakes or perhaps huge warehouse rooftops or maybe whole cities.

We fly into a cloud mountain/ we pass plains and plateaus

A white wind shakes us/ and then we are lowered

announcements, preparations and precautions are necessary as we descend.

The plane lands, letting the speed be felt for one moment before hitting the breaks,

and out the window is the same rust-colored prairie dog

still running beside the landing strip like she’s been waiting for us

and we roar along beside her, and when we stop, she keeps going.

Before Neon

2010-08-26T08:39:00.000-04:00

1
Many moving Marilyn Monroes/ in dresses that shine like plastic shines
and Charlie Chaplin looking back/ out the corners of his clown eyes
holding the hand of a little boy who looks like him
and Alfred Hitchcock is saying no
to the MGM lion/ drugged and roaring.
Dancers danced like Fred and Ginger,
and all the girls were pretty/ and all the boys were virgins
and the phone was ringing, darling
--yes? hello?--
and there was dancing on the other end./ In the time before neon was invented
and everything was safe/ dancing and singing:/ I love you./ Goodnight.
That lion was so stoned./ Black and white and gelatin print.
Get married, have kids/ set up your life and wait for the disaster. Pray
to Myrna, Pola, Jean, Katherine, Norma, Bette, Ingrid, Hetty, Lana, Carole, Greta, Betty, Lucy, Mary, Elizabeth, and Grace. Pray for the sort of disaster that happened in the days before there was neon to blame.
Marry someone plain, the movie stars say.
Spend time making distinctions between women and men,
between sex and that which is not sex.
The phone is ringing. Is it Marlon or Rock?
Is it Charlton, Humphrey, Clark, Gary, Spencer, James or Jimmy?
New dances are being invented every day.

2
The boys are down here fishing again/ casting into the blue and green murk
dreaming of fish as big as turtles as they say things that only Hollywood boys could say:
“If I catch a big one, do you think Ma will cook it up for dinner?”
“Of course she will,” the older boy is surer than sure.
I remember that certainty, that complete trust in the world
like I could will good things to happen. Too many times I tried
and got bored. Boredom will burn off childhood certainty like ice melting into water
and evaporating into the air. Then it’s unclear whether or not there was ever ice in the glass to begin with.
Watch these boys, they’re not even using real bait,
then the big one pushes the little one into the water
and their socks fill up with muck
and the phone is ringing when they get home
but Mom isn’t there.

3
(Hello?)
They’re constantly on the grounds, like everything needs to be picked at and trimmed
new additions made and old, dead things taken away
nothing has time to ferment and rot and smell. It’s like living on the set
of a movie, you have to ignore the people moving the furniture
and the tour groups passing through and the guy in the corner flash-flashing
so he can take home a picture of the whole scene. Everything is easy here,
you can bite right through it
and there are no backbones for your teeth to get stuck in
no backbones and no rainy days.

(No, she’s not here.)
There’s a poet, sitting on the stump of a tree. Two blonde girls jog past the poet,
respectfully silent and a slender woman pulls her leg up behind her as she practices yoga beside the pond.
(I don’t know where she is.)
You pay by the pound for this sort of perfection.
(Yes, I’ll tell her.)

Clark! Spencer! Come back! Come back! Fast
come back to the pond. I just saw a big fish jump out of the water.
Catch the fish and you will get three wishes.
There’s only one thing you’re not allowed to wish for.

4
Danger/ (says the sign)
the pond is closed/ (another drowning)
the flowers bloom wildly/ (unable to control their grief,
or maybe it’s just the way summer shines on them,
it seems impossible now to remember any other summer.)

“Hello?” the little boy says/ holding a sheaf of goldenrod to the side of his soft face
like a telephone receiver. “Hello? Who’s there? Ma?”
The bees buzz back and the pollen makes him sneeze and that will have to be enough
because the flower with the big white face has nothing to say either
and he’s already begun to re-imagine his mother as Marilyn Monroe.

Four Sparks of Water

2010-08-16T11:10:00.001-04:00

The Parthenon is sliding away,
catch it! Catch it!
I could swim to it if gravity would let me, and
the igloo is drowning in grey.

The white gnomes lay still in their white foam coffin.
Today is a gorgeous day on the shores of heaven,

trapped lightning barks in the angry grey conglomerations of hell.
Morning and night are the same, let’s settle on noon.
A noon that has nothing to do with clocks, just sun

just white lungs rubbing in pinks and blues over turkey tracks in the snow
white veins of invisible minerals and four sparks of water

filmy layers of white
chopped white

breasts, neck, head, arms outstretched, she’s got her back
to all the major cities.Sunshine filters through grey and blue
braids of dough
leaves of sky
grass of God.

An orange mouth and a Golden Gate bridge and a flutter of cotton
passing through the sun. A spindle in a galaxy of cotton spinning threads of rain
that streak the windows forwards to backwards.
We are going forwards but I can’t feel it
leaving a trail that I will never be able to see.

One day it rained houses and highways
(little rectangles in white and black and silver)
stadiums and parkinglots spontaneous
--couldn’t it all have been a dream--
one day it rained an orange math
and cotton for one thousand years.

Stay

2010-07-21T13:06:00.001-04:00

When roads are too thin to be anything but letters,
and now that you’ve seen them that way, they will never stop being ciphers
when clouds pass too quickly and you’re going too quickly too
here you are, in the ear popping raw honey of sunshine
clouds clump together in the first level of the aerial landscape
this will be the coral, the formations that make up the sea floor
and here’s a sudden break presenting the cuneiform of highways again
and then that gets swept away too, with the myths, there are no angels here
just clouds like white trees and clouds like white bread molds
in the clouds you never forget what you were trying to say
the center of your body is full of meaning, each small breath another infinity and each swallow
makes the roar louder in your pops.

The propellers of your lovely mechanical bird
beat through the round clouds leaving them long and smooth like raked beach sand
blank sky sprees of no clouds yawn at you
sun spaces
clouds speckle the metal of the wing
here you are, at the tip of the Giant’s beanstalk
while smaller planes speed by below you, descending into unknowable Arkansas
through see-through clouds and clouds of white styrofoam and opaque mushrooms pushing each other whitely over the edge of logs in dark forests
fungus on fungus/ snow white on bone white/ blue white on winter white
on pale silver and dove grey (the color of the breath of the sky)
shot through with spokes of filmy sun
shot through with cerulean.

All the down-there things still exist
all the things that twist your tongue and vague your mornings
up here you are all meaning, all visceral reaction, altitude-intoxicated
you are all tree-trunk/ xylem and phloem
everything you think and want and are, they coalesce, they turn strong
your blood is sugar-sap you want to use words like “port” and “starboard”
as the reflection from a river like the fat in a strip of bacon glistens up
that’s not bacon, it’s the Mississippi River, as a loose snow of clouds pass
and then clouds shaped like the brain hemispheres
if they could join, a great white whale might take shape around them,and make a tail,
fins and a blowhole altogether worthy of worship (and you would believe)
lamb clouds with streaks of white and blue all the way through them
your fear of death up here is making you taste all your feelings
and fear is hot bacon.

You wish to see the whole glorious shape of Texas but already the plane is dropping
through the film and froth of the sky
the ground is grey-green and grey-brown
microchip towns send out tentacle highways
the mechanical bird tips her tail down
rivers are making ribbon-dance passes
the sun is pointed at your chest
this cloud is whipped cream and has claws
HERE IS THE TAIL! HERE IS THE TAIL!
If only the white whale could reach it and assemble!
Find this tail through the thick feathers and the spume and the dollops
the inside of a shell pink and pearl essences
the dashes and waves of a white sea
and a rainbow straight from the sun.
The sun is the eye of the white whale that is always with us.
Up here it is no longer America.
Let’s make a new country.
Let’s write a Magna Carta.
Let’s formally declare our intentions to stay.

I like it

2010-07-13T15:11:00.002-04:00

I like it.
You like it?

I think it's strange, yeah.
You think it's strange?

Um-hmmm...
Well, do you like it or do you think it's strange?

I told you, I like it. Rena, I think all of your poems are strange.

Poem at the Uptown Cafe

2010-06-30T23:48:00.002-04:00

Sit with me next to the most beautiful limestone vagina,
she says, "I'm still there" but she's not here. Three beautiful blueberry
corncakes for the pretty little lady. (It hurts less when they are actually beautiful.)

"An ass like two apples in a sack," says the man in the booth behind me.
It's not that I don't understand,
milk, eggs, butter, cream and babies come from ladies.
Setting the vagina on fire, I realize it is plastic and it smells bad.

Broken beasts dance to the jump-edge of rooftops in every city in the world.
The perfect always think they are god-birds
on pretty plastic feet they jump,
vaginas burning and corncakes so sweet.

The best part of the naked girl
projected behind the band on the screen at the concert
was when she hit the cymbal in time with the music and Wayne hit the symbol too
as if to say, "It's not that I don't understand," but

and the man behind me says, "Her idea of the out-of-doors
is going to Bloomingdales." And the man sitting across from him says,
"Oh, okay, walking the streets." I am confused by their exchange.
I want to tell them that Wayne is the naked woman.

First her necklace (projected twenty times as large)
said Brooklyn in cursive gold and then at the end of the concert
(after she gave birth to the band on her back and had a child's birthday party for them)
the necklace spelled out B-R-O-K-E-N.

We're all her, that's what Wayne is saying. And Wayne says stop the war.
Someone on their cell phone says in that silly one-way talk:
Children are expensive./ Living hand to mouth./ I didn't say that./ I didn't even imply it.
The Norse word for great-grandmother also means: story of how the world began.

The Sea Wolves

2010-06-22T22:56:00.000-04:00

Part One: Ask the Cowboy

When you die and your body is put in a coffin, you turn into water and then one day someone is digging out the earth for a grave next to yours and their backhoe scratches your coffin and all your deadbodywater pours out into the new hole and somebody's got to pump that out of there, so they can have a nice-smelling funeral and put the new body in next door. (Howdy neighbor. Sorry about the mess.)

I bet if I read the Bible, it would be just like watching Caddyshack and realizing all the comedies I had grown up watching were based on and borrowed moments from a much older story.

Even the Sargasso Sea won't be there forever. It's not there now. When was the last time you saw it?

A nice-smelling funeral is a lie.

The cowboy works here. He knows everything about the house. He knows the family and the history and everything. Ask the cowboy. Go ahead, ask him. See what he says.

Part Two: The Sea Wolves

Feet in sneakers are washing up on the shore/ he said/ at the wedding
(magic) mushrooms can fix the oil spill/ he said
(I know the answer) don't bother me
about nerve gas, mushrooms can fix that too.
He said disco vs. rock and roll (made me famous)
and now that battle is faught at sea.

The dolphins fight the sea wolves/ the bear growly teeth and tag-team
all the way through the foodchain: dolphins, sharks, whales
and when the females are in estrus (his word)
they lure the domestic dogs into the sea, they go willingly
but not the deer, no/ once he saw a doe fall/ into the ocean
and a dolphin flipped her out/ with his snout.

That's when he realized they're all answers
I mean, he didn't even need a question.
The answer is:
disco dolphinss
and the answer is:
feet in sneakers (the sea wolves ate the rest)
and the final answer is dancing on the teeth of all the lesser answers
(don't call them 'shrooms) psilocybin.

Part Three: What is grace?

What is grace? The child asked her mother and her mother said, grace is being able to walk in a pair of high heels for a really long time without falling over. Then the child touched a dress and the mother said Hands Off.

Amazing grace.

(It seems shocking to the New Yorkers I know that anyone would want to live anywhere else. There is ample evidence that people do it, but still, it seems the rest of America is more or less a leper colony and the citizenry are living like lepers without the grace of a diagnosable disease.)

I thought it was raining but really the incessant tap-taps on the glass were hard bugs, flying toward the light I read by. Bugs carry disease, so we must be sure to keep the fear of them alive. Make it a ladylike quality, make it a condition of grace; small feet and certain, specific fears.

If you think people on the beach with you don't know the word for shark, put your hands together like you're praying and put the praying hands on top of your head. Hunch over a bit and run around in graceful circles, like you're swimming. If you want to be understood as a sea wolf, the gesture is almost exactly the same, but you must also make a distinct howl: ow ow ow-oooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Stripes

2010-05-29T11:44:00.000-04:00

My millions buzzed every sidewalk
berries splattered and bloomed with every step
I started to write a poem in my head about it
(sneakered sidewalk paintings, dark and geometric)

berry stains make racing stripes up to my thighs
when I run/ with my hands out/ catching
bees/ bees take me into the air/ my legs work back and forth

higher and higher/ I will turn into a million tiny wings
and when you touch my body
your fingers will flutter, my millions
of geometric air spaces will run with so much sunshine.

No Wolf In The World

2010-05-19T18:20:00.000-04:00

It looks just like a drumstick
he is crunching up my sinew and my saltlick skin.
The wolf has me in a tree/ he bit my thumb off my hand
looks just like it came off a chicken/ in his mouth the color of berries bleeding.

Now the next dream comes/ it is a wolf spider this time.
Have you ever seen a wolf spider? It's the size of a motherfucking starfish.
The tree I'm in is filled with them and my hair is spider hair,
I can almost speak their language

and then my heart explodes. I wake up and I lock the door/ load the shotgun
with my exploded heart (my fucking heart exploded)
though certain spiders can pick locks with their hot, hairy legs
ain't no wolf in the world/ gonna come in here and eat my remaining thumb.

Burning Out the Ground Bees

2010-05-02T12:14:00.001-04:00

Tonight we're having a good bourbon pie and we need rain
because the ground bees are back/ they make little black tornadoes
and fill in the abandoned mole holes with their aggressive bullshit.

Birds ate the sunflowers behind my house while the neighbor burned her ground bees out
three lines of flame shot through her lawn
and all the wet little green leaves of grass put the fire out. That lucky bitch.

If this pie sets, victory is mine/ if it sets and the ants don't get to it first.
Dear God, why are these ants all up in my shit?
I'll flame out the bees myself tomorrow but if you see

small fireballs chasing me around the yard
while the neighbors sit on their porch and drink and laugh
would you please use the hose to contain the fire?

Ants eat everything that would be a door. There is no word for door
in their featherweight language. A hundred words for food,
shit and tunnels. I read that book a long time ago/ I've had a few concussions since then.

A wave of ants/ a motherfucking typhoon. A tornado of bees
dark and sharp/ with no interest in honey or blossoms. Today
it's all about empire. Spiders know the crush of my hands. Thor

tolerant of their hungry weaving/ enjoying the music of the web-catch,
lovely until the invaders are too numerous and I sweep them out of Valhalla.
These days the cows on the hill say beef instead of moo

they will know the crush of my hands too/ on the day the bees learn about fire
the wooden chairs will realize their legs and they will flee the kitchen
clattering the floor like stiff little horses who don't yet know how to neigh.

It's already too late to pray for rain (wish I knew how to dance for it)
too late for the pie to set (a waste of good bourbon, sugar, cream cheese and eggs)
the Derby is this weekend and all those fancy horses will run like lines of flame.

Every Kiss Was A Bridge (There Is No Such Thing As Death)

2010-04-21T16:31:00.001-04:00

1
The river wants to be seen shimmering.
(Do you really think that everything can just die?)

Twisty thick arms and all
(encourage the river to grow)

lacks allow a river to feel needed
(do you really think anything can just die?)

Through the must, making bridges
(I swam it backwards)

three broken trees I kissed through the forest
(when I thought the river was dead)

every kiss was a bridge
(there is no such thing as death).

2
Do you really think that everything can just die?
(The river wants to be seen shimmering.)

Encourage the river to grow
(twisty thick arms and all)

do you really think anything can just die?
(Lacks allow a river to feel needed)

I swam it backwards
(through the must, making bridges)

when I thought the river was dead
(three broken trees I kissed through the forest)

there is no such thing as death
(every kiss was a bridge).

3
The river wants to be seen shimmering
twisty thick arms and all,
lacks allow a river to feel needed
through the must, making bridges
three broken trees I kissed through the forest
every kiss was a bridge.

Do you really think everything can just die?
Encourage the river to grow.
Do you really think anything can just die?
I swam it backwards,
when I thought the river was dead.
There is no such thing as death.

Blend of Morning Bells and Bliss

2010-04-08T12:09:00.000-04:00

Lessons from the Midwest

2010-03-19T22:59:00.001-04:00

The lake water thickens you.
(You will emerge red and itch pesticides and pests.)

It will become necessary to practice restrictions.
(Once these start they are impossible to stop.)

So far from the ocean you may begin to believe in tropical sorcery.
(Religious guys have the worst facial hair
so you can spot them and avoid them.)

I saw a seagull flying over the Great Plains.
She must have fallen asleep on the train from Pasedena
and woke up feeling sick. Now she's flying circles like a lasso.

(I will lasso you with my shirt
pull you in by the teeth.)

If you've ever wanted to be a whale, you will understand what happens next:
armed with the ocean, I call the gull home.

Saintly Rednecks With Hand Grenades

2010-03-09T12:06:00.000-05:00

Paper bags stuffed with cash in the fridge.
Almost two grand/ the beginning of the end.

It's the final countdown (da-da da da)
and everybody's couting down differently.

Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside
of the fields, wintercut

and scalloped by snowy ridges/ hills like little bombs
lines of trees/ one old silo and one old barn/ to so many cold little homes.

Everybody's at the basketball game (they all used to play horse without me
in the used-up coal lot over there/ I was glad when they tore

that shitty hoop down/ the other kids still play in the raw cokes)
and Ma's in the shower by herself/ glad to have the trailer whole

so she can swallow it with a song she's been holding all wrong since 1994:
What's the frequency Kenneth be-show, things have changed, uh-huh...

I am playing a game I invented myself with old hand grenades,
feeling like the father of basketball with his peach baskets nailed to the wall.

I'm doing lift the pin/ pull the spoon and swoosh! I'm a holding and throwing
those hissing old pineapples

and then the explosions/ send trailers into the sky
over the endless fields scalloped by snowy ridges like the lace around the face of an owl.
If you lived here you'd be dead by now.

Café Date

2010-02-15T18:22:00.000-05:00

Smelling pipe tobacco smoke brown in your hair,
pulling close to you in the café
rubbing the sleeve of your sweater, dark blue
with brilliant white checks
up and down your arms and chest,
each check a white bird.
Here’s a pull, by your wrist,
two birds so close/ lovers,
pulled like you and I/ flying.

On Earth as it is in Heaven

2010-02-11T17:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the theater
everything you are about to hear is blasphemy
we aim for a political renaissance of confusion
the miracle will be the conclusion
in the glittering god/gold-faced future it will occur
it shall be of a daring conceptual texture and worthy of worship.

Welcome to the theater. Let us all agree on how much to worship,
from the start, we must all be believers, such that the theater
will overcome it’s theatricality and become real. The occurrence
of a jig at the end of the play will finish us off, swelling with blasphemous
miracles. If the future is boundless, acknowledged miracles would conclude
all of life’s lovely boundless-nesses, so bring on the confusion.

What happens in confusion?
Work through the compelling production of worship
and the development of a Babylonical conclusion,
work your way to this, and when you leave the theater
tonight, remember: when everything’s all in order, it’s blasphemy.
The players are shocked when expressions of pleasure occur,

the play is given to the audience as food. Then the hunger occurs,
and begins the explicit battle between actor and audience, confused,
the front rows wonder; is leaping from your seat to avoid being hit blasphemy?
Is physical pain always wrapped up in the drama of worship?
What are the protocols and conventions of this theater?
Here questions are the best conclusions.

Intuitively, the survivors are transvestites, concluding
nothing/ carnival or marketplace/ loving what occurrences
belong to the voices and to the mixings of the theater.
Everyone lines up to pay for the privilege of this confusion:
this blaspheming of worship,
or rather, this worship of blasphemy.

Is gilding the face of the actor who plays god blasphemy?
Can we at least come to that conclusion?
This is a communal act of cognition. Gold will shine and will we will worship.
God really does have a gold face. Gold occurs
in heaven. We are certain. The man behind the mask begins the confusion,
and it multiplies /as we make moonshine and we make and laws/ of this theater:

1. All theater is blasphemous.
2. All conclusions disfigure the confusion.
3. Miracles occur, we worship.

Sun on Snow

2010-01-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

First the Fan

2010-01-03T12:08:00.000-05:00

First the fan of baseball fields, then the blotchy geometries of farms in winter,
then the clouds the clouds and only the clouds, this one so thick
it’s all there is to see/ the cloud and the wing
with it’s blue triangle fin spearing out at the sky/ bearing us somehow home
to the urban mist of New York in winter.

You will go to Maine and I will wake up Christmas morning alone/ until
we meet halfway/ in the in-between
where the Connecticut River splits Vermont from New Hampshire.
This is a small plane and I can’t tell if we’re still over Indiana
or maybe Cleveland/ the captain makes an announcement and we squint
through endless space of sky and clouds and pretend
to make something out. Cleveland—a city we drive though sometimes—
Buffalo, the captain says now, Buffalo. Thirty-five to forty minutes from JFK.
We found a little bit of smooth air

it may get a little bit rougher, he says. Earlier he used the phrase bumpy air.
You point me to a footnote in your book. Representation’s a good word
too, you say. We are too close to each other to write poetry and read theory
Sprung, the footnote says
means uprising, in German
right? Rising up through the cracks/ I like the cracks/ I say.
Then I point down to Buffalo

where there’s snow so white we can see it shining up through the clouds
in oblong seeming-hallucinations. Snow. You say. // Sprung.// Snow in the cracks.
Snow in the rising.

Dreaming of a white Christmas./ Glad we are not going to cold
Buffalo—another city we’ve driven through, but it never stopped us.
The stewardess is old, too old for this job. Her face is funny—
too puffy and too saggy at the same time. I want to hold her
in my arms and make her young again. Young and traveling
everywhere—boasting to her friends about how much fun her job is. Now
she looks like some sort of counter-advertisement
proclaiming the unhealthy effects of too much air travel. Now someone’s kid

screams. Someone always brings a screaming kid. But it’s okay
because now we’re out of that cloud and I can see the snowy terrain
clearly. It’s no longer Buffalo. Now it’s something mountainous and curving.
White and black and gray/ and straight lines that are roads
and white lines of cut-down trees
through the mountains so people can ski in lines.

The mountains look like curvy ladies laying down beside each other
Lay lady lay, I can imagine Bob Dylan singing to them
and they sigh and roll over and re-arrange themselves when no one is looking.
And the wing seems proud now, glinting sun like the arm of a ringmaster
covered in rhinestones: behold! Behold! This land is your land
layered and perfect/ rivers and roads and farms and fans
things start to come into familiar focus again
and I remember how excited I was as a child
to get in the plane and press my face to the window/ when I believed
that the outlines of the farms were the outlines of the states
and I could see so much America

that’s how high I thought we were—that the divisions were finally revealing themselves.
There was no such thing as representation
just lines that marked out states/ clear as day on the land
I can still understand my reasoning—from here, now, a frozen lake
looks like Arkansas. I also understood clouds differently
as a child I thought we flew through chimney smoke
and only god could be up in the heaven clouds.

Faintly, I can see houses again, rows of roofs
so close and small/ I could scrape them from the window
and paste a few like microchips on my fingernails.
Soon I’ll be able to pick things out again
I think I can see the Connecticut River now
with it’s body so like a snake/ it slides up and down/ all the way under
us and out to the horizon rainbow/ where there are recognizable landscapes.
Long Island herself—a careful fish
with the city in her eye/ looking at that river, that snake
that wants to bite her head off/ but can’t seem to fit it’s mouth around
the tall buildings and all of the trains. Wake up
the city is spellbound, I tell you
look at the pollution/ like some sort of brown power
the city collects around herself. We’re here. Circling over water
so low the birds
chatter at us/ they watch and fly
as we swirl and we touch down.

Okay Goodbye

2009-12-06T16:31:00.000-05:00

She’s a hat hound
Did you know
Wallmart is the biggest

The hat hound looked guilty
The county sheriff pulled into thirty minute parking
Can meter maids give cops parking tickets

When I die will I still think about death
Will I be aware of it/ when the people I love die
Hello says the older Russian

Lady looking into her cell phone speaking loudly
Hello okay two things
I’ll need two drinks when I get home

And Maury died
Okay yes
Did you hear me about the second thing

Juvenilia

2009-11-28T11:39:00.000-05:00

-James E. Dobson
from, http://dbic.dartmouth.edu/~jed/dh/searchlight-graph.pl?text=moby10b.txt&search=drought

You came to the desert intending to starve XXXXXXX so starve
-Kazim Ali, from “Gallery"

Goiters are decadent, you said at that sidewalk
cafe/ as we watched the overweight middle-of-the day Long Island
(housewives and otherwise unemployed) populace strut and stumble.
Absent afternoons/ you made the proclamations/ I held
the video camera (unsteady)/ you with your gourmand starvation,
me with my chubby thighs. I loved you H-----, I still
have that tape/ you were in the front seat of your father’s car
I was in the back/ he left the car running/ when he went into the liquor store
and you turned around and lip-synched with the radio:
I’ll be your dream/ I’ll be your wish/ I’ll be your fantasy...
We were practicing for some tremendous life. We were both/ the cosmonauts
and the stars. New York was ours/ stomach and appetite/ and all the black holes
and boiling points/ in the K-mart bathroom on Astor Place
where the decadent lack /paid off in pleasure and the famine changed
in the fever and chaos of heaven/ now relish your juvenile drought:
you came to the dynamo/ compelled to be a genius/ so be a fucking genius.

You Can Get Anything You Want At Alice’s Restaurant

2009-11-02T22:20:00.000-05:00

The hell cat was there/ and the log lady/ Colonel Sanders and the Pope,
a prostitute/ a friendly cat/ the genius and the swine flu/ all eating my pot brownies
like the ones we made in Queens years ago for Abuela’s arthritis
and then we thought we’d just eat one/ see if they work/ hours later we were slack-jawed
everything gone/ at the kitchen table/ a candle was lit/ a pizza
was delivered—thank you Uncle Peter—and the brownies
never took/ the road to Abuela’s mouth.

How could we attempt the subway?
We would have been laughed off the bus.

Theory of Sugar

2009-10-29T19:54:00.000-04:00

Salt gave you a canine thirst/ love is a feline sugar-hunger.
Paw, sniff and wait/ for love to wrap you in a jacket

then you will know the right way to struggle/ what to wear
so your outfit will say it for you. Say it lumberjack loud/ in red plaid.
Frye boots. Tank top. Say it with a drunk face
full of Momma’s vodka/ singing wild, wild horses/ couldn’t drag me away...
What kind of shit is that? Ladybugs distract you to wandering
while your boyfriend’s father beats him with a belt buckle
and later you will kiss /his welts

get higher/ and drunker/ go down/.../ and as the car slides back and forth
like Momma’s face shaking a “no”/
on the black ice of the main drag/ such a fucking shit town/ didn’t even salt the road.
No. No. Nothing, nothing./ Sweets or salts./ You eat nothing
to prove that you are nothing. You tell him salt
is just another kind of sugar
and sugar/ is just another kind of cocaine.

(But that’s not what you mean.)

The accident tastes like bloodsalt and grit. You can’t spit any of it out.

A deep peace/ be with you./ A deep peace
I stole from a taproot
to rub on your wings.

Lost Bear

2009-10-26T23:21:00.001-04:00

Sometimes everything stops.
Sometimes fish skeletons cross
to indicate danger/ on your underwear.

Tell me about that dream
island we live on/ wherever we are./ I don’t care about the name of the ocean
just tell me the address. Without it I might drown.

Instead of television I watch salmon
jump up the ladders
to swim through the dam

/some get chopped/

and some are saved by their velocity/ saved for the mouths of bears
low in the dark forests behind the superstores
where the buzzing electric signs attract away

the bugs that might otherwise get stuck in their fur.
Small reasons to be grateful/ always small/ always grateful,
and somewhere in this country a bear is loosing the scent of her home

and dies on the highway/ that world of nightmares.
You are not her/you have
such a family/ such a home.

Where Bones Go

2009-10-15T20:46:00.000-04:00

Morning hurts my eyes/ it's like trying to look through a one-way
mirror of new maples and old moons/ it's a drag getting old/ less meat
and it's getting harder to pull the teeth/ out of all the bad mornings. So I sit
in the public park and smoke myself invisible/ while the flowers push
out round/ coffeehouse cabbages/ cauliflower cream and gold,
pumpkin orange and crimson/ I can hear their roots hitting small drums underground.

Bones turn into roots underground but aboveground things turn into bones.
The spokes on bicycle wheels are almost already bones. The leaves on these big trees too.
I pluck a shovel-shaped bone and dig/ displacing colonies of insects/ killing their heros,
I killed my own hero once/ I bury him again/ clump by clump. Then I rebuild/ plant
I see the clouds with smoke and pray for a painted rain

to coat the velvet of bumblebees. I keep chanting the word miracle/ until the swam
hums out of my sleepless/ horrors into daylight/ in all the colors of rain
and I have to choose/ public library/ museum or a hundred thousand stings.

2
They teach weaving techniques with clippings of pubic hair
held by baskets in circles and baskets in bells. Tunics of porcupine quills,
shirts of pain/ in grassfields where they mutilate women.

Pottery/ ancient and modern./ One gourd
is shaped like a penis with a handle.

Raffia/ pigment/ pattern/ I will paint
a leaf/ somehow/ on my ear/ and carve geckos into the side of my belly
then triangles for balance/ elephants for luck.

I need a direct pull/ wood-brushed dung, grass and the strip.
I will never be a gown. A showpiece waiting

on the wind to dance through my tortures of lace.
I am a container or jar. Filled with palm wine or indigo.
Studded, painted, covered and whole.
Mouth, breasts, belly and vagina.

This is how you make tye-dye:
the dye does not penetrate the fabric that has been bound.
Think about it.

Each individual pain has it's very own nest.
Plush velvet women are breastfeeding caterpillars/ black and tan
cheetah and bumblebee/ chessboards of pain/ black and white,
big-bottomed and serpentine-necked.

3
Whole acres full of fire/ calling for China's weight in rain
represented by a crimson-glazed bamboo clock.
If someone wants your things for free he is not your friend
and he is maybe Castro. Enough with the communists already! Remember:
there is enough happiness in the world for everyone.
Look at all the different Buddhas: fat Buddha/ skinny Buddha. Both Buddha.

Ganesh the elephant is here and the one with all the arms
here the turtles are all stacked on each others backs and biting/ lucky coins.
Singing bowls and prayer flags/ big pots and tiny bells for sacred toes,
thumb pianos for gypsy music and finger cymbals/ shocks of bells
to tie around ankles for stomping/ Native flutes/ walking sticks with carved faces.

The homeless lady starts singing in the lobby/ the sacred
objects do their various dances/ the elephant mama, for example,
has a carved-out back/ see the baby stone elephant inside
as they raise their trunks together/ rocks split open/ the shimmer comes on
in purple pokes and old fire. Vending machines
feed the homeless who wake up outside, wanting a breakfast of Skittles.
Pretzels if they are being healthy and Doritos if they are depressed. Never bottled water.
Much better to have something that gets stuck in the back teeth
for licking later/ especially rainy today/ if the singer gets us all kicked out.

Homeless are not allowed to sing/ in the spaces of the public. Library and museum.
Railway platform and truck stop. Remember:
poor people always die first in a flood.
But the opposite is worse: acres of grassfield fire
where there are no vending machines/ no rain.
Here we are just bones with no where to go.

Girl from Guantánamo

2009-09-30T14:54:00.000-04:00

American abuses ruined the name/ of the most Cuban song you know.
You love it anyway. You played it at the wedding
for Abuela. You want to learn to play the cello.

At the wedding there was a cellist, dancing./ You can't afford a cello
so you painted one/ life-sized on canvas/ this will keep you faithful
to the idea of getting a cello someday/ learning how it likes to make sound.

Right now it is enough
to look at the cello painting
and listen to Yo Yo Ma.

It is enough
to listen to Celia Cruz
and smile Abuela's smile.

It is like having a cello.
It is like having a Cuba.

Hopefully a bacteria

2009-09-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

I say I don't want any soup/ he says, egg drop
and gives me a steaming bowl of yellow and float/ eggs cook in broth like this.
My lips still taste like toothpaste/ it's good I left the house. This egg
was going to be a chicken/ I was going to be a painter.

Painters cook like this:
wines by the glass.
Poets cook like this:
wines by the bottle.

White Zinfandel/ Pinot Grigio/ Chardonay
Merlot/ Cabernet Sauvignon/ yolk-thick and yellow,
when I'm dead offer me oranges and incense, offer me egg yolks and pony hair,
says the man sitting behind me.

I am the only one in the restaurant. There is no man sitting behind me.
There is no one singing in the kitchen. No soup/ no fishtank
of doomed lobsters. I have always had good luck
writing at Chinese food restaurants in the middle of the day.

My wife's sister, the man sitting behind me says, I hate her/
hopefully a bacteria will get her in the bowels.

Turn

2009-08-30T11:25:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time/ something let go
and the whole thing just shifted. The core released its grip. The waves got too big
to just go in and out/ in and out/ in and out/ so, the waves went out and stayed there.

They watched for signs that the water would come back.
They said /deep deep/ down from here, the ground broke.

Ghosts walked the earth with bags over their heads then/ and as the ocean
made one huge wave that would run back/ crushing/
they yelled out into the calm/ before:
this is how you have a war.

New Corn

2009-08-27T10:42:00.000-04:00

Today on the highway/ there's hundreds of white cars,
men in starchy summer husks/ speeding toward the strip-mall church
to worship a god no bug wants. The poems have stopped working.

Weeds won't grow near the big fakes.
Kernel by kernel/ well-stocked breed of debt.
If the bugs reject it, it's no good.

Mornings at my desk in Indiana
I watch the highway weep white cars.

Magnificent

2009-07-24T14:11:00.000-04:00

The deck chair is still/ but you feel like you’re still rocking
back and forth in the hammock, with its cradle comforts and the sun in your eyes.
The sea is close, maybe too close.

Bicycling down the avenue by the shore, you pass two women.
The first has short arms—child arms and a big forehead-dominated face
and she pushes a baby carriage around the perimeter of the island all day
in very small steps. You pass her quickly/ you wave/ she waves one of her terrible arms.
The next woman you fly past is supported by two crutches.
Watching her struggle with the small hill reminds you that you are flying
on your bicycle/ your aptly named Avocet/ and the woman has all white hair and you say hello and you’re sure you’ve never seen her before in your whole 25-year-long life
and she says Hello, Fancy Seeing YOU Here!

Two trees a big old fir and a new oak.
Two claws on the lobster- the crush and the pinch.
Two women on the avenue today, and you, little bird
trying to understand everything at once/ sure that all the information will loop around itself like the avenue loops around the island you are starting to feel familiar and comfortable with/ when the information connects it can be called something else,
something seaworthy. You are not seaworthy yet.

Rocking back and forth in the hammock
which is also the cradle/ the sea
rocking back and forth by pushing off with one delicate lobster leg
against the freshly painted railing stacked with the treasures you scuttled off the beach:
driftwood, shells, beachglass, a piece of old pottery with a cracked white and blue glaze
you would pluck all the riches from the sea if you stayed here forever
but you belong to the mainland/ you like feeling still when you lie in your bed
or sit on a chair/ you were not made for boats/ you like your treasures deep

in your own dark body where they grow like pearls.
You keep your tumors magnificent,
yes, they are all gorgeous gems.

Breakfast and Bullshit

2009-07-07T16:32:00.000-04:00

One coffee please, she says and curls her hand around the heat
like a cat curling up to go to sleep/ but the opposite.
Two nights ago she couldn’t sleep/ she was high on time (time in water)
looking at the calendar like it was a stone table with rows/ that the weeks
of the month were made to flow through/ coffee water through the mouth
bitter time and like a cat

pushing silk on your calves, ankles/ time in fur
snaps it’s tail at you/ time in seconds
sounds like the ocean’s small crashes/ on repeat/ it looks like now
and now and now. What are you listening to?/ I ask. Biggie, she says.
What?/ Biggie./ What?

Biggie Smalls./ The Notorious B. I. G./ Biggie biggie biggie can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me/ she sings
and the whales of the world beach themselves/ believing it is the rapture.
She rehabilitates the whales/ every one of them goes back
everywhere music is coming out blowholes/ so I dance/ on the beach
bitches in the back lookin’ righteous/ in a tight dress/ I think I might jusssss
as the ocean grinds up on the sand/ as the barrister grinds the coffee beans.

Next week she’s going to teach me how to fly
and how to make ugly ice cream/ it is the Age of Ice Cream,
and then we’re giving up poems.
My pants will write the poems for me in the future. My pants and my computer.
My pants will drink the coffee and my computer will weep the weeps.

One coffee please/ here/ she hasn’t been able to sleep or shit in days,
if we could just get back in the ocean, if we could just remember how
to drink coffee underwater and where to plug in our laptops.

Miss Tehran 2009

2009-06-23T19:52:00.001-04:00

In Tehran in blood red and skin/ color this morning
and the color of smoke/ watch this woman
as blood comes all over her face/ and she dies
on a computerscreen/street in every city
in the world. Her name means blood
no, that is incorrect/ her name means voice.

Now blood takes her lungs, fills her voice
every computer can see her dying face this morning
you can tell by her eyes and you can tell by the blood
again and again this woman
who is so beautiful/ we pass her on the street/screen in every city
on the screen on my computer on my desk she dies.

In Teheran in blood red and skin/ color she dies
on the news it says her name means voice.
We stand beside her on the street of the desktop city
and she bleeds from her beautiful face. This morning I found a dead woman
on my screen and I don’t know what she said but she said it in blood.

We drink our office coffee, it tastes like blood
on the computers at our desks we watch as she dies
over and over. Maybe this time they will save the woman
but they never do. Even though she is beautiful and her name means voice.
We drink our office coffee and die with her this morning
on computer screens in every city.

Dear dead woman, your city is burning, your city
the world is watching as your lungs fill with blood
you won’t get a funeral so let’s give you a beauty contest this morning
we count you/ we vote for you/ you still die
on this video where you are your country and your name means voice
you are Miss Tehran 2009/ you are the dying woman

you are the beautiful perpetually dying woman
we stand beside you on the street of the desktop city
red blood of voice
red voice of blood.
Look at Miss Tehran 2009 as she dies
on your desk again and again this burning morning.

Her name bleeds voice, this dying woman.
We mourn her this morning in all of the bloody cities.
The revolution flickrs in our electric eyes as Miss Tehran bleeds and dies.

Serenade

2009-06-15T14:41:00.000-04:00

1
Clove-flavored taffy/ tastes like sweet-salt-smoke/ reminds me of the clove cigarettes
from Indonesia that Marisa offered around/ after everyone had left the backyard
on the night of our wedding/ when we were all drunk on the back porch.

A little boy running down the beach throws a rock/ at you/
reading Nietzsche/ on the blanket beside me./ He must not like Nietzsche, I say.
Emmanuel!/ That was bad! That was very, very bad!/ his mother screams
kicking sand in our sodas as she chases him down the beach.

The little boy running down the beach is not a ghost/ this time.
The little boy running down the beach is not my husband.
You are my husband/ reading/ feet burrowing into the sand/ as a schooner with two masts
floats by and early June is too early/ to swim the ocean in Maine.

Today we are beach flavors/ strawberry, orange and cream,
cotton candy, banana, clove,
key lime pie, garlic and ginger.

I want mouthfuls of ocean.
I want nosefuls of ocean.

Do mermaids eat lobsters?
Can the mermaids hear me singing?

2
Now we are back at the house on Brackett Street/ and I have all our shells and seaglass
and driftwood/ spread out on the back porch table/ and one big jar/ and the love of my life
is in the kitchen/ scraping barnacles off muscles with a butter knife.

This jar will keep the sea with us. On the table is the camera
with it’s one twist-close eye/ pointed straight up/ hawk-watching.

The cork from last night’s bottle/ 24 pieces of beach glass
a foot of clean, blonde driftwood/ 11 shells
3 rocks and a bag of sand/ the smell

of mussels in garlic comes steaming out of the kitchen
you come/ pick up the best one/ you say, this is the most beautiful rock I have ever seen.
Children ride by/ ringing the bells on their bicycles.

I suck the barnacle cuts on your fingers/the trees in the backyard clap their millions
of leaves/ you put on a record/ the white album/ and sand sails off the porch
onto the green lawn, kept summer-people perfect/ “Only one refused to open!”

You yell./ Wonderful./ These old barnacled-up mussels still have something in them:
the ocean music/ what it refuses
and the tree music of oxygen making.

The mussels are full of pearls.
I swallow them/ thinking they are rocks.
I am too in love with you to care.

I have to admit I love the title

2009-06-11T09:50:00.000-04:00

First of all, ladies and gentleman,
these boats have like 12 people on them

and they're on the ocean for days and weeks at a time
and there's like no space (the T was crowded but bearable)

and the captain was from Winchester too, believe it or not. Massachusetts.
(Get this -- the coxswain is from Winchester!)

Some guy who just wanted to shoot jump shots with me
went and got his shoes. A good day
(except the celtics lost, we're not gonna talk about it)

and i sound nothing like Yeezy.
This song rules.

There was an enormous oil tanker right in the middle of it all,
make it your desktop and you'll be able to get through the offseason.

(This poem is composed of fragments of blogposts from Dave's Blog About Impressive Things)

It is so hard to sit here and not touch you

2009-05-11T11:08:00.000-04:00

I see the wind roll snow across the front windows
and howl through the huge empty
back door. This 200-year old skeleton of a house
lives inside me with my stories
and keeps me standing up even though sadness is saggy and limp
and weighs too much. Today
I need to e-mail Mom. Thank her for the earrings.
Stop writing poems where she kills things.

Today starts out with me being surprised that a fifteen year old boy
would be working towards his PhD. I text you a stupid joke
about Dogie Howser. There’s a novel written on scraps in my purse.
I was going to assemble and then burn it,
so I could write a proper novel on my laptop
in my time-off, but now I can’t find all the parts.

Yesterday a woman walked into my library
who was exactly what my mother was afraid I would be:
heavy, spoiled and blonde. Her laugh was too slow.
I want it. Slow laugh. Slow laugh./ I want it! Can I have it? I want it!

My mother is the sort of woman who refuses to take women seriously.
Her church taught her that. She is all dry church-air and stupid pious loneliness.
Not me. I read books. I call you loveboat.
I have brown hair. I go to the gym and work at a library.

Hundreds of times I’ve passed the same stone statue and thought/ what
a lovely stone. It’s a woman though. There’s a half-carved woman there.
I just haven’t seen her before today. I apologize to you, stone lady.
I think this is another thing my mother was afraid
I would do—talk to stones and art and anything that can’t talk back.

I talk to everything. I tell all of my mother’s nasty secrets—
I publish them. It’s her fault. She made me go to confession.
For years I lied to priests in boxes while she waited
and measured my sins, counted the minutes I sat in the pews, praying it off.
So many poems about her, each a cross
she takes to the dream mountain every night and asks Jesus
to help her carry.

I am surprised to see the fifteen-year old PhD boy walk into the woman’s bathroom.
I get many strange text messages today:
he looks like a hero/ there’s surprisingly little difference
between doctors and drug dealers/ i know why the caged bird sings

This last one reminds me that my mother killed a small yellow bird
by accident, she claims, when she was a child.
She’s asked me to leave her out of my poems. But here
it seems important that I explain
how she reached into the cage and held the canary, feeling it’s heart

beat between her fingers before it went stiff with fear.
That was her first death.

She is the sort of woman who can kill anything.
She can answer any question with the complete certainty of a lunatic,
proud of her bullshit answers. And I am always asking stupid
questions. Why? Why does the caged bird sing? Prozac? Is the answer Prozac?
It is god? Is it a combination of god and Prozac?

I have waited so long for you to die
please stop
coming to these dreams where icicles are upside-down castles
that hang off dead mills/ with broken/ busted-in windows like old, bad teeth.

You live in swirly/ frozen castles that I am passing on the train
where I am trapped, because the doors are frozenshut/ and because of you.
Dream train-traps have captains who announce:
The café is to the rear and the restrooms are right behind you.
The sky is Switzerland/ blue. These snowed-over houses are marzipan.
The river is iceglass/ and powdered milk blows all around the train.

Beside the river there is the circle where we used to sit around the fire
and make spells and wishes. Now I am too afraid of fire
to pray like that. See how the logs all line up together,
someone shoveled out a circle here. I can’t go there to meet you, the doors

are shut and stuck and they have been forever.
I must have been born/ on this train in a warmer
time. A bird nest full of snow like a snowcone
flies by the window, then you fly by/ my headless duck.

A cardinal flies in the opposite direction like electric blood lightening
dotting the hurt where weak, young trees
have been knocked over by storms, their roots all the way up out of the ground,
like girls/ on the floor/ with their skirts pushed up

who won’t remember this in the morning/ maybe they’ll try to fly away
or maybe they’ll never wake up/ or they’ll wake up and be someone else.

Six sparrows fly in formation next to the train/ the lowest one drops off.
We are in the forest now, where scrubby trees twist into barbed wire fences
I decide to hijack the train
because if we can go south where it is warmer
the ice will melt and the doors will open. I will leave the train
and everything I touch will be you.

It is so hard to sit here and not touch you.
So I shoot the captain.
The sound from the gun wakes me up.
Please stop.
Please. Stop
making me crazy for you.
Just die. Die. It’s been almost seven years now. Go.
Or haunt me to my face when I am awake.
Get your ghost-hands on a real gun/ and point it at my brain/ and make sure it’s not a dream.

In the darkness it's the hardest for the unicorn whale.
All the pretty rocks are ice.

I'm half in the river terror/ half
climbing out every day/ I try to reach you
every day/ a different bird eats my liver.

I tell myself okay/okay because one of these days the bird will be you.
It always gets worse at night. It is always so fucking terrible at night.

Three Etudes

2009-05-05T08:13:00.000-04:00

Etude #1

Baking your blue/ mornings in the clay oven/ I never thanked you
for all the days that you did not kill yourself.
Maybe if I had thanked you for each day
you might have kept stringing them on, one after the other.
Maybe life could have been something that felt good when you held it in your hands.

Pipe organs, tusked, enormous, inseminate/ the church with white music.
I wish they would play television show themesongs. I sing them
in the shower/ I sing them in my sleep. The bow tortures the song
out of the cells/ of the strings/ of the cello. If this music
disturbs children no one should listen. We’re all too white
to register the disturbance. But perhaps it’s just too loud?

Is the music making me cry or is it her vanilla smell?
(It’s the old you’ll-love-me-if-you-love-cake trick!)
Sections of the horsehair bow are snapped and sloughed
off/ we watch/ watching is the standard
response/ to torture. Who is the cello? I demand to know. She will not say.
She says she makes music
the way old houses make ghosts. One by one/ from nothing.

Take any kitchen perfume/ make everything a hand drum.
Cut hungry/ diamond-shaped holes in the walls./ Count the bones in her back.
She is the hardest rock./ Every visible bone is her American apology/
a denial of complicity. Now everyone stands to sing./ Seasons of concerts
go by. Every famous fire/ makes ash that nobody wants to claim.
Every instrument is a handgun/ if you have the right hands.

How can we tell if it’s music? Put the masterwork beside an imitation
and let a reincarnation of you, the newborn you/ indicate
which is blessed. If you, dead-and-back/ indicate the imitation
we will know for sure/ everything is music.

Etude #2

She’s so Connecticut. Her dyed black hair matches her black shirt exactly. I like all different shades of black worn at once. I like the mirages uncertain colors make; an extra breast here, hips, bumps in the legs. She is talking about Cuba. Inside my feet/ there are keys that know all the locks in Havana. How do I say that in Spanish? My feet can walk to Florida and I could swim the rest of the way. Ninety miles to meet/ exile backwards. Cuba is the sister I’ve never met and am afraid to talk to. She will imprison you/ if you tell her your love her/ the wrong way. She pulls me with warm ribbons. She wants me back. Every word in Spanish/ that I can’t understand/ is another lock.

You are not trying hard enough!
This is not beautiful enough!

I said, I want to be kind.
He said, no, you want to be real.

No, I want to be beautiful. I want to swim ninety miles to Cuba. I want that to feel like coming/ home. There is too much beautiful/ in this big library, to look/ at the unimportant poet woman standing at the door/ flipping through an English-to-Spanish dictionary looking up the word for home. Casa. Make yourself at…Then; home address, home banking, homecoming, home computer, home game, homeless, home loving, homely, home made, home page, homesick, home town, homeward, homework. If you focus on English words, the Spanish hurts less. Casa, casa, casa, the locks click forward.

Etude #3
(On the phone with Abuela)

George and Monica found a little house near./ For the children
because Monica gets nervous. How you call that—
how mother talk to children- very high
!!!ei-i-i-i-I!!!/ Screaming?/ Si. Escreaming./ I hear

the Bermont is the more healthy state in the united state.
It’s not one day like other/ the family of James giving dinner for us.
I need something from Saturday.
Sometimes I can’t understand what day is.
You’re going to be whole Rena, I am sure/even when/ you could no do it that day.

Ethan Allen

2009-04-30T13:14:00.000-04:00

Lying on my belly in the grass/ trapped behind one closed eye/ one eye open
my toes stretch like little painted earthworms toward the arch of your foot.
My parents have always told me different versions of the same story.
We are watching sailboats tilt in the lake. Dogs run for sticks
that’s how I run back to Mike's death, a dog with water in my dirty fur

shaking it on everyone/ on you/ all the time.
Grief is a trough of poison. You must not put your snout there. Or your growly teeth.
Stand on two feet/ waltz away to the landscapes of fictions.
Story:
It was a white car with California plates/ and a girl eating ice cream on the deck of a ship
and as the ice cream drip-dropped/ sugar on wood/ the ship was called Ethan Allen/
the car drove straight into the water.

This is the same story:
the ice cream girl was standing on the dock/ melting
sugar on skin/ the ship was called Ethan Allen.
The man in the white house looked out the window and thought
that's the prettiest girl I've ever seen.

chronic pain/ love, chronic (also)

2009-04-18T10:11:00.000-04:00

Driving back through plastic aroma avenues/ where the lawns connect
like a carpet thrown down before a barefoot fight/ you inhale
splendid suburban afternoons/ a pool/ new growth trees/ splendid
suburban (human) sacrifice. Leave
the window open. Passing on the left is the neighbor girl your dog bit once.

(She is old now, she is the exception. No one stays here really.
She deserves this, like she deserved it when Muffin bit her. She
jerked his tail and she was in love with the same schoolbus bully you loved.)

Remember when you rolled it all into a spliff/ in that frozen-pizza-eating
season of joy/ and sent it in the mail with your application?
Your application said: Please/ let me live
in one of your tiny worlds/ let me have a house
with plenty of places to hide. I will listen to and learn/ the names
of your silences. I will take in the hum/ of the nearby highway
and I will call it river.

Now having swum already over/ the many for-sure rivers
miles on miles/ causing chronic pain/ love, chronic (also)
/now you come back and can’t see/ the sweet afternoons you smoked
cigarettes hiding in the backyard with a homemade Long Island
iced tea/ reading Anna Karenina and smelling the grass/ hiding
from everyone/ throwing yourself over
and over/ onto the tracks.

Let me live, your application said/ and live and live.

You don’t really miss this/ at one time it felt like love
now you know it was lust/ just like hearing a radio-song-on-repeat
until you’re crazy/ about it/ but you don’t really love music
you can’t even tell that it’s a fugue. Suburbia is all words.
You experienced everything as words then:
fugue/ river/ highway
obsession/ vein/ bone.

Phrenology

2009-04-06T11:10:00.000-04:00

Eyes gloaming, she/ parted the grass faithfully
in the evenings/ and found a different door
there every time./ So she thawed the doors down
and glazed the mud/ supported the head, sculpted
an intelligent forehead/ and a wide, flat roof
for dancing/ on the top of the city/ eyes closed, arms out
to the wind/ full of color/ all the colors the day made.
The sun rises like Lazarus/ she inherits death
in the morning/ learns history/ makes decisions/ so many separate traumas,
they are all doors. Doors or birds.
Her face feels colors as wing\bird/wing
blending cheek, chin, neck, forehead/ feathers. Feathers
carving heads from mahogany and bodies/ feathers beating codes into keypads
making triangular doors open behind her eye-ing eyes
one by one/ in clear, bright color/
fluid/ wrapped in sweetgrass/ using phrenology to misunderstand/ proportions,
hang this/ on the walls in the rooms where war
is declared and denied, hang /this, in a frame
is the face/ of the trauma/ she inherited
/ the porcine sky and/ naked mountaintops of the mind/
she refuses any knowledge of or association with history.
She doesn’t need the dead to re-live their deaths for her.
Her head is shaped to see the city as country.
(translation: Her country-head is city-shaped so as to see.)

You May Be Right

2009-03-24T08:34:00.000-04:00

I’d kill you if it came to that./ Six decades/ two sons
murder-suicide/ Hanover, New Hampshire./
The police suspect no foul play/ there is no evidence of domestic abuse/
the couple mentioned to their friends many times that they didn’t want to live
without each other./ Would you kill me?

Friday night I crashed your party
Saturday I said I’m sorry

My face is like a split melon uncomfortable/ in the dentist’s special
padded chair this morning/ where the local news radio sputters out:
they were married 59 years/ they wrote notes to their sons
about their decision/ to die together./
Everyone in this town knows by now/ he shot her and then himself.
But I wasn’t thinking me and you/ until this song came on after the news broadcast
and sometimes we crash parties too.

You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for

That kind of love needs a better name than murder-suicide.
/ I jerk
my head up/bleeding gums and teary
eyes make the dentist pull back/ and as I spit it all out
in the little white sink and watch my blood swirl down/I suddenly know
we have that kind of love.

Non Sequitur

2009-03-15T17:48:00.000-04:00

In Slovenia where I was born/ the flowers come out of the ground beak-first to greet the birds/
because if they keep beating at it/ north north north/they will fly past the top pole of the world.
The birds rest their wings/let their skinny and lazy legs do the work that houses do, Grammy says.

Behind my house is a barn full of feral cats, I can hear them screaming
at the stars some nights/ a whole sustainable cat city that rubs its back
on the rough old wood/ leaving petals of fur thatched there.

The compost smell turns them into vampires at night. I suck the thirsty juice
out of my grapefruit husks and then throw them at the barn.
They bounce off the side and slide into the compost heap with a sluice over the matted fur.
The barn is an animal too/ I see it move at night/ it’s heading to the lake.
But if it gets there it will turn out to be Grandma/ the lake will turn
into the Connecticut River/ and she’ll stand on the bar between the sidewalk and the water
leaning her great neck down like a swan to the river
and drink until she is not thirsty anymore.

Birds can’t fly past the top pole of the world! I insist.
Behind my house before the compost and the barn is the Christmas tree
I didn’t want in the kitchen anymore and wasn’t ready to completely give up.
It looks so lonesome in the snow. This is what cutting down trees looks like.
Chairs, cabinets, floors—all lies. This is raw wood/ frozen/chop/ factual/chop/ authentic.
A whole chain of words that won’t become roots and let this tree grow again.

In the war we were so hungry we ate the trees.
We sucked the sugar out of pine needles. So sweet they were! So sweet, no?
The painted-on white sky and pines touching the clouds
in the picture trick her/ into remembering wrong. Unless she’s right.
Memory is a house that crumbles a little bit every day
onto your head. You just can’t see it yet. That’s why Grandma’s lowered her face
to the river impossibly/ while leaving her fat body on the two-lane bridge.
Boats pass/she smiles at them.

She calls me by my mother’s name. Irene, she says. I correct her.
She insists there is no difference. You will get married to a nice man one day. Do something
about your upper arms. They are too big. Men like little arms. I want to push her off the bridge/
with my big arms/ instead
I remind her that I am getting married/ in May/ she’s got to find a dress soon.
I grab her by the wing to take her shopping. She won’t budge and I start shouting:
The only place you shop is the supermarket! You can’t buy a dress there to wear to my wedding!

Ach! I can, she says. Ach! Jesu Maria! Jesu kindlein! She invokes baby Jesus
and his mother/ in Gottscherrish. The bridge coughs./
It’s trying to be subtle./ Can you take this somewhere else,
the bridge seems to be saying. I’m scenic. People don’t need your immigrant story here.
You never ate pine needles!
/There is no such language as the one you’re speaking. It died./
You country doesn’t exist./ You can’t even remember it anymore./ This is all you’ve got.

American Perspective

2009-02-24T16:23:00.000-05:00

1
America Loves Rich People

You were laid off
why are you telling me about the nice kitchen
of your former boss? Why do you know all the details;
the kitchen island, the marble countertops, the shining new pans hung
on hooks from the ceiling? We all do this,
memorizing the make of the cars they drive
while we are sitting on the bus.

/The most important thing to remember about miracles is/ sometimes you see them and
sometimes you don’t./

My tea is green
you ask me
in the grotto
the dark back-reaches
of the café
as I molest my soft Italian designer jeans
still in their bag

if I think a bomb threat would work.
If a bomb threat would make your boss re-think things,
the big-picture things and ask you to come back.
I shove a plate of cookies at you.
I tell you we need to go to the art museum across the street.
We go straight up to the photography exhibit.

2
Chromogenic Print

This photograph of Cuba makes me upset because of Abuela/ and how much she would
love to go back. Someone has hung colorful communist laundry/ over the graves of my
land-owning ancestors. Yellow-striped curtains/ in front of the restaurant in the photo
recall the old Cuba: shineshine from the sun/ and so much happiness! The laundry on the
rack/ is like mine, but mine is new. I know/ what it’s like to have someone tearing up my
calendar, erasing my holidays. I write down what I need and move on:

Andrew Moore
El Rapido, Havana
1999

3
Dye-coupler Print

Edward Burtynski
Shipbreaking #31, Chittagong, Bangladesh
2001

I spent all morning with my face/ in the sun/
reading and eating cookies/ until the awful conversation with you,
I think the photographs are helping./ Right in the middle of this print
it says/ NO SMOKING/

don’t worry, huge ship with your hull broken off
in hell-orange water where your face floats away in pieces/
I quit smoking/ and you/
you who always reflected so majestically in your own oil spills,
what do you know about lungs?

4
Gelatin Silver Print

Rwanda
James Nachtwey
1994

The top of his ear is gone/
the bottom is gashed/ the part for listening/ was intruded upon.

His mouth is open.
From the top of his mouth, the longest machete mark connects
and goes back across the side
to the neck
to the hand
he’s holding there, three
moon-luminous fingernails
covering his neck. Eyes down
mouth open.

My face is reflected in the glass of the frame and I am crying
a fainter image, but there. My face
smooth and warm and never cut-up but chapped by the cold sometimes,
have you ever seen the snow? I whisper to the man in the picture.
I would wear your face
for a while. If you needed to trade. So you could heal.

All of the sudden touching my smooth face is sickening.

“Were you tortured?”
The man standing next to me asks.
Suddenly his face is in the glass of the photograph too.
“What?” I ask, sure I hadn’t heard correctly.
“Was he tortured?” The man asks a little bit louder. “It looks like barbed wire was
wrapped around his face.” The man’s young sons rush
over to us out of nowhere. I don’t want to talk about it in front of children.
I don’t want them to see it, but their father doesn’t seem to care.
No, it wasn’t barbed wire/ what you’re seeing above and below these gash-scars/ are
places where his face was stitched up/ and it healed over/ so when the stitches were
pulled out they left these raised dots./ I can see why you would think it was barbed wire,
but look here/ where the top part of his ear was chopped off, look at the places on his
scalp where he didn’t have any stitches./

Machetes/ look at the date, the date should tell you right away what we’re looking at
here/ genocide.

5
Bomb Threat

I was eating cookies all morning./ I really don’t care if you think that’s not a miracle./
You can’t always see miracles/ up close/ at least not right away./ Up close everything is
streaming/ organisms under the microscope in quicktime/ this isn’t a threat/ or a bomb.
The most important thing to remember about miracles is that sometimes you see them
and sometimes you don’t./ Bomb/ my throat closes up with embarrassment just to write
the word on the page/ threat. Cookies in the morning. One morning a decade ago Mike
and I were driving on a Long Island road we’d been on one hundred times before/ when
the car in front of the car in front of us/ was hit and it flipped/ and we managed not to hit
it but could hear the person in the upside-down car screaming. We didn’t know what to do.

Two lives later (lives meaning two boyfriends later/two breakdowns/two different
perfumes) the night was breathing black velvet darkness under a canopy of trees in the
jungle/ in Chiapas/ when the car crash split open that animal silence/ and the screaming
driver dying human-howling into the night/ knowing there weren’t any police or doctors
coming/ just teenagers with huge guns who didn’t know what they were doing/
like I don’t know what I am doing
writing your bomb threat for you
sitting at my desk in my little office now
feeling like a stupid tourist in my own life
eating cookies all morning
trying to explain pen-to-paper-to-you
how it is/ why you shouldn’t do this.

Flowerbomb

2009-02-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

for Jed, on Valentine's Day

1
There’s a new perfume called Flowerbomb.
It is part garden and part war.
For a sexy, dangerous springtime. You could loose a leg
or gain a lover. Or both.

When I was a girl I loved this one particular pink nail polish
so much I used it to paint nipples on all my Barbie dolls.
My Barbies had crushes on boys in my class. I told them
not to get their hopes up. They were pretty, but they weren’t interesting.

I loved having a new crush like I loved putting on a new sweater.
A movie cowboy once said, sometimes you wear the sweater
and sometimes the sweater wears you. Sometimes the garden explodes
all over your neck
and you thought you were just putting on perfume or having sex
or stopping to smell the bombs.

2

A bride with a cigarette is not a pretty picture. While you are wearing
your wedding veil make sure not to smoke.

says Emily Post Weddings circa 1963.
(I found the book at the dump and decided to keep it.)

According to tradition, the groom buys the finest gift he can afford
as a lifetime treasure for his bride.

I write explanatory notes in the margins:
Something you can pawn if you need to make a quick getaway.
You need to be able to pull a string
so your life will turn into one gigantic flotation device
so the plane crash will be subtle
serene almost, picturesque
like a squad of coast guard boats storming toward you in the Hudson
while you watch the sunset rainbow-out into the pollution over the skyline.

Money, and things that are worth lots of money, can never be more than
a flotation device (when you’re drowning,)
a taxi and a hotel room (when you’re leaving,)
something beautiful to hold, if you’re alone (when you’re dying.)

And then everything you’ve kept your whole life will either become someone else’s heirloom
or go to the dump. (Most of it will go to the dump.)
So smoke cigarettes at your wedding if you want to,
and be sure the person you’re marrying
will whisper to you that you’re wonderful
when he thinks you’re asleep. Last night

I was dreaming about ice cream
and a freezer full of HÄAGEN-DAZS opened to me and I took one but then looked up and there was a whole row of Ben and Jerry's and I dropped the HÄAGEN-DAZS and was about to take a Ben and Jerry’s and then I looked up again and there were rows of old-fashioned milk bottles with layers of home-made ice cream and cake and I was looking at those for a while and then at the very top of the freezer was my favorite—Udder Delight—a little ice cream shack on route five that makes the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted and there was only one little carton but I dropped everything and grabbed it and then realized it was talking to me, it had been talking to me the whole time, saying:

I love you.
You’re so beautiful.
You, Rena, are so special.

I opened my eyes to my future husband, facing
me in bed, saying these things to my sleeping face,
hoping for them to slip into my dreams, and they did.

As I write all this, filling the margins of the little manners book right up
so my possible-someday-children or grandchildren
might know something more about the myriad truths of life,
I realize I’m leaving out the most important part
so I scribble; pick love, pick love, go for LOVE
on every page. Now they’ll think I was a nut.
They’ll probably think that anyway. At least I’m trying
to give advice. At least I’m not being cryptic. At least I’m not a language poet.

3
Wedding cake
cake icing
icy road
road turns
turns back
back woods
wood winds
wind chill
chill champagne
champagne Wedding.

Plastic propriety
propriety pantomime
pantomime pantoum
pantoum poem
poem reader
reader Rena
Rena rose
rose flower
flower bomb.