Poetry

The day will come when I will Share once more the quilts And pillows I am storing Away. Once more I will shyly Let you undress me and gently Unlock my sealed jewel. I can never describe the Ten thousand beautiful sensual Ways we will make love.      Huang O      16th century From THE WOMEN POETS…

     Don’t ever hold on to anything!      Let it go! Let it go!      And you’ve got it.            -Claire “Don’t lay your trip on me, ladies. I don’t care if you’ve got a headache, a muscle hurts, your old man has split with another chick, or what your dreams are. . . Drop your shoulder! Stop…

The pleasure in being tired after sex is the feeling of that slow infection someplace else. The explosion passes like the name of a town you leave your body outside of. Emptiness returns to normal under you. Then you burn imaginary rubber, extracting the acrid smell of Indianapolis, the collision of smiles and steel. You…

— JB, H & Mr. B This is the death of water, the sky gone bad; This is the wall of blurred names; This is the drop of wax, the shined shoe; This is the noise, the wardrobe of no address — And this is the shirt, bone shirt, chalk and chalk dust, Its coat,…

I told you all I know holding on to your arm looking in windows city after city whispering, murmuring with whom and when and the way we did it. You smiled. Desperately unzipping my dress at the school for the blind I show a breast, a thigh, mad eyes, while they march by in twos,…

It’s all because the round man with the pumpkin neck was teaching no one in particular macadam composition, and because a lady giggled like dry fire when the bartender who liked lighting his lighter and looking at it said a fellow wanted to be a vampire to get the inside story but he had bad…

The Holston lolls like a tongue here, its banks Gummy and ill at ease; across the state line, Moccasin Gap declines in a leafy sneer. Darkness, the old voyeur, moistens his chapped lips. Unnoticed by you, of course, your mind Elsewhere and groping: the stuck clasp, her knees, The circle around the moon, O anything….

Sometimes I have to think big, bigger than an airplane hanger, bigger than Lake Erie, bigger than nitroglycerin. When I think that big, I stand in a field and look down for a long time, my crackerbox boots are clumsy continents, I ignore them and look instead at a stone. It is cold, grey and…

I The morning train arrives at two. Be there. I’ll be carrying a briefcase, wearing heavy face lotion. If you get there before I do I’ll be in the second coach, compartment 5. I’ll be sitting in seat 3 facing a fat man. He’s following me. After the briefcase. Discretion. If I don’t descend the…