Things that delighted today

1) Babies wearing glasses. Four separate sightings!

2) A random young man in the library asking me to rate 3 other men's pictures, on facebook, in terms of hotness. (Less delightful: "My opinion probably doesn't count, I don't like guys," I said. He said: "Oh, are you in Rainbow Alliance? No? Why not?" No. Just... No.)

3) Foldy ears. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IjpZRSQ7t8

4) Colors: Weird-glowing bluish snow in twilight, sky gone mauve and gray at once, and a lusciously red-berry-filled tree supporting a small birdnest. Oh, and also wet pavement reflecting lights. There has been a poem gestating for over a year - the way traffic signals illuminated the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks - especially after rain or snow, when street and tunnel walls are lavishly streaked with red or green.

5) This picture from Iron & Wine's EP, "The Sea and the Rhythm":


I like things that are alluring without actually revealing anything.

Lavinia

(Draft 1: Imitation of Brigit Pegeen Kelly's style for class, with liberties taken from Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus")

Clumps of sticks swing at the wind.

Dry wind. Enough to peel back black

Bark from black stumps in this circle

Around the still bog water. Yellow water,

Yellow grass, and the black crows calling.

The crows tell a story, which is an old story.

Old as the song the dry wind sings

Through the black bark and dead grass.

Old as anger. Crumbling in the grass,

Heavy footprints. The boys have run away.

They are laughing boys. And dirty.

Dirty from bog water and blood.

Their laughter is dirty and smells of iron.

Dry wind. Her body bends in the wind, twisting

In her white dress, a ruined dress,

Stains seeping dark from the dark triangle

Of her young cunt. Mouth open. Empty mouth.

No, not really empty at all, empty only

Of her little pink tongue. Now oozing,

Wet and hot, rent open, like the inside

Of some swollen fruit gone near to rot.

Clumps of sticks grow from stumps

Where her hands were and are not now. Claw

And claw at the wind. At her own chest.

Where do the hands lie? Folded

Or flung apart? Do they miss each other?

What now tastes the tongue?

Stale bog-wafer of still water-sodden dirt?

Crows are crying their dry cries. Wet mouth,

How to cry? How to tell the story? How

To sing? Song, story both are spilling

Warm and red. Flies are coming.

Green-gold swarm. Returning the song

Of the wind and the crows and the far-flung

Tongue and the stick-claws clawing with

their terrible hunger, terrible hoarseness.

But the swarm song is low. Low tone.

Low in the grass. A song without iron. Low

Song in the yellow grass in the red sun.

Song of things blessed and bled.

I'm in a poetry class

...and so life has meaning. My absence (from vomiting poems on the internet) is largely attributed to all the theory I've had to ingest recently. Reading brilliant work & its criticism, not being as brilliant... You know.

In any case, I'm turning in this to my class tomorrow. The assignment is an imitation of Frank Bidart (further proof that the best poets are gay, lonely, longing). His work can be on the creepy side, which is why I chose to write about something so awful as asphyxiation.
(P.S. I'm having indentation issues. Does anyone know how to indent stuff on this website??)

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

Look at you – gold and whole, your painted,
impenetrable pores thigh eyelids lips breasts hipbone

roast in stage light. Gold dancer,

your chest swells. You’d scrape your shell
off to sawdust, the lungs that sag

like rotting wood under the weight

of skin you writhe to relinquish.
I watch your gibbet-jerks; you twitch
___________________________and twirl and twirl and twirl

Perfect limbs won’t peel away

like the bird that careens, bright in sun,

between flying and falling as breath dies in it
like the bird watched by the creature

watching in the dark, the dark

creature that craves the dancer,
craves bright surface and flare of the beauty

I’ve made of you; your skin
shut like an eye; your painted,

perfect limbs can’t peel away. Trapped, shine, MINE.

Photograph by André Kertész

Artificial light slices right angles –

blackened brick corner, crumbling stair, crammed-

together buildings too many teeth in a mouth.

Laundry line and telephone line

outlined brightly. This night, half-light

in empty alleys is less longing,

less an ache than eked-out, shadow-strewn

generosity, though everyone's asleep. No –

gone, by now. What promise is this?

– held together in narrow dark spaces,

in small frames and forms.

An instant's feeling extends through, as if it's

anything to do with you.

Our Joy

(This comes mostly from the latest salacious CNN.com scandal. If this poem doesn't work out, I'm turning the story into a musical. Or a Lifetime movie. http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/10/cloned.dogs.ap/index.html)

You bounded hungry into the world, doggedly hunting

down what it owed you. You never could discern

that line between sweet-talker and a stalker.

In Ireland, on the run, you played deaf and dumb –

your sick heart pinned to him like a star. That cold country,

cold chars of stone in a church courtyard. The bells

pealed out, without melody, a rush of hard, clanging sound

so like the inchoate cries welling up in your own throat.

“I loved him so much,” you told the judge,

“that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a

carnation up my nose if he asked me to.” You were crazy,

said tabloids garish with grimy details –

has-been beauty queen, kidnapping, pair of handcuffs

(mink-lined). Your love’s carnation is rotting,

Joyce. Sugary decay smells like all the pages

of notebooks stuffed in your trunk, your pen tight-clenched

and drilling in scrawls of him, him

pulling into his driveway, him on a park bench,

buttoned shirt and Bible open in square hands,

in dry Utah air. Not like it was. The cottage: Slick meat

of heavy thighs spread on the bed a holy offering.

His thick wrists bound, you fell and felt

warmly received, like a homecoming.

What you get from someone who can’t leave you,

it isn’t quite love but it almost filled you.

You disappeared. But still starving in those decades

for your due, anything that loved you, always more.

Your fat pug you had divided into five,

and in the picture you, too, could have been a clone.

You and the small wriggling pup you clutched tight.

Faces wrinkle-folded, your mouths opened in twin twisted O’s,

yours with joy, blue-dusted eyelids creasing, his, wide, still

with the shock of being born. “That’s our Joy,”

they said. Your face, again, smears across newsprint

in colors tawdry as cheap polyester. Fugitive,

you’re gone, you look out weak and wounded

in dazed amazement. Cheating world.

It offered you platefuls of nothing but air.

(Draft 2) You may not touch

because the painting is old and not yours.

Blazing red, bison hulk

over slim human shapes.

But lines of skull and horn, hoof and calf

are tender as a lover’s traced curve,

her side’s slope from rib to hip.

All red, faded but raw, a bloody color

because it is blood, and fat.

Some once-alive beast, insides ground

with rock to powder. How right –

the rendering made from the real.

The stone would feel ragged, the shapes

smooth, dusky dust-flaking shapes in the palm.

At night, in the park, what I could say

wasn’t enough when I asked my friend,

Do you want to do stuff?

That, she said, meaning the unspoken sex word, that

opens a whole ‘nother can

of words. She messed up her metaphor

but it made more sense, the feeble conversation

spilling out, dark, dirt-clumped and wriggling.

That, she said, wasn’t necessary.

Words are a poor vessel for desire,

but less lonely a place than inside skin.

Through the painted figures winds

a thin red line. Some form of magic,

says the placard on velvet robe cutting me off

from a life preserved and contained.

I am keeping my hands to myself.

I am keeping myself to myself.

The line ties red outline to outline –

umbilical cord, I think,

connecting all of them, all

wrenched from one gaping womb.

What is necessary? Touch is.

Reach into me, remind me

that body, if anything,

is bridgeable. Skin, soft barrier, bare-

ly containing all this living,

can it hold us back from each other?

Reach. And make it hurt.

That pain is duller than our distance.

Boy in the grass

Lightning charged the soil, he had told me, made it rich

and lying open for the till and plunging fingers.

Storms ripped to the roots of long grasses,

made them stretch deep through rocks, worms

and arrowheads, longer than each dry blade.

In a yellow stretch of prairie I explored his form –

muddled-colored eyes wide, wild

and helpless, shorts around his ankles.

Mosquito clouds and power lines split the air

with dull buzzing songs.

Even then I was remembering him, red shoulders,

fresh smell of sweat and hot wind.

And a maleness to the smell, alive-ness.

I held him in metaphor. I fed him to it.

Dangerous to mix up the real, flesh

with flanks of hill, sunned arms for red rock.

But that is, after all, natural,

to confuse, infuse bodies

with bright fragments like broken porcelain –

a sharp piece of song lyric in her room, long

past midnight. How the profile lined in white streetlight,

rain falling, reflects – as if between two mirrors –

splintered wet blue nights, fingers tripping down

forever unrolling keys, each note sweeter

and more mournful than the last.

Yellow and hot, the afternoon

was every afternoon,

laughing on my knees in gold-lit heat, high grass,

summers I was younger. Floating sparks – Oh,

poor loved bodies, pumped to bursting,

others’ impressions pressing in,

filling in the outlines.

Something bucked inside me, buckled.

Broke, on his slack mattress, in a white room.

But that matters less than when I took him

in the grass, in my mouth. My knees

pressed dirt hard and I felt it, or imagined

I felt it – fierce and electric, a burn

slicing through skin, deep.

Past metaphor, past memory,

into earth warm and waiting.

When you leave (or: I like trains way too much)

When you leave, always leave
in the dark. In the pre-dawn hour
of orange-burning, humming streetlamps

you will drag yourself down
blocks of silent sidewalk –
yours. Not quite empty,

but filling with everything you know
or imagine about whistles, arrivals, you
with your suitcase and your dizziness.

When you rest at last, rest
on a southern-bound train.
The car rocks, and you pretend

the way you pretended, a child
reaching for sleep, that the mattress
was a raft, the room an ocean.

Rock now, through dreaming
and black country. Wake up
someplace new and strange, a stranger.

Another work (whine?) in progress

Dawn didn’t break like a clap, just gradual gray, then day.

I came halfway to life with it, armed at the train station

with stones, water-warped notebooks,

half-eaten candy, condoms and no toothbrush -

meager evidence of life on my own.

The 8:20 express ate still air with a shrieking mouth.

Traveling from my parents’ house to the city, I always hang on

for the boxcar yard. I have pinned my heart

to its peculiar perpendicularity:

boxcars’ rusted right angles, power lines dissecting the sky

with ragged clouds trailing from the lot’s asphalt edge.

All laid bare to steel-hard sunlight, and safe

in the idea that things are sorted, transported,

get there. That the world streams clean

down a silver streak of track, clear

points at either end, open to be understood.

The past six months have been a Rube Goldberg machine

that clicks, whirls and hums with a logic too large,

too complex, churning out events I know nothing about

except that they happen. Real things

fracture, fragment, skew: a man in flames,

black-charred skin by black newsprint. Friends I knew who

flared, burned out, fell. The same gravity

clings to all questions – why I can't balance my checkbook or

keep my apartment clean, why I can't speak

to strangers, or clearly, or at all

sometimes, why figures recede on a dark-growing road,

why fucking feels like breaking

as if the hymen were a heart, or why

I am scared. The aisle filled with elbows

and unknown commuter faces, closed.

I pushed and leapt off the train, watched it lurch from the station.

I called my mother. Come back, come get me.

Safety and strength are solid things, hard as pebbles

but as easily lost. My plum heart shrivels.

I cried in my mother’s car, in anger, in fear, for the train

rolling out, without me.

Dilate, blink

The story always begins with an image.

Hold it, the late-afternoon window:

the jug’s rivet of water

pouring through a man’s black hair

as he leans, shirtless, over the sink.

The open square contains him, both hemmed in

by a barbed-wire-rimmed wall

overgrown with orange flowers.

As the dilated eye opens to knife-like light,

clouds burn too white, metal turns molten.

Streets vibrate with more urgent energy,

you all eye and waiting.

San Lucas mausoleums are more garish

than any gushing blossom. Sun infuses stone,

colors pulse too vibrant for mourning.

One hand on the rough wall, look close,

and deeper, past flowers shriveled brown and brittle,

to where mounds of earth rise soft to stick-crosses. Look up,

the volcano’s shadow spreads like languishing silence,

over shacks leaning together, limp and tin-patched.

A girl runs. Between the houses of the dead

and of the dying, she is small,

as all the children here are small, stumbling

in a woven skirt wrapped loose around her legs.

Her head tilts up. Her arms are out.

When the image has no meaning

is the story broken? Even as the seen takes form

within a form, a freeze-frame, an eye,

the I telling the story in a room, in a stanza, it has all begun

crumbling, inevitably, a pale dust blown

through understanding’s margins.

The man flows through his window like the air did,

smoky with woodfires; the girl runs on, a door

slams, distance expands.

You were there and saw, and you know nothing,

possess nothing but your own dumb stare.

You blink into the light. There is no story.

Newness and the nameless

A thumbtack marked each city he’d seen

on the map on his wall in that room

already blanketed in photos and books, a layer to muffle

or absorb whatever roared in his head.

In one picture he took himself, his naked torso glowed whitely,

white hipbone jutting below a smooth stomach,

frame cupping his form. “I want to go out of this world the way I came in,

naked,” he said. To be devoured,

body lain limp on a high mountain

for the birds to wrench apart.

His hands traced the map west, north, talking of

Manifest Destiny, the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail.

Brown and bright-skinned after hiking the glacier, he had a mouthful

of Thoreau and wide binoculared eyes later in tall grasses

humming with mosquito clouds. A flash of red,

the bright bird, and no guidebook to name her.

In my fifth grade class,

each dogsled rider had a thumbtack

as we charted their movements over Alaska’s ragged shape.

But no one could fear, listening to him,

that everything that could be mapped, had been

or was divided in portions of the already-discovered. All energy pushed

toward newness and the nameless.

The air almost sharpens with ice crystals and pine

when I think of him now, a string of thought leading me

to blood flowing from chapped nostrils, dry cold altitude, as the trail

drops, wiped out in a white-out. Paws fly fleet and strong

pounding an unyielding earth. All blaze like a bullet

through the blankness, half-frostbit and gasping

but pure as a burned-down forest, all ash washed away.

I haven’t cried for you in weeks,

not since the night when I knew you were gone.

The last time, you hardly spoke,

in the art museum, cold marble and blasted air conditioning.

Your face was like the statues, maybe like it was

in the casket, but I didn’t go to the wake with those people

who had talked of you in past tense for a year.

Once I wanted you, now I just want a piece of your brain

to pulse in my open palm, let it whisper

all those words I half-understood, and forgot.

In my head, when I pressed it to the bathroom tile,

you flew through a white frontier –

grim as iron, you shone

into a space

no one’s yet discovered.

In grasp - from this spring in Cape Town

Vines spread and branched like veins

woven through the dead tree’s black wood.

They snapped with pulling. Tough remains

still snaked in the wood and worms

and California soil. Wet coolness, closer to the root

the vines glowed vivid purple.

Evening comes to this city in a gush of blue fog,

thick enough to forget yourself, if eight hours at a computer

don’t wipe memory away. Bending toward home,

I am unlearning eye contact

because looking up can mean opening yourself

or your legs and slithering voices have followed me home

more than once. Harsh voices come from bloody-eyed children

in a dull cicada buzz: “Hey, hey sister.”

When stroking eyes and hands are enough

to wrench a body apart,

I look for myself the palm of my hand,

or what it can hold. Pinecones still woods-smelling,

a three-legged plastic giraffe, a shell

rainbow-streaked like an oil slick.

My mother’s meditation stones are hard and smooth,

like the solid layer my heart is trying to grow.

Call me back, graspable things.

When the night is a riot of throbbing bass and anger,

my eyes close to a stone silence,

stone in hand. All heavy limbs long to grow

thick at the root,

burn a color more brilliant.