ALL RESPONSES |
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the record played
miles’
and day’s
soft, cool, sweet notes
the floor was some
how transformed
into space--the lack
of seams
her hair
auburn
Hepburn
cauterized his loss of blood
so young
like running fish
leaving the graveyard
of their parents
eyeliner
tweezed brows
sure
signs of a certain age
but she took her own photo
and hid him
behind her figure
the possibility of discovery |
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I don’t remember how young she was. The vague scent of lilacs always sends the scene into her hand held against my cheek. Indolence on my part. Her blouse snug against the sides of her breasts. The form of cotton hands. Hands that were calloused. Fingers of reason splaying, eventually, until no math can support them. She floats away.
Into the street--my feet trample on candy wrappers that always remind me of her. She was so much better than a penny paid vending machine. Better than a quarter--her intensions made baguettes seem perfect and common. I loved her for this. A tart bought in Hendaya, Spain, where the old men dug clams at low tide. My tide always wanted to be a part of her. We met.
When you are old you may find that a single step inters you in a sea of guilt. But her hands, and arms...and I was so young. I couldn’t even speak her language, but she spoke mine--had me sit down for a while at the bus station and play songs of America, even though America was broken. Sit with me now. Reverie. You may never be old enough to remember love.
Our hands sat near the candle flame that we lit. I had her number. She went to work, but said I must meet her afterwards for dinner. Small bites of summer pressed from her lips to mine. God, there was never a reason. Only sparkled seconds lisping out my mouth, and her catching me before I fell, letting me down, falling herself in the end. The tangle.
Motion, device, tenderness and grasp, the playing of frayed lines that held but I had to go. Madness. Isn’t it isn’t it in love? Sat in a nearby restaurant and sipped water, ate bread, but she was already gone and I had to decide whether I would accept truth. I stepped onto the bus. Forgot how truth felt in an instant. Never to retrieve it again. |
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When Mattel introduced Anna as Midge's step-sister
all hell broke loose. Up to this point the only
dollhead other than Midge allowed to have freckles
was Scooter, and expanding the family in extended
ways permitted Barbie's illegitimate pregnancy to
be on the up and up. |
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What were you thinking when you watched
everything you own go up in flames
on that hilltop in Turkmenistan?
Maybe you were told no trace could be left,
or had to travel light on the road to Berlin.
But did you feel the danger?
It was good your mother had kin in Germany,
but even better, when you came to Minnesota,
that blood didn’t matter at all.
You said you would return to America,
so when you do, please remind us
again of who we really are. |
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there is no such thing
as an "action figure."
being waylaid
by the next corporate icon
seems to simply be
a requirement of the fate
that we all...enjoy?
I'm sticking with Kubrick
(ala 2001...)--progress
is unnoticeable. learned
change is directly involved
with the outside commentary
of commercialism.
the big fucking black column
may not fall on us,
but it will release
the interior designs
of DNA, CircuitBoards,
anything that can be influenced.
I am obsolete. |
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A diamond’s edges cut hard, sliced thin my arms
like veal cutlets they bled as I soared up over reality.
A wallower of sorrow I fell to the bottom
of it, soaked in it until I could no longer eat or sleep.
I kept my hands clasped together as
If in prayer -every morning we met at the
bottom of death hill, scooped Indian burial
ground in our hands- the last supper
at the end of the world.
Daily interaction consisted of
smoking in the ladies room in the courtyard
laughing until my eyes popped out of my head
spinning around in my long peasant skirts, shoeless
those mornings when I was lucky to be alive
as cotton sleeves covered my sins.
I made adjectives and men tell the story of my adolescence
No wonder – God just doesn’t trust me anymore.
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She sits in the far leather
chair, scars visible on her
bare arms
She tells me she is white
shouldered, like Venus
De Milo
Her scars came when
she got stoned and lost
her head
We come to this place
on Wednesday evenings
and write for ten minutes,
usually in quietly spoken
syllables
Her words, in contrast, are like fire,
imploring everyone to run toward
the exits
We sit and listen to her private
alphabet and imaginary vowels,
trying to understand how her now
time feels like all the same hours
and minutes she spent cutting
her arms |
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I.
Shoeless that morning, I was lucky to be alive.
The big, black column burst into ash
as flame and wind squeezed it between
their white-knuckled fists. As I stood there,
atop that hill in Turkmenistan, watching
each thing fold to its knees
like beheaded warriors,
I thought nothing.
Posters of Audrey Hepburn disintegrated.
Freckled dolls with auburn hair quivered
into a rolling boil of pink plastic while
vinyl couches, floor tiling, and Miles Davis
records pooled together like tar. This
was supposed to mean something. I
was supposed to float away.
II.
That night, the trees rolled their creaky heads North;
I walked that way. A sharp limb caught my peasant skirt
sliced through to the supple thigh but that blood
didn’t matter. The path was open;
I walked it.
III.
The river was iced, still, I crossed.
Minnesota doesn’t know
what
to do with me—
with a face so very like the bud
of life—
whose life
is still opening wide as
the oversized eyes of a child.
Small bites of summer press cicadas
to shed their exoskeletons. I walk away
from the incessant questions
and place one beautiful shell
in the center of my open hand.
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Impossible, the beauty of woman:
the tensile strength of her limbs
in and out of gleaming towers,
sliding doors, swift cars,
laundered cottons. Her gaze,
a branch stripped of bark. Her eyes,
at the end, pure water drops
and insoluble resin. Her brainscan,
through them, flaring borealis.
And in the late evening light
of the most cool room
in her own home, you see:
impossible. And no one
even to attempt her desolation. |
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Anna has eyes that say
don’t you dare leave me.
Her gaze is like the anthers
of a rose, pollinated with intent.
She doesn’t like to play games
so has driven a long way to be here,
down a ramp onto the freeway,
changing lanes often to avoid slow traffic,
a queen forcing check-mate with her car.
Anna veers off onto a two lane highway
through rings of suburbs into country.
She passes new wind generators,
a barn turned antique store,
acres of harvested cornfields,
the illusion of water on the road
leading to a short bridge
over a dried-up creek,
and miles of telephone poles
connected like the chess men
of Emperor Qin's Terracotta Army.
She goes through town, right by
the Phillip’s 66, the Ben Franklin,
the Pamida, Hal’s Wayward Diner,
and Sam’s Bait and Tackle.
Anna crosses the Runaway River,
racing the sun as it falls from the sky.
Off in the distance set against
ginger-colored horizon, she sights
the house on the hill and far above,
faint shape of the moon rising
like a gazelle out of mist.
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Too impatient to wait for the end,
David downloads the final sequel
from a server in Novosibirsk.
It takes thirteen hours and
sixteen minutes.
He watches himself succumb
to the sword of Gog before Megiddo,
while executing a bottle of Tanqueray.
Dreams of love follow,
starring Freska, Italian grad student
who lives down the hall.
She arrives clothed in instinct,
and removes her molecules.
They make love, naked.
Then the bomb drops,
spewing holy water
onto their hot bodies.
The next morning,
he awakes as Constantine.
May he reign as emperor,
compassionate servant of Man. |
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I Believed
And Fell fell
Until I Was Emotional
fell
Until you kissed my eyes
and Somewhere in a Disney Movie
NO 1 CARES
In a Disney Movie
NO1CARES.
(in a Disney Movie
(stop yelling.)
diseesed in two hundred yeers
not from an immigrant
probably from Those
who insist that they are Americans
Insist®
but
My mother bleeds between her legs
My father cuts his cheek
and I bleed dollar signs--Insist® |
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That hall, those
High windows ...
Almost medieval
And not at all
Like the coterie
Of scruffy
Boys and girls with book bags.
And we took rags
And wiped the tables, or
Loaded the dishwasher
That huge metal Hobart.
When I was not quite sober
I sometimes forgot
She was engaged and I was not
Which did not matter in the end
As I was off to England ...
What was that brilliant clarity
That ease, conviviality
That made us feel so whole?
It was not sexual
Nor was it the light
Though that was very white ...
It was not anything
Either of us had heard or seen
Then or later—
Or for that matter
That modern lovers have ever found.
It burned me to the ground. |
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Tomato is fruit, only more,
beating heart pulled from
sacrificial chest, red planet
filled with hidden moisture.
Unlike avocado, she bleeds
small seeds from pierced skin.
Oddly, she craves to be cut open
and eaten at the peak of ripeness.
That’s when I rub salt into her womb. |
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I love the way
you wrote what you wrote.
Because of you
I will write what I write,
not what you wrote
but pray to write it
as well as you did.
Before I too must go.
You were the first
and the last.
The last
to write poems
strictly meant for
reading out loud.
The last
to sell
forty thou and some
copies
when writing a novel
was becoming the cool
thing to do.
The first
to be knighted
for writing well enough
to be liked by so many.
Happy birthday Alfred,
Lord Tennyson.
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She's tired of learning
things in books
and would prefer
to travel. |
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She comes to the circle with dawn in her eyes:
she holds out a hand for the cowboy coffee steeped
in a tin coffeepot. Never knew
she thinks, it could take so long to
build a dream, a new world, she wants
to cross bridges and borders without language,
she has never felt so clean or so awake
as when she bathes in the river,
sunshine her only mate. It is a life
time ago but I feel her still breathing
inside me whenever I put my feet in
the kiddie pool and lean back
to taste the green of summer. She wouldn’t
know how to live through the frigid blast of
winter but I will teach her, even so.
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A diamond's edge cut hard, sliced thin my arms
they bled as I wallowed in sorrow and
bared that dimmed virginal light.
I fell to the bottom of what life had to offer
soaked in its wetness until I could no longer see.
I kept my hands clasped together as if in prayer –
every morning (do you remember?)
we met at the bottom of death hill, scooped Indian burial ground
in our hands- created our own last supper
at the end of the world.
At the edge of reason I made adjectives and men tell the story
of my adolescence; the things left buried, left behind.
No wonder – God just doesn't trust me anymore.
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And maybe it’s you Tennessee.
Dirty air and tourists. Gas stations,
hillbilly toothpicks, grape jelly,
confederate flag shot glasses.
No tax, drive-through state.
Poor south, and fireworks.
Mondays, I remember, were
always the coldest days here.
North Carolina, there a girl for me:
every day, every night, every where,
outside on my break, a great sweat,
amid rocks and terrible bugs and trees.
I’ll become a forest ranger in Kentucky;
get my fill of Louisville. And in October,
see my daddy in Cincinnati. Just drive
an hour north up the seventy-one. |
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You waited, I know, for the first kiss to be right.
At age sixteen you could not wait any longer
and let the boy kiss you.
I saw your flustered faces,
a light flow of guilt drain from your eyes
while your cheeks were luminous
with the beauty of that kiss.
Your fresh, tender fingers of teenagers
tangled strongly in a hold between your bodies...
as if trying to define
who you were at that moment,
feeling the strength
that becoming one brought.
You crossed the threshold of innocence that day,
but did not let go of the door frame
because inside you still lives the child
that wants to explore but not leave the den.
You smiled and cried the first drops of love
the insecurity a tender heart is made,
hanging on the you you were
and the one you are discovering.
I saw your eyes filled with doubts and questions,
your realization of having stepped over the line
that separated the child from the young adult.
I said "you will be fine",
those are the steps you take into adulthood,
doubts are part of life, there is beauty in loving...
I looked into your face darkened by questions
about the kisses which still burned bright
on your lips of child.
Maybe you weren't ready to grow up yet,
at least not this way.
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Girl with the dark hair,
the sister-wife of Tutankamen.
Or are you Salomé, waiting to
jingle your toes on the Persian's
carpet, dazzle him?
The ground beneath you holds
only a drop of dancing. Bears
more dead in war than weddings.
The Cedars and Olive branches
burn the Saturnalia from your
fawn-brown eyes. Look hard.
When we are wide-eyed, we forget
to look. Delights disguised in
plain sight, stand ready to pull
the rugs, to trip us down,
into the secret sepulchres.
Dark-eyed gazing girl, go out
to work for money. Do not give
the money to a man, not even
to your father. This country
is a dream--your face is not
your freedom. No more than in
the land you may have fled
to tear the veil and land here. |
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She will leave today and I
Will never see her again.
I close my eyes
and see her face
slowly lose its shape
& become smeared,
melted, all the colors
sifted until the larger
bits remain—
almond eyes, lemondrop nose,
minor chord of chin
combines with deft cymbal
of eyebrow.
what I will remember
most, however, isn’t
the sum of her parts
strung together like
an archipelago, but
her deafening
crescendo of a gaze. |
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When water takes rock, it goes
around, not through. Rock becomes
sand, but remains rock, and
water becomes salty, but
remains water. In this way,
they will remain together. |
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When I was a girl I left
my body to find another.
I looked in the church
In the room of women saints.
My body took its cues from these women
saints with crooked spines and closed eyes
until its shape curved and bent
under a willow wand neck, the bones
cracking in its leftward lean.
In religion class Father Feeney faced us,
white mane halo around his red face,
hi s fat fingers shaped air.
“Girls,” he said, “you are growing like this.”
His hands forming an hourglass, his mouth
a moue of distaste.
“You must stay pure,
pure as the holy mother,
pure as the host at Mass
pure as the “Hic est corpus meum”
that I say over the host.”
“You have thoughts, words to confess.
You must tell everything.
Confession will save you,” he said.
I imagined his heavy body under the black.
I looked down my green uniform
at the part that must stay pure
But his words could not reach me there.
What did he know about my body?
Hic est corpus meum
My own words could save me.
Afternoons, I studied the creek
above the place where it plunges over falls
My face under water broken and broken again.
My body was a tongue
with the sweet host upon it.
My body was a stalk,
lily of the valley growing
beside a wooden house.
One foot on concrete,
one dragging a toe in the grass,
books in my fingers,
baby brothers in my arms,
purple heartsease in a clay pot
beside the shabby door.
My body sang to wood
to wheels, to the weeds
In the empty lot across the street
To the boys playing Robin Hood
outside my bedroom window—
my face all angles, my body
a glazier’s knife whistling on glass,
anticipation, rain on my lips.
Hic est corpus meum. |
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My heart
cannot help but ache
for you, or
is it that almost-smile
that reminds me
of some universal pain
that many women have
borne patiently
throughout the ages.
There was Cleopatra and
of course
the oh so famous one
captured by
that certain Italian,
and Anastasia,
symbol of Russian melancholy.
But mostly you make me think
of that young Jewish girl
who left a record
not as easily forgotten.
I cast these lines for you
and all the other pretty girls
that have graced my years
by coming into my vision and
filled me with the delight
of how wonderful a world
I have been given to live in.
All of you
together
outweigh
all the sorrow
I have and ever will have
seen.
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I see her face traveling
in the glass reflection
of the speeding Metro
her face is every face
and each time it shows,
she melts
at every stop
she is a different woman
her hands hold white rosary
beads like bird eggs
she might have been alone
at the harbor this morning,
beneath a tree that stands
at the edge of grass
she might have thought about
her throat and lips, concluding
they are not a language
she might be remembering
what she responded last night
when he asked how it was
he was lucky enough to have her
share his bed
and she told him angels
watch over both of them |
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I thought it was my name perhaps
that was wrong or the instinct of desire,
how it made me want twice what I had
tasted, fold it to my heart like
the way hatchlings are born, or the way
the butterfly cocoons itself before it
can be set free. I did not know
how to change the inevitable fate of bearing
a name common as clay and sweet as
wind. Changing my surname, patrimony,
heritage, lineage does not
seem to have helped despite the
stories that have followed me. The
Wendy-bird mothered lost boys and was
shot down by the arrow of jealousy, the fairy
curse. Still I have a way to spend the gift of
words dropped into my frame: but time is not
in a bottle and the wire is where birds
sit to sing
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an early morning
whisper
slides cool into a room
velvet smooth
ever watchful
easy smile
handsome face
warmth radiates
treasured moments
indefinable
unique
too rare
a sister of the spirit
a voice that warms my soul
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I thought it was my name perhaps
that was wrong or the instinct of desire,
how it made me want twice what I had
tasted, fold it to my heart like
the way hatchlings are born, or the way
the butterfly cocoons itself before it
can be set free. I did not know
how to change the inevitable fate of bearing
a last name common as clay and a first as sweet as
wind. Changing my surname, patrimony,
heritage, lineage does not
seem to have helped despite the
stories that have followed me. The
Wendy-bird mothered lost boys and was
shot down by the arrow of jealousy, the fairy
curse. Still I have a way to spend the gift of
words dropped into my frame: along the
wire is where birds sit to sing
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hiding flame
inside this many storied
terrain. Lava hardens,
smoothed to face the mortal
day, yet ever sluices
‘neath a halcyonic
dying
spewing glistered embers
into space.
Unrequited love
lands like cooled
stones, pied
at God’s
trying. |
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