Sitting with you in the kitchen
Talking of anything
Drinking tea
I love you
…
Oh I wish you body here
With or without the bearded poem
-Elise Nada Cowen, "Sitting"


Face the firing squad, Evan -
the dowsing rod pierced memorial waters
coiling in the soft morning triangles.

Morning coffee builds browning steam
as I recall the feeling of lips, hungry lips -
ladies of death and water.

The mind is the borderland.
Where does mind go after the body
returns to the ash salt cycle?

Oh, hell - who cares anyway?
Billions of years from now, the sun eats us,
the sun dies and in dying

it eats its children, like the titans did.
There won't be new stars.
Whatever lump of death I become,

will be scattered into the universal zero
way, way before that. But ... my mind?
Does it just shut down, a key turn,

going cold? A message, read once?
A name known to a few, then unknown to all.
I no longer even desire one person like I did -

I just want to connect a few times
before the lazy azure turns black.
Some company in the evenings.  

I know you understand - remember
when someone slowly touched
the inside of your wrist?

"Let me out now please –
Please let me in"

Alone
In black park of bed
-Elise Nada Cowen


Bedding them, saving them -
(or maybe the reverse?)
it was all the same to me.

All of them, like that;
One liked to wrestle first,
another wanted to be tied down.

Their eyes loosed in the darkness,
swimming at me, sparking
& begging, always begging.

But all of our skins need touching,
all of our faces want remembering.
So I gave them what they needed:

I loved them all with unclouded heart.
Ivy trellises inside me,
but memory is still sterling.

Black park of bed -
yellow crush dawn -
I am the giving snare.

The neon vests are huddled
against the white sleek of the van,
crowing cigarette gossips
as they warm up the machine.

The asphalt is plowed away,
churned and melted, black butter
of the earth, pecked to hell
by rapid, merciless steel beaks.

The foreman's memento mori:
tobacco's body returns itself to ash,
a smoked soul rises toward my window,
gray crown cooling and fading.

They strip the street.
Denuded, a dirt stripe stretches
into a water cradle.
They pour tar into a slick shape,

it gleams thousandfold,
accusing insect oil eyes.
Paths can be taken away, remade:
crooked roads straightened.

Two years of grief distilled
in gulped gallons: undone,
undrunk, sweated out
on the cork yoga mat.

New things are placed
beneath the surface,
filling the cavities.
New skin is pressed.

The orange vests disperse
into the rings of evening.
I sit and wait in the new dark:
someone is coming for me, and soon.

Flowers that blossom at night:
those who open in the dark,
those who open to the dark.

I sit in my ***-bottomed boat,
thinking about the turns
& branches of my life.

No: my boat is dry-docked.
Let's be honest:
it's just a lonely bed, no oars.

But I am open, at last:
I am ready for someone
to come and turn their key

in this reddened lock.
Behind this door are rewards.
Behind this door I am waiting.

But let's be still more honest:
no one is racing down the hall
with a key in hand to try their luck.

I am a night-blooming cereus:
open in the dark, scented,
waiting for something in the black

to land and spread pollen.
I will breathe it - I will inhale
the sweetness, the gesture...

The statues are eyeless in Iveagh,
ruins under leafed eaves,

effaced, pitted, blotted,
benighted green and wet:

they have heard far more love
than mine and hers, witnessed

others filled with beer, wine,
& whiskey. Forbidden fruit

rots on the branch. Magpies gather
by blue knees, curious and hopeful.

Crimes of the heart were committed
on that night. The sound of the river

sinewed through the cracked window.
The past was father of the present,

the sheets were stained sails.
Coffee was brewing in the evening,

corks rolled into corners,
whiskey emptied the memory.

Now it's years, years later:
I just walked on water,

the river would not collapse beneath me.
A friend sent me neon letters,

rain is due tomorrow,
and the kittens are restless.

I open a bottle. My lovely neighbor
is building a mirror before dinner,

she borrows a screwdriver.
I am guilty of everything you said.

I am guilty: but there is no jury
who would ever convict.

there is something good
and some light
in this desire
enraging my cells
with divination chanting
sculpting my shape
in violent curves
I don't recongnize the hues
of mornings
because of frenzy:
the new definition of gravity
along the lines
mesmerizing visions of
softness and caring

love is a whirlwind
in any language
a clear water
so you can see
how translucent
nakedness can be

hers is
the bending of space
to smaller and smaller
atoms of delight,
fusion, diffusion, infusion

it holds you tight
from the very centre
(heart&lungs)
when it breaks you
and then these traces
the swarming of photons
in the fabric of skin
sweet radiance,
energetic warmness
an arch, a cohort of waves
crushing everything
like cherries' sense
reality sense
roads' sense

a scarring refusing
to scream/bleed
defiance of stillness
music of laughter
sun raising in your hands

there is something beautiful
for the poetess in me
it just describes herself well
for the never-day
it transmutes
anything:
beauty into horror
horror into despair
despair into words
even thought into
singing birds