Poem
Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk
Poetry
May Day, My Thirty-third
Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…
Where
1 Like a transparent tooth In a myth’s mouth I sang of words in words That had no foretell 2 I was the closest relative To the one who never existed That absent autumn drops Its cease-colored nets on oh 3 Ever-so-longing I lay Spanking my placenta plate In curtseyland I’ll stand now Groundswell gate…
A Hieroglyph for Rexroth
A barn owl for an m’s a funny way to run an alphabet tho The merciless talons’ grid over a foot square A white whoosh a juju all eyes & feathers & bless your magnanimity, Kenneth, your immortal artifacts, wine and bread
The Stillborn (Domesticity #3)
Eyelashes did their job: they lengthened the afternoon, like a dress hem. Then that night the hem began to rise, in stages revealing scenes from my shameful life. Those calves up which the hem reproachfully rasped, catching, lingering over the ugh pictures did belong to a woman or were they mine— I hid my eyes….
Marichi
An hour before sunrise, The moon low in the East, Soon it will pass the sun. The Morning Star hangs like a Lamp, beside the crescent, Above the greying horizon. The air warm, perfumed, An unseasonably warm, Rainy Autumn, nevertheless The leaves turn color, contour By contour down the mountains. I watch the wavering, Coiling…
Song
Perched on each others tongues To fly Where now are the angels In what pursuit plunged vaporously Who late will sniff your crotch for eternity The wind is rising The diamond that divides the faces of a wound The surface of our planet should be waxed To make the wind go faster Than the windmills…
A Poem to Go Before Eight Lines by Jalal-ud-din-Rumi
Leaving here, I slip out the gates of the palace garden as autumn stuns the trees with remembrance and makes them come around again like a memory of dervish flutes. In my mind I hear the word perfect. My feet touch down into cool…
For Anne
On each shoulder I bear a jar with each its angel in formaldehyde I wish to preserve my loves You say No let them go fly way Away and when they come back…