A Discovery

Oh women
With your squiggly lines
You misbehave and can't remember
How not to judge

So in a room with pillows
And more women
You sigh out of your corsets
What a relief!
How you say, "Thank you
For your permission! "
Eyes round as doberge cakes
You hear the voices
The other women
Who say "Oh!
I am not crazy?"

No, you are not!
You are wide and consummate
What is it in you that longs to be nurtured?
Let it have air!
Give it to the world
And be as you are
As you are
As you are

It is not so easy to trust
To be here and now
But believe, please, that below you
Is a latticework
Of women
With wide and consummate hands

Number 24

Green light, we read novels in the late afternoon, you remember to leave a note, I purr and you scratch my back
Red light
I grouse about folding clothes
You drink more often than I think you should
Red, red light
When you say I've no room to talk because all the candy I eat
Will rot my teeth and give me diabetes
And we're going to die anyways so quit all the fussing
Green light, we have dinner outside and play hangman on napkins and gleefully cheat at cards
Red light
Isn't it always a long day
Work drags, and traffic's bad
There's never really enough money
Green light, when you're just the right temperature, and I sidle in close, and you smell like earth and salt and home
Red light
You don't ever hit but you can see how a person might want to
Green light, we plant a tomato garden
Red light
I forget to water it
Greenlight, we might move to Seattle
Redlight
I clam up when you ask what I want
Greenlight, you
Redlight
Then somewhere along the way
We melt into yellow

My Reveille

The day arrived in leaden pounds
Tethered to construction sounds
Pulled floorward, flat onto the ground
And prone, I waited to be found

I lolled in perfect loathsome dread
My heaviness with guilt crossbred
“But let there be light,” you said
And all my blues, they came out red

In songs about St. Valentine
With glass pipes in a conga line
With harmonics and dark wine
And laughter in three quarter time

Immediacy of the Kiss

(OR Immediacy of the Kiss and Penelope’s Reflections on How It Can Make You Do Things You Know You’ll Probably Regret Later)

Limping Odysseus
Your murders are forgotten
I’ll rush to your side
Your murders are forgotten for now

After years of fighting, running
Nothing, nothing left to fend off
Shed your ramparts with your tunic
Nothing, nothing left to defend

But do it soon, and very soon
Come tomorrow, I may remember
Calypso and Circe
Come tomorrow, I may remember their names

Don’t give me time to think
The blood on your hands
The men who died for you and from you
Their blood on your hands on my hands

Let those things slide away
In this instant, only your breath
No hero’s song, no fanfare
In this instant, only your breath and mine

But do it soon, and very soon
Come tomorrow, I may remember
The punishment of the hours
Come tomorrow, I may remember their names

I’ve had a decade of waiting
Maybe later I’ll hold you
For the sneers of my beaux
Maybe later I’ll hold you responsible

Perhaps tomorrow, but for now
Tomorrow’s farther off
The laws of proximity insist
Tomorrow’s farther off than this kiss

hmpff

I want a snuggle buddy. Now please.

"Je m'ennui de mon pays"

Barcelonette

Mountain air is different
Somehow
Closer to the sun, perhaps
Or the snow that never leaves

Finds me somehow crisper
More acutely outlined

I tend to blossom
Under the watchful nod of gristly Frenchmen

Michel Dallo shrugs
And tells again the story
Of how he climbed Kilimanjaro
In three days
But took only one day to get back down
Because he was tired of eating
Peanut butter

The summer opens me to
Woodchucks and local wine

And Michel Dallo
Goes rock-climbing and laughs with us

At the Fête Texas
I cannot help blushing
When they proudly serve
Barbeque on baguettes
Under a Confederate flag

We toast mint diablos and
Pass around tomme du vallé and camembert

I fall in love quickly
With the shepherds and statesmen, and feel sure that

I will tell my grandchildren
Of the time Michel Dallo
Drove our van so close to the edge of the mountain road
I thought we’d all die
But instead

We lived

Water Poems About a Girl

Number 22
One of Four

It was not the moment of goodbye
But the moments
Upon moments
Which followed

Those endless moments
That made me wish
I could build levees round my heart

For long after you left
I found traces of you
An earring, a camisole
A pillow still bearing your scent

Each finding, a moment
To make the time drip by
A leaky faucet
To keep me awake
Against the quiet of the night

Stretching seconds


Into minutes



A stop motion flood











An Invitation
Two of Four

Why don't you come back down to where
My heart vacations

When the days are long and hot,

Where the gentle smell of salt
Is stronger than the carnage outside,

Where my unspoken cravings pulse,
Surge, tighten, release forever

It's not always quiet there

But you'll find a forest, a river,
A cavern that goes to the center of the Earth

So perhaps you come down
To this, my locus,

And perhaps this time you stay









Number 38
Three of Four

The thought of your smile
Takes me far from today, far from the mountains
And all the ways we failed ourselves

I plant my heels and with my back taut
I steel against the current of memories

And I can't forgive you this ocean
Nor the way the clinking coffee cups
And running baths became a refrain
And my screams, our swan song

I feel my knees begin to bend

And I can taste how easy it would be
To slide into where someone else
Has already begun to pool photographs of you

So I try to remember that when I cry for you
The dirt on my hands turns to mud

And nothing will ever be as cool and clear
As the last time I saw you smile








Water Poems About A Girl
Four of Four

Here is what I have learned:

Do not fall in love in a hurricane.

Hurricanes serve too well for itchy poets
Grasping for love metaphors
Pain metaphors, loss metaphors, power metaphors
But mostly: love metaphors

Poet eyes scour the news
Hungry for imagery
The wind and the bullets of rain
The lists of casualties and the understanding
That hurricane season comes every year

Poet molars grind, and it’s almost kitschy
How love, my love and her love,
Was a hurricane

Heat and wet and rising air
Wake of broken china and snapped plant stems
The easy, easy way out
Nonetheless, I’ve written a small set of
Inexcusable water poems about a girl