she is a little more than a little tired of
lists. And litanies that go no
where, and
hail no one. it would be nice to be the
list, instead, being penned, being spun into be
ing, to be the logical result of a strong clear
desire. (all she can really remember
from that pirate
movie is that the compass only worked if
you could let yourself
wild yawp want it).
More. more (the word quivers at the nub
like something might be actually
happening).
More
magic beans.
Less stirring soup.
More of to fly into
a rage at the intrusion
more intrusion! less
steady golden eggs that bore her
into a whipless
stupor. More unknown. More parapets of cloud. More
lovers the size of small mountains. More rumbling
and coming apart at the fault lines.
More lava beneath me, she writes and grows
warm. Oh! How
that would burn...
You already know about
everything
I know about
and because you do I get
to get
lost without my long running
friend: that urge
to explain/destroy my own machinery
(I mean intrinsic mechanism)
or I mean
something else and betterer and more accurate and
Who am I without
the ceaseless explaining?
Who are you to come so
fully loaded
(like Herbie the fucking Love Bug)
?
(Ah) comes the balm of genuine curiosity.
I have been so long falsely
expert.
I am just beginning. Stupid
and frankly new.
I like to call it blowing on the harp. Or wailing.
Like how helpless my mouth is
in the throes of translating wind, how I forget to
unfurl into the hot pleasures
of bath, pearling on around me,
that I had previously spent several dimes of
anticipation on,
even the mounds
of afternoon-special bubbles,
even the pleasure of seeing my own
flushed and perfect skin, mermaided
beneath this tideless sea.
When the urge to blow upon the slim silver box finds me
I almost don’t. Issues of noise and also
whatever it is when you think “I don’t
know how”. I am surprised to see such
reasonable concerns after all these years
of exacting unreasonable responses
from myself in those silvering and hightide
moments that you never see coming.
As if there were more to
the how of it than lips and hands
and steam and breath and the now weary bubbles
done tired of waiting
and laid down instead, across the water
in flat white whorls,
in a type of peculiar obedience, to the music above.
you say boundary
Like we're in a B&B
upholding the highest standards
of privacy for guests.
I remember standing outside the tangle of humans,
my friend and her four kids and husband
and I felt like I was in a Wal-mart parking lot and
couldn't wrap my head around the exits, even what
the word exit means. All those logistical concerns,
but how do you, and what about...
now, with you, my mind can scarcely make out what the heck
you are talking about
I guess it’s fair to say that the prime concern
of those not in the bed
is not the same as those within
nor can you glimpse, from there,
the bridges, canyons
and glens
the sudden cascade of love to wake with a child in
your armpit and a lover tracing his finger over your
nipple, having been watching you two sleep
and growing so hard with love he can not move
and moving so the boat stays afloat for all
and rolling with the waves that are carrying you to shore
come roll call, all the guests are gone
you’ve come home, or not at all.
she is a little more than a little tired of
lists. And litanies that go no
where, and
hail no one. it would be nice to be the
list, instead, being penned, being spun into be
ing, to be the logical result of a strong clear
desire. (all she can really remember
from that pirate
movie is that the compass only worked if
you could let yourself
wild yawp want it).
More. more (the word quivers at the nub
like something might be actually
happening).
More
magic beans.
Less stirring soup.
More of to fly into
a rage at the intrusion
more intrusion! less
steady golden eggs that bore her
into a whipless
stupor. More unknown. More parapets of cloud. More
lovers the size of small mountains. More rumbling
and coming apart at the fault lines.
More lava beneath me, she writes and grows
warm. Oh! How
that would burn...
If speaking does indeed
rob us of our fullest
human aplomb,
than let us be bereft
together, beneath the rafters
where language gives way to
shadows and owls, let us
watch a while
the dancers below,
one couple a little apart
so aware of the Being Very
Near they are barely more
human than music.
He sends an edict into
the small of her back, and the touch is less
than he intended, so full of
ready was she, to be
spoken to thus, that she
spring releases into a secret garden
of lone twirling,
each fold of her skirt
rustling something we can't quite
hear up here in the quiet perfect dark.
Language is an ingredient
in a magnificent soup.
It is not the soup itself.
Don't satisfy yourself with garlic only, that burning smack
is nothing compared with its capacity
to wend and become something brand new.
So get to the kitchen! Stop holding single ingredients in
your hand! You are not as foolish and unsure as you seem!
Inside the steaming, many things appear that are not
here now, in your thin, tired question.
If language is a dead space ship between us
if its a sleeping chicken
instead of a casserole,
if it's cold tea,
a fake hug,
if it gets lost in the corners of the ceilings
and never reaches her heart
if it can't ever remove the training wheels
if it only knows dog days
if it will always be a contender
than we must start fires in the stars, with whatever we can
and stop pretending we give a shit about accuracy
or communication or being understood
I don't want you to understand me! Who gives figs for stuff like that any more?
I want you to set stars on fire in my name.
I want you to carve the lines of my body into the bowline of a pirate ship
I want you to not be able to leave the room
tear the bread in half,
don't return the library books
don't ask what I think
and don't stop asking
me to dance anyway. Even if it's an old
fashioned dilly. Even if I didn't
wear your mother's
dress, or ever can anything, even the
beautiful tomatoes that covered the red
clay. Ask me.
No matter what I say.
I built this desk higher than was reasonable.
Apparently, I wanted the pleasure of my own excitement
more than a comfortable writing life.
The legs rise, Dr. Seuss spindling, a long
way toward ceiling, and I bungee corded an aviator
seat onto a tall stool at a breathtaking angle so that
I have to be very careful sidling my butt up and finally,
oh, er, off, on! This batting about of language, at great
heights is not for the faint of heart. It’s much
warmer up here, and I’m too high
to get down. So I stay a course through powerful urges
for Chips with Dip or One More Fucking Load of Laundry
and occasionally, in my bored
willingness, I stumble
upon some shimmering confluence
of words that makes me want to rip out
my hair and buy a new howl, or spend
my life trying to become
a white sheet, hanging alone all day
with the sun and the wind and then the stillness of night
and the dew, leaping from blades
of grass to sway a ways with me in this
soft shiver of not yet morning.
I’m reading Italian Vogue and trying to set my spit on fire.
Where the fuck did all these sneaky longings come from?
Yesterday I was a woman with a reasonable hoard of contentment.
Today I am shiverfish on this tiny rug between us
learning the shapes of my own long latent
and thank god still purring longing
these days my pages are full of the most horrible poetry. Don’t give a fig kind of poetry, the kind of dirty greed to feel at all, to hang on kind of poetry that simply should not be shared. So, here it is.
I’m making a dress. I’m rinsing
my lungs out with vinegar. I’m recoding my dreams into Sanskrit
I’m climbing out the window and taking the roof
I’m dipping the frogs in eggs and fire sauce
I’m reorganizing my clothepins collection
from spring to pinch and back again
I keep Neruda in my pocket and take
a hit every hour or so: everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
The long white curtain is still hanging on. The baby still
sleeping somewhere in all of that. I don’t mind
a thing. I don’t mind at all. See how slow and good
it can be? He says and points to my gizzard. The one he
insists upon me having. The same one I have given up insisting I don’t.
I’m addicted to the pith and gaff of his arguments,
how stalwartly he rows them down the narrow
passage of our trying not to hurry banter. I curl into the slow
lilt of how he doesn’t mind strolling around inside of promises,
like Burt showing Mary Poppins another chalk Paris. Look! A
riverboat! Lights and parasols. Pretty lovers laughing on the prow.
We’re both still wearing your T-shirt
inside the stewpot dreaming we do between sex. Aprons
and porches, babies and waterfalls.
The kinds of props you bandit from other people’s dreams.
Shorthand for lovers, with an hour to prove they exist.
All I can do:
snip threads from the skirt all night I have danced in
Too far away
Cut then, a hole in the center of the lambskin chemise I wear over my chest and heart
not the shape of a heart understood
but the form of a heart that does not require understanding
Only what you do not need can you fully
have. All I
can
do:
stay on this rug between. Try to wear holes in it
to glimpse the woman I was before the one poet
told the other: this language will
fail. And it does. And
they are saved.
Last night the whole world froze over
and this morning, while the sun was drinking coffee and
bitching same shit different day
I burned my way to the shore
like a meteor in a car, too warm to make sense
even to myself
in the newness
of this wanting.
The small glaciers in the marsh shifted
and let go as I passed. The folded heron unlocked his sleeping head.
for Nave
Busyness makes one idiotic and forgetful. And we nearly sunk the night
didn’t we darling, leaning on the wrong swing.
(It is always the peach tree.) Katrina doing her Harpy on Fullblast thing
with such deftness and professionalism she leaves us no room to respond
to legs and offers of spread cheese. And poets cave in like lonely black holes
if they cannot response as fully as they have peaches in their coffers to do so,
or at least they think so and so do we so I escaped to shower, and tried to make
the water hot enough to round me straight again, but my skin still gets in the way.
I wanted to peel off everything and douse my soul straight in the hot and the lavender, questing
for a readiness beyond the pale, some state rare, and infinitely usuable.
It was only when, and this is true, when I decided to make a list of
why I love you that the water went in
and the lavender grew instantly between my toes. And Rosemarey Clooney
danced you in to me and you were a happy Papa at last, and we knew enough. And there
was finally room enough to
mambo home.
I want to be the girl tied and flung
aloft wildly
I want you at the other end of the rope
doing the flingin’
all this drink has gone straight to the
fault-line of my vagina. Pressing directly on the
button my body has wired to the word “longing”
but it is not tied to anyone or anything, just the
tequila down there fucking with the buttons
He asks for the knife and I don’t want to spar so I tell him: we made a slide out of it. We made gravy out of it. We turned it into a homeless shelter for banana’s displaced by the sandstorms in your bedroom. It’s a new language. It’s something see through now, something you might hold to the light in a long car ride. It’s an excuse to not listen. It’s what’s left after you’ve eaten all the cheese and there’s still a thousand crackers on the plate. It’s one click away from getting it done. It’s stuck in an old contract it signed when it was young and desperate. It’s high fashion. It’s remembering you on fire with hope like every fucking dawn.
it wasn’t till night that I realized what had been bothering me all day and when I saw it at last I was sad, in the way I do, when the bothering is so easily-remedied-a-thing, once seen, or in this case, felt, as it was the longing of my feet to be without shoes, sans socks too, no winter, fuck concrete, sidewalk, home every encased thing. It was night in a park with the children wahooing when I got quiet enough to listen to the feet, who’d been fed up all day, and when I slipped out of the sturdy hiking shoes and pressed my feet, which by this time had nearly given up hope of ever getting what they need, onto the cool spring grass my silly knees nearly buckled. And I was greedy for the different surfaces, to give them to the feet, who longed to walk and slide over them, to hold pebbes in toes, to crunch twigs and acorn caps, to squelch cold blades of grass together. I got a text then, from a friend, “I want to run naked through a feild of cilantro” and then my whole body started its caterwauling and boo hooing, and I felt as if I’d maybe started something I couldn’t contain, having given into the feet.
A poem is a needle on the energy meridian:
if you hit it at all, you hit the whole damn thing.
