My love, you blot out the stars And I in my arrogance Will dream that I brought you here Your fingerprints on the window Your laughter shakes the walls We are playing airplane I am the child caught On your knees, mid-flight, watching The ghost of a distant leviathan crest Beneath the waxing moon |
In the back of my head beneath the rug There lives a stick-thin spirit called guilt. He raises hell on knobbly knees whenever I fall short And gets along with his neighbor the old woman, regret and her hound dog, judgement Guilt is nervous and solitary He will not eat unless I remember to leave a bowl of rice, an offering, at his doorstep We will make an agreement, he and I Because I must love him, too And love is sometimes an armistice Because if I shut him in alone He will gnaw the bed, the chairs, the wall until he is all there is left of me |
I feel a kinship With the cat Who stands on the threshold Neither in nor out Because it wanted to poke Its nose in Without entering And who, once inside, Wishes to leave. Cats are threshold creatures There they dwell And may cross at will; The only thing That might be dead and alive At the same time Until someone opens the box. |
I envy the communism of ants They know exactly where they're going Brave little guys Scouting out the counter inch by inch I watch them touch antennae In their long twitching service lines (As a child I was sure that they had secret passwords so they would know which anthill they belonged to) Every one like the next, sexless, intrepid I don't think they ever get lonely. |
Winter was made to permit your sorrows Let your wounds amass like cloistered snow I cup in my hands the tap water blessing The sullen sweet of cooking acorns Bitterness leeching out |
There is rain falling on my porch There are bombs falling on Gaza I am watching it in yellow streetlights I am watching the horizon glow of Gaza burning Filmed across the sea The sun has set here, I taste chocolate and I will wake in the morning To grey skies Soon the dawn will break in Gaza Where the sun will be greeted by raging fires And the dead and the dead. |
I felt it on your off-white walls Burning from your old flourescent cieling lights In whimpering candlefire and The kiss of dusk on spent storms It refracts in miserable cobblestones, anemic lampshades, Poorly bleached hair and last year's sweaters and one lonely pair of hanging shoes. The snow by contrast is stark and white Betraying its newness on the aging stones And I saw that it's a winter color Not like buttercups or wine Summer is for golden things, Not books unbound by time Or faded coats, stone walls at dusk, Or wan and pale faces. Crosswalks marred by city slush reflect the sky from underfoot The last dead leaves of summer trees beg you to let the beauty dig you out Flurries frozen midair by light that whispers holy, holy, holy |
I do not know Desire We have hardly met. I could not pick her face out in a crowd. All I know is that there must be someone, somewhere Who will come with me to the desert at the end of time, When all of the lawns have died of thirst And all the plastics, digested by pill bugs. I imagine the falling days Bringing sweet rain, And I could not bear to watch it alone |
I will never begrudge a rainy day The sky understands That she, too, must close her eyes from time to time To sleep, or to weep over dry lands Green things are greenest in the rain And the pavement can smell of earth The air is soft, forgiving These days are meant to be taken lightly; Others roll by with the weight of ages The revolution of the seasons The fungal rebirth of the leaded sun But on days like this even the unknowable must lay her brow on the earth To breath it in and remember what it means to rest |
Cottonwood grove-- Where the desert lets down her hair smells of damp sand unusually wet roots, wood in water Reawakened moss Pinpoint sand rubies in quartz and silicate Granite by the creekbed worn to a metate to grind the acorn ancestors of the tree that shades our lunch Leached in a creek that must have been running With summer rain or winter melt An oak can live three hundred years; A saguaro two hundred they may well remember |
Easy to grow obsessed with the after because it passes over the in-between The violence, the cataclysm, the apocalypse, rapture is usually scheduled. We meet an appointed doom Together, or alone, dealer's choice-- Let me check my calendar If time is never the same river twice We are swimming upstream And I am casting flies from a rowboat in the swimming hole; Revolution is not a fish. |
In a jar on the shelf in my kitchen Are last year's linden flowers Dried but sweet-smelling And sometimes I am reluctant To nourish habits Equally so, reluctant To nourish myself. Even if the flowers I gathered last summer, in fragrant June From the waiting arms of Earth And dried so patiently Are just sitting there, waiting A lover's gift deferred By arrogance and drought Until I wake up one morning With a tremor in my bones And the world closing in on me And I force myself to make tea What could it be but a gift? And what could I offer in return, To the uncountable ancestors who learned, with the trees, To make one another whole |
Did you know that pomegranate seeds make a dye bluer than indigo? Osage, weld, and gorse, as gold as the sun The masters of Rome burned cities for Tyrian purple; purpurea, they called it, the waves rising A head-turning girl in sappanwood magenta, with her long black hair, turns down the village road; Claret green and cochineal red No corner of our world In all of time Has foregone color. |
So, Tiresias, Will I grow long eyelashes like all the boys do? Will I shear my gosling down until it grows back thicker Will I taste of gunmetal and round bones So, Tiresias, is there still laughter there? Unscattered, velvet low In a land with the scent and color of mud What news, Tiresias, you who has walked both paths and now turns hungry from the spirit to show me how to straddle size me up and find me lacking |
The season is cooling, it's September and I am ready to fall in love again Is it possible to walk through the world heart out-first? This and other experiments in autumn I speak and breathe A season for poetry, the cusp Bottled winter will be for lovers. |
In line at the dmv I have the invoncenient desire to put myself into the earth and make it part of me, Restless heart feels too small to swagger Something needs to be let out the leash is too short the face is all wrong Weight on my bones is damning today but at least the ground feels my footprints, I think I don't want to fade away, my inertia become for stillness instead of against it, Collapse into immanence. But who could blame them, the collapsers The spurring-on is gruesome, pain and needles, sore acid in my throat. The bloodhot heart of everything is too big for my chest, too hot in my viens, rolling in my stomach when it overflows from my liver, my vision warps, hot meal fills my chest, presses out to burst. Aches that can only be soothed by old, old, old songs, and waiting. |
On a small winter morning I listen to a song Burning blue nostalgia the color of my veins seen through skin wood paneled libraries Dusty cold collections and road trips through naked trees An old miner's house, narrow and musty A set of borrowed sheets Deer on the frozen bog Cars warming themselves in the morning Worries and absolutions In an old sunken couch Love simmered in the kitchen and served on those hideous pink Ikea plates To bare myself to you I left under the worm moon with a sense of possibility and hardscrabble work to come Raw, but happy Fly back to Chicago, city of light, Or love |
Does a desert need to learn to cry? Does it come by nature, or in drought will the soft face of limestone weep? Storms are rare; springs are rarer I was raised by ten and twenty years of drought In a place where the almanac forgot rain Faulty, faulty almanac Written in loam for a place where there is none. Pumice from Pleistocene volcanoes that rest in the crust For a million uncounted years and Their floes still scratch at the sky Harbor a legion of ugly small-leaf plants Leaves that have turned into spines Spines that never meant to shear; Green skin from the sun; to live in such an abundance of life that it scorches you; you must make yourself a shade-cloth Things do not pour forth from the desert These days, they rend On sweltering noons, febrile, birthing storms And when the water breaks it razes Washes and tears with it the dirt and tumbleweeds, these days Gouges in the earth like seams pressed red into skin Canals cut like sutures Lifeblood sows with salt, these days Arterial spray paints the canyon walls in rings, rings, rings, descending. The desert does not need to learn how to cry it just needs a chance to remember. |
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Spiderwebs on the windows Square and multiple climbing Marching out right angles in the sun Halloween hasn't decorated here but the spiders have and their catches catch the sunlight that has escaped into narrow streets Streets that are tall rather than wide, too far below to make out save for the ruckus of rubber and horns. Not catching the sun but caught by it Between it and the wind that dresses skyscrapers Motes of cottonwood or soot-- I can't tell if they are seeds or ashes-- is something burning, many things are burning, just out of sight And the floodwaters are rising. Can you smell me that I rode in today, choleric, just before noon, so I could feel the sun burning, yellow bile turning to black, sweating out thorugh my pores with the rest of it, disingenuous Discretion; secretions; secrets, all in the name of blood spilled glory Or what else I cannot imagine and never could Give me a wand and a dragon to fly up through the glass and scream and love The windows cast no shadows Do you see that, Pontius Pilate? Water the damned and save some for me |