I’d melt in your houses. I hide in blue shadows, appearing only at night— a bride in a glittering veil, pale and shining as if lit from inside. You offer me a snowman: a frozen dummy with eyes of coal. But I want a husband with a heart in my bed, who’ll lie with me…
Morning sunlight streaking through the blind lit the jagged scratch from a roller skate in the kitchen floor’s jazz-patterned lino which I filled with putty and tried to hide with my art-school oil paints in every shade of tan and brown, cream and yellow. Such glowing yellow: the color of a slice of corn bread,…
Here, where the old Industrial School was and then the porn-film sheds, stands the last lamp before the water. Dead as he’s been these ninety years the lamplighter on his beat walks with ladder on shoulder. Above the Mardyke Steps and the donkey track he fixes ladder to pole, stands back then climbs nimbly into…
And this is where they met in secret. Follow my pointing finger. Now you see it quite empty. Those curtains that veiled it are rags, and the bed stripped bare. Here she used to play for him, there he would place his shoes in the corner. A piano from an upstairs room, wanton extravagance of…
In the train, in the dim glass, you, long dead, slip your face over mine. A mask, a shade, a past that is somewhere there, in the dark but not here, nor in any other scored-out street my dog-eared notebook holds, not here, your voice gone, your name caught in a fold of paper in…
Milk, rice, blueberries, plums— I’m laying out our weekend along the belt when the black sack of a stormcloud splits with a noise akin to anger or love and all the mothers look up from the strip-lit aisles as something larger than ourselves pours down, dances like baby-teeth in the grass outside. I’m frightened says…
To taste the salt of the stars in the sea. To love another more than oneself. To know this is to know everything. Do you see how the dusk and rain are one? Do our bodies come to nothing? Not how we fall in love, but how we fail in love. Ask aloud what comes…
It’s not just that he can’t remember you: he can’t recall any of it: the university, his other students. I rocked. I reeled. I was knocked off kilter, as if the child in me had stepped up to the blackboard and picked up the chalky duster and wiped her future lines away, even the bit…
I sketch the patternings of the sea: the iter- and reiteration of event. Similar; not the same. Lulled by dull predictability of my own selves’ dreary projections, I’ve confused the sacred with its name. Better scan fractals, rhyme sea with tree, tune into tantric syncopation my mortal gods, frantic and profane.
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