Little Orison

"Solder two wires together, somebody else"



Little Orison

Mary, oh Mary,
They tell me you listen.
They tell me your fabric
Is the same as mine.
And though you are clouded
In gauzy blue linen
I've heard it said
That you answer in time

Mary, oh Mary,
My hems, they are fraying
And oil and mudslides
Are staining my clothes.
Blasphemous mouths,
Nights sweating and praying,
Pastel-colored Mother,
Can you relate to those?

Mary, they tell me you listen.
Mary, they tell me you listen.

Tarnished Silver

Spoons out of raspberry strata,
Puffed with shallow scoops of breath,
Are curved and burnished until
A warped face gleams back.
Now stretched at all of her seams,
With vagrant glances upward
She says, cavalier,
"My violin's been strung so many years
I am just sick of the high notes."
So she replaces her chokecherries
With wandering jews, and lets
Her starthimbles tumble downward.

Penelope, revisited

Both the first and second times I read The Odyssey , I felt a great deal of feminist scorn for Penelope, but later changed my mind.

I want to shake you, to say
What were you thinking?

This man, he came to you reeking of carnage.
He slew the suitors who, believing him dead,
Brought you flowers.

He instructed your son
(Your son.)
To slaughter the maidens,
Some of whom had been raped,
Because they, like any decent girlfriends would have,
Told you to move on.

You waited for him all those years,
And yes, I know about these high-minded
High-fisted
Notions about honor, and the glory of killing the right people.

But did anyone tell you
How long he dallied on Calypso's island?
Did anyone tell you about Circe's bastard child?

Did they tell you how he chose a path
Through the water
That guaranteed the deaths of six of his men?
He never told them.
Just offered up their lives.

Surely, surely you must have known,
Somewhere in your woman's bones
You must have felt this violence in him.

I thought, "Stupid woman."

But then I remembered the myriad things
I was willing to forgive
In exchange for the illusion of closeness.

I excused figurative violence
And literal betrayals,
Saying, "It's just part of the journey."
I was swayed by the solidity
Of a body in front of me,
Wanted it more than I wanted
To admit the truth of what had happened.

How are we different, Penelope, you and I?
Did you call yourself weak,
Lie to your friends about who you were seeing,
And curse your own heart
When he brought his sword into your bedroom?

Penelope, forgive me. We are in the same shoes.

Rêver de voler

Everybody dreams of flying, right?
It cannot be unusual
To look up at the gauzy clouds
And feel the pull to be among them.

Surely other people
Thrill to the notion of soaring,
And wired into their cells also,
Is recognition of the vault of heaven
Jarring as memory.

I cannot be the only one
Who arches to ease the ache between my shoulders
Where I know there once were wings.

"Awesome--what, like a hotdog?"

Other Countries


Well-intentioned relatives and friends ask
"How was your trip?"
As though I could possibly answer truthfully

I paste it with insufficient words,
Words that could not possibly stretch
Around the things I saw and felt

Words like:
Fun
Beautiful
Adventure

When I mean words like:
inner earthquake pinch bell pepper new smoke blossom isolate held shift emerge crumble minty salt flats tango miles tantrum lungs falter grow sweat and change

These are not the words requested,
But they are my storywords, honest as I can manage,
And pieced together properly
They explain how I came back different
And what transpired
And why I will no longer say, "God bless you!"
When somebody sneezes

"Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions."

Delicate Ecology

This evening it storms.
I am resigned to spending these maelstroms—
And for that matter, all incarnations of weather
Save for hurricanes, which, necessarily, are family affairs—
Alone;
Because, I reason, the circus in my head is still
Too graphic to inflict on another person.

But in the meantime there are recurrent storms.
So in a bed that seems too wide
And flanked by too many blankets,
I set about imagining
This pillow I'm spooning isn't a lumpy rectangle of cotton,
But a waist that tapers and then broadens into tulip bulbs
And gravity draws my lazy wrist
To the nadir of that precipitous dip.

When lightening splits the firmament,
Raspy white fingers reaching hungrily into crevices of the sky,
I shut my eyes against the instant floodlight
And conjure up a careless knot of hair
That spills maybe just shy of my nose.

It stops there, though.
Much too dangerously specific to pretend a scent,
Because every person’s fragrance is her own
And the beauty of this non-reality
Is that it lacks precision (no eyes, no hands, no scent.)

And though I haven't been afraid of thunder
For many years now,
I still feel better if someone else—
No matter how illusory—is there
Not being afraid of thunder
Right next to me.

How I List

This patchy connection we have
(at some moments electric and viable)
makes me keep hold when I should--
knowing, as I do, that you are given
to fits of caprice--
search for someone more steady;
but then I think
that flagpoles and accountants and refrigerators
seem steady
(and do I want this sort of love from a saint bernard?)
I would rather reach for cherries
from between slats of a jenga tower
and pull closer to some mercurial inamorata
from whose mouth come trinkets
and one specifically
the particular folly of whose hands I welcome.

Revenant

"I am not magic yet. But I am in bloom at the end of the world."

Revenant

She came back!
I don't know what changed, but
I was alone one minute
And the next, there she was!
She was not beautiful as I thought she might be
And she looked remarkably, well, unremarkable
Which, I have to tell you, did not disappoint me.
She said to me, "I am a journeyman."
I was glad for her company because
The road has not been so friendly,
Nor have I, on this road, been so friendly.
I spent a long time on the shoulder,
Entire years, really, envying the grass, the birds, the crickets.
But now, for some reason I cannot fathom,
She has come back from that place where I buried her
Under yards of jersey and stretch poplin
And under layers of sugar and white flour.
We walk together now, and if you see us from far away
You can't even tell who is who.

Things You Don't Want To Discover Too Late

On my stove sits a dysfunctional teapot.

It doesn't whistle.
But, then, neither do I.

Anyway, the teapot
Doesn't whistle
So I never know when the water is boiling.

It doesn't matter much
Because I can guess about the right time.
I usually end up with slightly-too-hot tea.

But it would be nice to have a warning,
A whistle to say, "Hey you!
You're overdoing it."

Not that I have a history of overdoing it.
Or denying that I overdo it.

Overdo what, anyway?
The point is, my teapot doesn't whistle,
So even though the water is boiling,
I hear perfectly clearly when

My brother in the next room
Is playing a game with his friends
And someone announces

"Things you don't want to discover too late:
That the parachute is actually a lunch box."

Caesura

You were candy-cane ribbons, silky coils of color,
As you played, giving an impish tug on a branch.

You were enough color to set the sky aflutter.
Shaming the pink and orange—even the daring purple!—with your flirtations.
And just remembering, I am a deluge of color,
Mostly yellow, as I recall, in awe, the bold grasp of your arms,
And the purposefulness of your feet on the peeking roots of the oak tree.

You swung and your toes made an upside down arc-en-ciel.
And the branch, laden with the weight of a girl,
Bowed in creaky submission.
My cowardice kept me still, but the oak tree and I,
We knew what it was to bend for you,
To open a little more in prismatic wonderment.