How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
-Emily Dickinson


Each body has its own agenda:
Her? Her criss-cross brain flings

scrawls of knuckled candlelight
across the mystery of his face.

Him? His bursting nerves waver,
tremble on the blue patio

where her dress is ascending.
Leaves rug the streets under

coffeed eyes that survey it all
before scoring down the lane.

Murderers must be walking by;
lovers sending frantic texts;

hermits of the plague
smoking furtively in alley skirts.

Bodies are traitors, always asking
for one thing but needing another,

wanting another, planning another.
This body wants hands to find it;

yet pricked with poems,
stiletto-sharp, this body

is browned with night, inhabited
by cascades: is aimed at you.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
-Sylvia Plath


because you're often here:
my head is booked with you,

heart wrapped in your worm;
even my feet walk where I do not want to go

thanks to old paths you laid to bone,
invisible, revived by instinct.

Don't get big headed about it -
you know my memory, I recall

every figurine caught in the web.
Many have no names now

& some of the rest are only names.
But unlike most, you're wont to escape

this night scribble brain garden,
percolating into a shapely world.

From time to time I wonder where they go,
all those strange and lovely yous

that leak in photo negative
from my mind's eye with dusky limbs

& that unforgettable voice,
paroled and incessant...

If you are ever out strolling
by your canal where the waters are so still

& so black that the drunks swerve away
& the sodium vapor eyes recoil,

& you hear following steps and look back
& there you are...
                               walk faster.

I was a chain child, a pookie,
A hellion with a smile,
Tied tight to the backyard clothesline,
No doubt, no kapp.

I got loose. Vicked down highway 2.
Two years old.
Five miles between person a yo-yo
And drunk parents.

I was laughing, lizzing,
The highway clocked up, ripping and running.

The cops finally tagged me, brought me home.
Barely remember but I do.
I was running from them.
Still.

Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
             tracks
             A memory
            Heavy as winter breathing
            in the snow
-Elise Cowen


A white cloud caul brooms back
from the blue jeans baby above,

& a lemon blotch veil settles
over a moss-pocked branch facet.

Slow and chilly the afternoon
peels into memory fingers -

pleasant and strange, like sugar
stuck under the tongue.

I audit odd thoughts:
ephemeral *** reflections

are gauzy in the middle distance,
trapped in a basin of lost things;

grief is colossal, a leviathan
washed in from yesterday

to blight the snubbed beach slant.
In between are a thousand thousand

blacknesses between starry points...
Speckled with desire, I am witness:

the blanching cloud caul is broken
& a day-head blooms from a glass.

if we say stop
scream stop
shout stop
cry stop
utter stop
whisper stop
whimper stop
long enough
loud enough
enough enough
then surely
at some point
eventually
enough will be enough
at some point
surely?

Poetry is seeking the answer
Joy is in knowing the answer
Death is knowing the answer
-Gregory Corso


"Fall is here." She yawns
under ruptured sun & brief,
timid cloud; helm of elm leaf
stung to beaten bronze
and sleeves of copper - the bill
of age is paid in change of gold.
The slacking breeze slugs to cold,
slumping toward the thinning rill
whose runny fingers read my palm.
She walks into an afternoon;
I lay in morning's greening dune,
writing a city's sonnet-psalm.
In this bower hours are years,
years are lives, and lives veneers.