Emmeline by dawn light
borrows roses from your bed
Emmeline by moonlight
brings back petit fours instead.

Italy had its masters
who loved Emmeline with their oils
touched by God in Trinity
and Emmeline in trefoils.

Emmeline in summer
reads your letters until the fall
then she wades into the water
to the boatmen's barcarolle.

Our mutual friend
had told you
how I used to be Queen of a very small tribe.

"It seems almost..." I said, hesitating.
"Like it really happened?" he asked.

"It did happen. But now
things are so different that it seems
ridiculous."

I sat there,
shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian--
like him, not dying
but split and empty like a dead pew.

There are more gospels than they let on, you know.
This man loaned me two records--
Joni Mitchell
and It's a Beautiful Day.

Like poetry, it was love for life for me--
Hot Summer Day and Sweet Fire.

I left Illinois not long after
to Gypsy it in a small car with two teachers
off for the summer.

We read Richard Brautigan,
and wandered the bars in New Orleans, then Galveston
where I left both my crown and my grave in a coin laundry
on a Sunday morning.

"I remember Coyoacan," Jay told the interviewer,
sitting under mahogany-and-cane fan blades on the veranda.
Leaning back, legs crossed,
He smiled easily and added,
"He didn't believe in me, Trotsky. Too bad.

"The palms were dripping that day, but the rain had let up.
Mercader set his raincoat on the table
with the ice axe under it.
Trotsky was reading.
When he looked down, Mercader withdrew his weapon,
swung and sculpted a new Winter into Trotsky's mind."

Jay shrugged, as if to say what can you do?
"The guards rushed in and beat that man like a pinata.
Each fist was an eloquent argument,
each kick a blow for the worker."
He waved His hand dismissively.
"It was too late of course. Mexico is devout, but unforgiving.

"Trotsky knew he was dying, and said so.
An aide brought a basin for any final ideas,
and someone put on a phonograph record of Russian dances.
Across the room, Trotsky could see where Death had scrawled
'Te veo pronto'
on the mirror above the sink in red lipstick.

"He never asked for me, and died the next day."
The interviewer followed Jay's gaze to the flower garden--
dahlias, the Mexican national bloom.
"The Aztecs used to eat them," he told the interviewer.
The scribe wrote this down on his pad from the hotel,
with "Bienvenida a Coyoacan"
in bold script across the top like a leaflet or a prayer card.

I burn my one effulgent hour
at a driveway banquet of unwanted goods,
listening to a woman in a Sag Harbor T-shirt
tell me her son’s wife hates her,
she never sees the grandkids,
and she’s moving to Costa Rica
because the dollar goes farther
and no one visits anyway.

Through my sunglass scrim
I watch komorebi flicker
across the varicose veins
of her blue-white calves
and wonder why I even stopped,
why I ask the price of a microwave
I don’t want.

Twenty, she says,
brand new, never used.
I hand her two crumpled dollars
for a box of yellowed greeting cards
with kittens and roses
and tell her my real name.

All the while
I feel the light through leaves,
the ache to bite your buttermilk neck,
to nip the chantarelles of your earlobes,
while the shadow falls,
reminding me I’d better love
whatever I am doing -
because it may be the last thing I ever do.

Ooga booga darling.
It's me, sunflower face
the fox-hearted misdirected letter of your dreams.

I live in the space between the walls.
I play Candyland with brain-injured devils
for a *** of chilly blue dawns.

I raid your fridge while you dream of dolphins.
I tip toe around your place, judging the art,
boiling the pasta, making a mess.

That's me saying "love me" from the heat vents.
That's my voice on the tv during your ballgame,
making you ***** with the settings.

Give in, please. I haven't got all day.
Once, I was an Egyptian queen.
Once I was a Dutch laundress.
Now I live inside your Jiffy-Pop, getting hot, expanding suddenly.

It's me, sunflower face,
the fox-hearted misdirected letter of your dreams.
You'll wake up in love with me.

You'll wake up as a black horse wearing a feather plume.
You'll wake up to find me in bed next to you, staring.
I've put my stamp, my kiss, my spell on you.

Easy my high-stepping Friesian, shh shh...
It's all right, I'm a specter and I've got the cure
for all your missteps, I'm an oval track, fresh spring clover,

a pinch of salt, and a lot of black cat!

I can't recall what this place was like
before the renovations.
There were difficulties--
bombings, whatnot,
and the removal to the madhouse of the construction foreman.

Blueprints are lovely, don't you think?
Smooth and blue as calm seas.
Birth, though, that's a ****** messy business--
the screaming gobsmacked arrival
held up in the hands of the midwife who never cuts her nails.

It's not so much that I love this place as that I was presented with it.
I woke in these rooms
with the hammering already in progress.
I long for waterfalls and love,
but have skin like bricks, and hair like shingles.

People say, make it beautiful, you can do it!
Be your own fetch, a siren of the flooded basement,
luring yourself with your own song.
Make it your home away from home as drowning sailors do,
find the bright side of blistering paint and warped floors like heavy seas.

All right then. I have tattooed the name Rán
on my arm, see it when I hold you.
We are limited only by burst plumbing, crumbling rebar,
and our own imaginations.
We are castaways keeping our heads above water
in our Rubik's Cube Winchester House
of gorgeous possibility.