Poetry

Everywhere gutter musicians with rare saxophones rise in the air like snowy egrets. The night wolf drifts on a coffin nailed with stars. A man in an alley unravels the feathers of a woman’s body. From the firmament above the rooftops a hand rockets loose, catching fire in the snow. The one window, steam-laced with…

(for Lynn Sukenick)      She is the      only      go-go girl      in Las Vegas with a      white BMW      with a      chartreuse mohair bathrobe      with      dayglo pasties and      monogrammed underwear      She is the only go-go      girl in Las Vegas      with      an emerald-green Ferrari      with tulips in her fishtank      Dunhill in her humidor      onions in her glove compartment      She…

What’s hard, sandy, and won’t crush like sweet olives against my lips? I lie on barbed wire but dream of caves plushed with skin. My mind’s lined with vaseline, my body cups like a breast against the sheet. Think of angels. Their marble knees streaked with veins, their thighs locked against the touch that spreads…

I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…

I      I think I’m lying. Surely one nation divided implies another sad device of history, when I might have said road into ourselves and seemed friendly. This country nags me like a bad excuse, these critical days away from myself demanding accounts, looking at the future in my wife’s sharp face. II      Rutledge, if I…

The squirrels are frantic in the branches; birds circle; the cat waits near the roots, wanting to strip the bark and grease the trunk. Here’s the news under the ground: the rain’s driving weeds through concrete; farmers are tying razors to worms to fish sprouts out of seeds. You’re eager too. Don’t your fists twitch…

I want to be mentioned more. I want to be able to be dramatic: a sculptured Renaissance mouth fifteen feet high. I want all the pistol fingers. I want to drive up in a Bentley as big as a boat. I’d like somebody to see to this pretty quickly.

You don’t sleep in the house that stands for happiness. You dance to the music of its cracks, flexing your lonely muscles like a priest, pretending your body is a ghost come to haunty yourself. The closets, with luck, remember you as moths or shelves & kiss your open mouth with years that taste like…

I’m tired in my hands from tearing at walls and my feet are bored with kicking, but the head stays open and empty. Some dream crowbars and files, steel fists and paper parapets, the night watch blind in the searchlights, but if the doors opened they’d root in the stone like ivy; they’d lock themselves…