Love, what have you become?
In broomsticks and cupboards and pantries,
On the dust-covered stairs,
In the breathless rush of faucet water,
On the crumpled lampshade at night,
Love is the summation of an individual’s life alone,
Somehow still expressed by two across the bridge of language failing.

My finest dusk was the watermelon kind,
When bats skitted in the shortcomings of light,
And on a picnic bench in the cool June of outside,
I felt the dogwoods and pines and other apple-greens
Fidget with insects in the newness of night,
I felt the only grace was
The watermelon kind, and though the world was newly
Dying in its freshness, the pulp squirmed
From my bloated, gleaming lips like
Blubber split from a whale’s side.

In the park, soft-study of sands and swings,
Where the birds while away the unabridged air
Like rains on green, copper roofs ~ their wings.
So I have touched my rainy fingers on the fountain’s surface,
And tum-tumed at the dumpy belly of a dog,
So I have felt the vendor’s balloons like cantaloupes for freshness,
So I have a pocket-change of smiles for all.
At the fountain’s edge,
Like green-molded quaystones feather-singed
By the touchstrokes of the arcing wings of the sea,
Or like a saucer of warm milk
For the alley-cats to drink the milkiness of sun
And then with their paws,
Plink at overturning the day into porcelain shadows.

Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me,
Cover me
Somewhere in the woods.
I’d just lie on some fallen twigs;
Listen to them crackle
As I pushed my back into the earth.
Then I’d look up
And watch the white drop,
Let the snow fill up over my body.

I’d feel it sink into me,
Pour into an empty mold.
Cover me
And make me part of the smoothness
Of the white earth.
Then I’d wait,
For the rabbit or deer to leave its tracks
Over my white.

And I wouldn’t care.
Not care that the snow had been
Wrinkled~
Because I’d wrinkle it too
When I got up and left my tracks
On another’s white—
Maybe someone like me,
Who had watched the snow fall.
And maybe they’d stay longer.
But I’d have to go,
Because it’s only
Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me.

Sunset is a washwoman's stream of rubia dyes
And the crushed scales from the Kermes insect,
While the loosened garments of life slide
Over the ancient liquidity of the hills rolling
As the mountains rolling as the seas rolling
As the clouds rolling as the graves rolling
Like eyes rolling back to sleep.

I am pressed for lullaby,
Not the pillow-clap of thunder or the ether songs of Persephone,
Biding by her asphodels with icen fingers from plum-colored hell.

But press my ear in my mother’s lap of ancient sun,
Of peplos and himation and stola,
And listen to the vines and bunched grapes
And all of heaven sink in its commodiousness.

Press my ear to the sun-fed heart that flows
To the furthest span of the cloth-seas of man and
The solemn songings of the ever-deepening sky.
My mother all along smoothing out the wrinkled sheet of sunlight.

When I was too young to stand against the world,
I ambled its sempiternal floors and overheard clear minds
Blustery through the stark decor of man’s marbled winter.
I was too young to huddle in banners for warmth,
to follow festive the dizzy denizens to their
lightheaded classicisms, their sandal-freedoms upon desolation.
I was left word by regency, word alone.
I was a child at the base of dark thrones.
And too often sneaking looks to steal a seat,
Sneaking seats though no one was to come.

I am a child in a place of dark thrones,
Too restless to settle when no one will come.
Lying just to lie across the worldly floors,
As my clear mind blows the torches to sputter,
And the hallways, one by one,
Are wordless and long-heard.

Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
~Having played serenas to paramours lipping at the cup of an evening bawd~
Like tethered donkeys now with their packsong of pastorela and alba,
No more musical mensurations of the ****** Mary, Cantigas de Santa Maria,
But slung over the railings of dawn-blotted taverns or courts of renown,
Here hang the wine-sotted troubadours of sadness and clouds,
Like drinking gourds, their stringed citherns dangle from their shoulders,
Leaking the strummed honey-wine of sound like the retchings of the nearby sea.