Poetry

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.

In moonlight the landscape was all blue: frit of cobalt, french ultramarine, far off hills of phthalocyanine and that gleam of light on lake water cerulean, shore rocks indigo, fugitive soldiers freezing to death on a Prussian ground, when my beloved turned on me his eyes of blue mercy: lapis lazuli, pupils of gold.

i. Ill …we are all ill, i.e., neurotic… —Sigmund Freud All ill, some very, some not so much or not so evidently—though perhaps for that all the more ill. Overall I’d say I was ill, but not quite ill all over as there’s still some small patch of well, a window sill of the psyche…

I avoid books about the present or last war, The war has never been. The air Is thinning itself for the breakup of winter. Breadths of breeze requiring sun Slice through any and every complaint To a dark kind of summer. Moon scuffed at its edges, brighter, Narrower, smears its self-improvement mirror- Image of giveaway…

for J.G.   I am powerless to change a thing. But Let me fool you, sweetly, with my pen Or better still, my fingers, and if not With my fingers, then my tongue— Wherever you feel yourself turned To wood, wherever a joint is thick Pinned into a pleat or crook, trapping You in twists…

Into the mute and blue- green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go though not for that which I’m going. I deserve to go, and not alone, because I did not sing loud enough about this life, this world. Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not. There were too many things I saw…