If it were time for me to die
I would ring my rue with scarlet red
and wear it as a binding scarf
sewn from every word I said.

If it were time for me to sleep
like a stone the river runs above
I would count the clouds from underneath
an accountant in the house of love.

If it were time for me to speak
with roses growing from my teeth
I'd talk of roots and bark and limbs
and dress my skin in paraffins.

If it were time for me to pay
Charon for my journey home
I'd fill my purse with copper coins
and jelly made from angel bones.

If it were time for me to die
I would ring my rue with climbing vines
and lay my head where heads can rest
with hyacinths and columbines.

She's gotten loose again.
I'm talking about the mean dog I keep
behind the rickety fence
of my better sense.

She's all mouth and teeth,
dumb as a box of rocks.
Careful walking down my street--
first you're someone, then just meat.

Down in the viney valley, fragrant and wild,
came a mist-born baby, a minstrel child.
Down the bramble run, in the muddy black
that sweet babe wandered and never came back.

Down the alley, off toward the stacks
my mean dog rambles to hell and gone.
She lives on my tongue, not cute, not young
and I'm sick and sorry, whatever she's done.

I wonder if this is normal?
If you were here, you would not care that the sheets were plain.
You would hold up your finger,
gently, testing me for concussion
and you would find me to be the same as I ever was--

unable to name the date, the address of this hotel,
or the President of the United States, but I never could anyway.
Oh, love of my heart,
he can't close such unhurried lips around that finger--
let alone each one in turn as the windows turn coral, then azure.

Where did you go?
I must have fallen asleep, and when I was awakened
by the hotel doctor and the day shift desk clerk,
you had gone. "Who?" they ask. "Who?'
Beautiful One, I can't remember your name--forgive me!
But I remember your bare hip, the rise and dip that God Herself envies.

I was made to leave the hotel, and the emergency room as well.
I bought a post card with a dollar I found nested in mud
beside a building in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
My hand, the one you held, the one you kissed and guided
between your legs as you spoke my name,

stopped, palsied, when I tried to address the card for you.
Where do you live? What is the name of the street
where you watch, every morning, the windows turning coral, then saffron?
How much postage will carry my heart to you, immediately?
Why can't I remember anything, darling, except that moment when I was happy,

as you stretched out, soft-skinned on top of me
and I knew everything, and nothing, and loved you so much?

Hive-heads, you human honeycombs of disordered thought,
drip yourselves out of day rooms across the complex.
You have been made to feel like ants in a land of bustling giants,
each one of them wearing enormous, iron-soled clown shoes,
and I'm here to tell you--
things are about to change.

Come out to the green paradise of the asylum courtyard,
where morning glory and clematis vines climb the catatonics.
Which the cleric, which the classic presenter?
Come to where the learned diagnostician finally shuts his yap
and sits the **** down
on a pretty, donated bench depicting tiger swallowtails in flight.

Feel that? Inside your poor flood-damaged skull?
It isn't the medication.
This is real.

Even if you aren't Catholic--
though the mind reels at such easily remediable error--
Creola the Kind can help you.
See her enter by the main gate, with a cheetah on a chain.
The tethered cat is emblematic of the mind caught up in the Play-Doh sludge of encumbering madness.
Enter the healer.
Enter the liberator,
Creola the Kind.

As she joins you in the garden,
she brings with her the sea breezes characteristic of the Creolan Mission,
though this institution exists landlocked,
blighted,
sandbagged into torpidity by a ballast of text books and dogma.
At the touch of her hand on your cheek,
you begin to feel something nearly forgotten,
as if she carries in her fingers a series of bees
who introduce peace, and a spreading sweetness.

Forget about your doctor.
Her nervous condition has become acute,
causing her to build elaborate nests out of prescription pads.
To burn sacred candles there would only result in disaster.
Instead, my dear florid crazies,
lean into Creola's offered remedy like infants at the breast.
Watch the clouds float by like milkships,
honeyships,
sending nets over the side and into your stormy constellation of symptoms,
plucking you new and gleaming from the tempest.

She is a fisher of men, and more particularly of women,
sent here with your own personal Bonus Round from God.
She is Our Lady of the Falling Piano,
Creola the Kind.

That June, I was on my back in daisies,
happy, high as a goldfinch on a space station.

Wait, what June?
There was no June like that.

Having begun with lies, let me continue,
but this time with bigger better lies, whoppers, impossible *******...

I played autoharp at Woodstock,
and made out with June Carter Cash.
On my back in daisies, out on the fringes of Yasgur's farm,
happy, tripping on chords I scored from Joni Mitchell on stage the night before.

Well that's all crap.
I was studying maps of South America in grade school,
braces on my teeth policing every word I said.
But I could sing "Jackson", both parts. So eat ****.

If I were still the debutante I once was,
poised at the top of the staircase, holding a wheelbarrow,
eager to collect my portion of gilded horse manure from the polo pasture of old Birmingham,

I wouldn't be so coarse.
June wouldn't have turned to October,
whites and yellows to browns and deep reds.

When the sun goes down,
I like to sit in the high weeds next to the Walter P. Reuther expressway.
I am the girl guitarist of the goldenrod,
wailing blues for Toyotas and Subarus,
those invasive species that killed Detroit.

Here is the truth.
I have about reached the limit of how much **** I can take.
If Pontiac and Mercury can disappear, what can be depended upon?
A dog. Goddess bless dogs, but a morsel can distract them.

I'm wondering what can be depended upon,
when June Carter Cash must be about a hundred years old, and Johnny's gone altogether;
Carlene Carter isn't blonde anymore,
and even Emmylou Harris can't get Graham back.

Here in the goldenrod, I'm sober as a Baptist raccoon in a church attic,
six hundred miles and forty-five years from Woodstock,
but I can't help wondering if there might be a mulligan god,
whipping out second chances
and bootleg versions

of Pontiacs and Mercs,
old country singers,
and debs who kicked off their shoes
and barefooted it all the way from Birmingham to You Are Here, USA.
__

October, you are a dying man
wearing a yellow suit
voguing down the boulevard
pretending that cane is just a prop.

Step inside the boulangerie.
Sugar melts, cakes grow stale,
but being in the case is like being on stage--
it's "let's pretend" in the sweetest way.

Summer hasn't been kind to us.
There is chewing gum on our soles,
our skin is a disaster, our regrets numberless,
yet we reflect in store windows as clearly as royals.

October, offer me your arm and no one will know
that you are not just being gallant.
With each step, another day ticks away
and when you lie down with me it will be as a near-ghost.

No matter, don't give it another thought.
I am here, once almost-pretty,
my spirit a genuine drop dead knock-out babe
and all yours until November arrives

in its ferryboat, and if you brought no coin
I've got you, allow me, you with the kindly moon in your eyes.

__

Four leaf clover talk to me
Tell me how my luck will be

In the rain
I'm the girl
with the flower garland in her hair
I'm the ball
that someone
left dangerously on the stair

Four leaf clover talk to me
Tell me how my luck will be

In the fall
I'm the girl
with a jack-o-lantern for a face
I'm the book
on the bed
but I never think to mark my place

Four leaf clover talk to me
Tell me how my luck will be

In the night
I'm the girl
with a yellow candle burning bright
I'm the stray
in the road
watching all the passing pretty lights

Four leaf clover talk to me
Tell me how my luck will be

I am the spine of a book, pages open on either side.
I am steel rails down a valley that two greening hills divide.
I am the corpus callosum, of two minds in every thought.
Am I sleeping or here wakeful, one eye open, one eye not?

I am the nest with two birds calling, both the same but different still,
I disperse myself in potions, both the doctor and the ill.
I am the worm who grew two wings, one of blue and one of gold,
Meeting in the middle when in flight and when in fold.

Miroslav Jubert Hans Barinsky
was fond of candied apricot whiskey
and drank so much, so cheerfully, so often
that they stuffed six bottles into his coffin
then down the side of a mountain on skis
they sent it, helped by sail and breeze
past the graveyard and off a cliff
poor Miroslav...come to this.

"And now! What did we wish to say, that we were not able to say?" --St. John Perse
"Love is a stranger in an open car" --the Eurythmics



When love is a stranger, things can get twisted.
A girl can get sick, being the McDonald's drive-thru of eating ****.
She may cop an attitude, or hear the cop say
to his partner, "That chick might as well just shoot herself."
That stuff sticks.

When daddy and his strophe wife, the replacement who shoots up Thomas Mann say,
"We'd like you to move out," after just a month of nervous dumbshow confusion,
the mulligans are running out and the road calls.
Where else you gonna go, baby?

When love is a stranger, there are still poets, painters,
failed academics, leering dittybops, locust nutjobs
and grandfathers walking with canes into
the roaring pandemonium of downtown San Antonio.
There are still stricken drunks on pulpit stools
to tell you, baby,
let's get out of here,
I know a slaughterhouse on the south side
where a girl like you could see god in fumed gold Krylon.

When love is a stranger and the bones bend
like spines of books with pages knifed out
to hold some lack-rent new straw man's works,
it's time to get knocked up with an idea,
blood out a new plan and join the shanghaied sailors
at the 12-step dock in the free lunch church downtown.

When some oxford-cloth **** tells you not to come back,
You come back anyway, you find a new high,
you start scudding down San Pedro with no idea
and no wheels, but a sacred heart, a votive candle,
and maybe a shine-ghost mirage of something better.
Slide into the Olmos Theater,
start tatting together the film edges until you spill
out with the rest of the film buffs,
find a tarantula on the pavement on the way home and say,

"I will not die here."
That's when you pick up some pride, some Spanish
and some mom and pop Texican deliciousness
before doing the dishes to pay.
Hey chica,
it doesn't have to be this way.
New friend Jake tells me that til it rings in my ears.
He buys me the leather jacket I was jonesing for,
and suddenly it's my world too,
holy ****, I have the right to be here,
and I am walking down Alamo towards the cenotaph
thinking maybe being a live coward or dead hero

are not the only choices that I have.

When I first met Skully,
I was an ingenue in a silly fragile plastic body--
a nursery flat, a starter bed,
not yet Anne Of Queer Gables
magnificently not giving a ****.

Back then,
I believed that Skully was stuffed like a bell pepper,
jammed to bursting with thoughts, dreams and
wisdom on every subject;
I didn't know, as we lay together under the ceiling fan,
that he was as vacant and distant as outer space.

He PEZed me kisses, bought me roomsful of useless junk,
and twisted me silly like a bonsai tree.
I let him.
Daydream starlets and archery targets both have curves,
and sit still for the incoming--
I spent a decade with Skully that way,
as if I'd done it with a porcupine and was proud of the damage.

Now, he sits like an unfortunate date brought to dinner--
big-eyed as a girl, smiling too much,
and adding nothing to the conversation.
Still, I can't bear to throw him out,
and so the dogs lug him around like a trophy,
scoring and striping him with their joyful teeth marks
and losing his mandible under the fold-out sofa.

My girlfriends tolerate him.
After all, he's dead, and won't start any stupid crap about threesomes.
The next door kids ask for him sometimes,
and they bowl him at empty pop bottles in the driveway.
I confess, though,
that late at night, when it's stormy, and I'm alone,
I pause before bouncing him down the basement stairs, and I say,

"Thank you, Skully,
for keeping me from having to be alone
in the years before I bloomed into my need for heart, flesh, soul,
and not just solid bone."
Then I lay one on his grinning kisser
and even add a little tongue
just to tease him
for the lack that made me leave him like a southbound bird

The river runs under a stone bridge
down where no one ever goes
a place for old men where the trees bend
and ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

Its source is hidden as is its end
this river that barely flows
where the trees bend, a place for old men
who ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

Where the stone bridge breaks, it cannot mend
what deep January froze
a place for old men where the trees bend
and ask, "Pourquoi chercher autre chose?"

The God People are at the door
loaded off of trucks
where they slept under tarps

Kids, no
I know she looks like Madison's mom
but she's
a God Person now.

God People are at the door
having just walked through
the spiritual car wash,

and they're coming for you,
Barbara.
They want to eat you and leave no tip.

God People are at the door.
Bobby quick go wake up daddy
and tell him
to bring
the Tikka.

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house
but too human for the tool shed.
She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,
provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.
She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer
and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow her.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,
telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.
She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,
but she is leaking into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

Jenny Mechanical can eat no fat, nor either any lean
and yet between the two of them she knows her grease from cream.

Still, as Jenny could tell you, mere maintenance is not love
and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,
glowing pink
then rose
then lavender
then blue
then indigo
to create from refraction a lovely illusion, a rainbow or so it seems.
___

November is the lover who leaves--
December is the long nights, after.

Trust is the toddler on the tracks--
Experience is hanging from the rafter.

Hope is a prayer whispered in the dark--
Truth is the unexpected laughter.

Is it wrong of you to wish her gone to Hell?
Maybe when you get there you can ask her.

Hello, Doctor.
Welcome.

What a relief to see your bag.
No, not your tiresome shirts and socks
and your dime novels;
I mean your black bag, filled with the shining apparatus of life.

Follow me up the stairs, if you would be so kind.
Do you like the dark oak?
We find it somber, like a casket.

This is why we need you so desperately.
We have nearly given in!
So used, are we, to the predations and the despair,
that we women wear black, even at Easter time,
and the men drink, and are sick on the front lawn.

I apologize, Doctor.
You've only just arrived, and I haven't asked you about your trip.
Did you have a nice seat on the train?
Were there porters and cooks,
solicitous conductors?
A woman across the aisle, saying her rosary and weeping?
Monsters and archangels in your fitful dreams,
shooting it out like they do in the moving pictures?

I'm teasing, Doctor.
Forgive me for my familiarity.
Forgive me for trampling upon your necessary reserve.
Do you know why I was the one chosen to meet you?
It is because I am the sanest one here.
I am the limb that can, perhaps, be saved above the knee.
I have a nice singing voice,
but can no longer afford the risk to indulge it.

Are you good with severe injuries, Doctor?
You're not just some kindly old hand-holder, are you?
Here, one has to have eyes in the back of one's head.
We form fierce attachments all in a single afternoon;
a glance becomes a kiss becomes a fevered coming together,
and all before the dinner bell.

Don't look so disapproving, Doctor.
In this place, life isn't a game of whist in the stuffy parlor.
We must rip at it, and at each other, as one would a carcass,
or we starve,
gnawing on fear as if it were a rib.

Have you seen our Wolf yet, Doctor?
Were you uneasy, sitting on the box seat on the way in?
As a physician, you know how the organs and sinews are knit together...
did a tremor run through yours, like doomed babies holding each other?
Let me tell you about our Wolf.
After you've unpacked and taken tea,
I'll take you to the graveyard,
where the earth is always freshly turned.

Our Wolf is large, the same off-white as the doilies on the table downstairs.
The hired man we keep insists that there are no wolves here,
the last one having been shot years ago.
He swears it was a bear, or a cougar,
that gave him that ugly scar across his face.
He admits he didn't really see it, though,
and that was when he could still see, at all.
Now he sits polishing the silver, like an Irish servant girl,
fuming under his breath.

I saw our Wolf myself, Doctor,
when I was out gathering tomatoes from our vines,
just feet from the main house.
There he was, standing as still as January,
staring at me from next to the smokehouse.
Something in me shriveled, like a frost-struck bloom,
and I thought, "Cook will have to improvise her sauce tonight."
The fresh red pickings rolled out of my apron and onto the ground
like so many drops of blood.

It let me walk away, Doctor.
I've been distracted and unpredictable since.
Some wolves eat the organs first, did you know that?
The heart, the liver, what have you.
Tell me, what is it in these bodies that makes us animate?
Are we just some accident of chemistry, when we hope, dream,
fall in love?
Are we nothing but green vines with red eyes,
dumbly waiting?

Once again, I apologize, Doctor.
You're tired and want to unpack.
Will you think of your wife and children,
or does your head fill like a well bucket with the stuff of achievement,
overflowing?

Come down to dinner when you're ready.
We eat on the veranda,
because we have to keep the big table clear
to lay the injured on.
After dinner, relax a while, enjoy a cigar, read your journals.
Then, take a walk in the evening air, just at sunset.
Watch for our Wolf, though,
and I'll watch for you, from behind the curtain.

Goodbye, Doctor.
I mean for now, of course,
but I wouldn't unpack everything, if I were you.
Don't tax yourself the way our previous doctor did.
I don't think he really understood the things that come upon us here,
sudden and hard,
and always from an oblique angle.
Rest now, Doctor.
I'll let everyone know you've arrived,
except for our Wolf
who already knows.
__

Little fox,
I've come to confess to you

though I know your church is the chicken coop
and your Christ is appetite.

If there is mist up on the mountain,
it's my spirit wandering.

The rest of me kneels here,
before you in the brambles like an overturned cup.

Alone in my bed, I have wondered
why I hurt my lovers, why they hurt me,

but I think it's because
angels are so similar to layers

especially when a spray of white feathers
in the air is all that's left.

Little fox, here is my spirit
riding wrapped around your slender black feet.

Let's test our hearts and pull a wishbone--
you've got plenty cast aside.

If I win, I'll change my ways and skew to kind.
And if you win?

I'll call him, saying let's try again
knowing what will happen, and how sly my words have been.

In the Rhambangle, the climbing vines
looped themselves up and through the latticework
like emotions falling from a dream.

You loved the hour-bound birds who made their nests
in the high corners; feathered keepers
without ceremony, counters of our soft seconds and all the rest.

I liked your boots, especially tucked beneath a wicker chair
in the moonlight, lost to your feet
but called a curious thing by the avante garde among the moths of local wing.

I haven't said it well, I realize. My irises kept the words
after I first saw them in morning light.
It's a fool's errand, so they say, making these sounds no string nor key would own,

but I keep trying, because I love you down to the detail, the divinity, the dissonance, and the bone.

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Pauvre petite, quelle domage!

Romeo, gosh, I'm sorry how things turned out,
and sorry I didn't die after all like you thought.
I'm old now, you wouldn't look twice at me
but I miss you still, even so, most definitely.

You could find me tonight across from a cornfield
working the St. Lucy's Fall Festival and how would you feel
about that, babe? I wear a lumpy old overcoat
and sell tickets to teenagers so in love they almost float.

I get feeling sentimental and sad about everything
remembering how you said you were the All-Powerful Weather King
and could make the sun come out if I wished it,
or kiss me and kiss me again if I told you I missed it.

My goodness, Romeo, you don't know how often I still think of you,
like when I saw some crestfallen kid with wild hair walking through
the festival like he had something on his mind
and he seemed lonesome, like you, and quiet and kind.

It's almost midnight and the lights are going dim
so I've got to pack up and go home alone again.
I wish so hard that things had turned out different
and I'd say, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and you'd know what I meant.

All those songs about waking up in a lover's arms--
I don't know what they're talking about.

Oh, I've known the happy wedding night mattress on the floor
amid the stacks of packing boxes
and the delicious view when the world narrows
to a single cherished face.

The bee, though, doesn't live inside the bloom,
and goes still inside a jar.
Touched on every side by an adoring indigo night,
there is still just one Moon.

Allow me morning alone in my garden
with just my mug and dog.
It doesn't mean I never loved you, or loved you less.
There is only one dawn--this one
and it only waits so long.

While I stared at the moon
summer slept with death's black rooster,
her garland tethered to his three toes
with their talons sharp as testament.

While I stared at the moon
frost made love to my bones,
each on its proper shelf like dishes
in a house with snakes for silver.

While I stared at the moon
half-dead men danced with half-mad women
though neither was excited, and neither calm.
Roses twined and cut them both with promises.

While I stared at the moon
my fetch sat down on a river stone,
grinning with the morning in its pocket.
I wept and the night ate my heart like a truffle.

When I was younger, one of my co-workers
was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.
She was just always there,
a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--
some sort of salad.
She was just an ample,
stationary emplacement
as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin
to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties
still rumbling around Havana,
something you'd smile at
but not feel had anything to do with you.
She wore a cross that rested on her *****,
like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis.

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.
"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce.
I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.
What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather
blood and bone and breath
breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.
There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,
just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.
British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs
in grainy archive footage
as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing.
"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered.

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.
I still think of that day at the hospice, though
and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,
like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,
at that wind-down hour.
He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,
but though we protest that we were only in the middle,
we want to see how it ends
he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,
"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

A man wearing only a sodden overcoat and one dress shoe
led a seasick stallion by a rope along the beach
slowly, so slowly
like their ship that descended the ghostly green.

He said to me, "No kiss of yours can replace deck and cabin,
keel and hold. No woman is as precious as the next breath."
Sadly, so sadly
he wandered away, wearing only one earring and a felt hat.

I was, then, a Multilingual Sister of the Silent Bell
and led the abandoned animal through our courtyard
carefully, so carefully
so as not to disturb the stillness with the thunder of his heart.

Wearing only a sundress and carrying one rope sandal,
I know now that summer pavers are warmer than a drowning man.
Slowly, sadly, carefully,
I flowed that day like water from the stone of Samarkand.

If you want to find God, you can go by rail
or catch a jeepney, repaired a thousand times
and driven by a madman with a rosary on the mirror.
Tell him you seek the Divine and be certain

that he does not misconstrue your meaning.
You go down General Luna street to the place
where the Moon and Mars both must bow
to the great glittering of the Creator's face.

When you arrive, look for the Indian Laurel tree
where a crow has come down the backbone
of the Sierra Madre to wait here for you.
He knows you have lost much, your child, your home.

The Sierra Madre crow can offer only baubles,
still-warm bits of pan desal bread, and his wise mein.
He is here, like the church of San Agustin,
as mournful as the Christ, as wounded, as kind.

Go inside, where adobe bricks contain time itself,
and the Spanish artifacts reconcile gold with rust.
There you will find Dibella, Alberoni, majesty and peace.
Outside, the kind crow, the Philippine sky, the laurel trees.

I was putting on jeans.
My dog was smiling.
Sun was coming in the window behind us.
We were there
reflected in the screen
of the old tv I had fixed myself.
A second sun
was reflected there with us.

I was young.
My dog was alive.
We would watch "The Adding Machine"
on the old tv that afternoon.
I was getting sober.
The room was small.
It was years ago
and I didn't know
that I would remember that morning
forever.

She first noticed Antonio when he stepped out of a mob,
holding roses for her;
a bloom for every head in the rabble.

She took him on--
her personal little rooster.
He made love to her as if in timelapse--
an ardent insect skittering adoringly along her body.
She could have kept him in a jar, or a desk drawer.

The war came, then.
The sun went off-kilter, tilting drunkenly into the further reaches of the canals.
What use, anymore, for filmmakers
or their gaudy chattering treasures wearing ridiculous gowns,
smiling automatically at the invading armies?

Her last film was a dark comedy
released with subtitles and smuggled to the West
only to languish in a storage locker,
unwatched,
as round and unheeded as the lessons of history
in its circular tin container.

Her rooster was never meant for difficult times,
and he became tubercular--
within a month, he drifted through the bedroom curtains like a ghost,
and took to living with a flock of crows
as their underling,
but yet, he was flying, wasn't he?

She missed Antonio
and the competition of auditions and readings.
Feeling ****** and out of sorts, she joined the underground.
Wearing berets and trench coats, they taught her to handle a rifle
and to shoot fat-faced officials through the heart.
It was her ingenue days all over again.

Antonio and the now-faded diva met again after the war,
on a single occasion,
at a hotel in Suwanee, Georgia.
She ordered gin through a heavy accent,
and he flipped his good wing, tiredly.
After a silence, they both spoke at once--
"Do you remember..." they began, and then laughed.

It was, by then, the only thing to say,
and it was enough.
_

In the day of the fever,
at the end of the war,
you'll take up my hand and I'll give up my place--
my customary place--
in the hall, on the floor,

to go riding with you.
Remember the days when willows leaned low
over the canal, where we girls used to go?
And oh, the things we liked to do.
But you, My Love, you already know.

In those days when the voices were sweet in my head,
the willows leaned low, as if putting babies to bed;
there were no air raids,
no rubble, cracked and sharp-edged--
just mama's little angels passed out in the hedge.

So now...what, My Pet?
Kisses to catch up on?
Rooms to let?
Do you want to love me slow and easy?
I'll take all I can get, I'm not so far gone
that I would say no to that.

In the fields at the far end
of the old road to town,
you can see the hulk of the Junker
that the home guard shot down.
I just like to think that it fell
from its bedding of clouds
like a baby...My Baby...
where the willows lean down.

The woman with the cat face made a wish
And all the sparrows turned to fish.

The sky produced them at her command
Stacked like kippers upon her hand.

The woman with the cat tail switched it once
And paving stones turned to hot cross buns.

The woman with the cat tail switched it twice
And made Catholic bishops of five field mice.

The woman with the cat heart had a beau
Set him on a gallows and swung him low.

The woman with the cat heart clapped her hands
And made his coffin out of watering cans.

My cat child
brings order where there was none.
Let's not talk about the walnut shell of my womb,
empty birthplace of dust.
Let's talk about my cat child, proud with powers, handy with struts.

Now, listen--
I have forgotten all about you.
I've heard that I was in love once, but who knows?
Show me the evidence; I'll yawn elaborately, and my cat child will agree
that such stuff is dull in the extreme.
Dead fish, on the other hand, become more riveting every minute.

You would not have understood my cat child.
At least, that's my foggy instinct about it.
You would have objected to the damage, the **** and the fleas.
The rumor is, cats were royal once,
and I need the reflected glory and the chance to sleep during the day.

Right now, my cat child is away.
She is hungry for mice, songbirds, or someone's leg.
Me, I don't eat anymore, can't recall why I ever did--
I remember nothing, value nothing, aspire to nothing.

But once,
The feel of my mouth closing gently over the curve of your soft lower lip
seemed such an urgent thing,
like warm waves for mermaids,
a place I would do anything to get to.
Yes once,
the sight of your dark hair sent warm honey over my heart,
my belly,
my ***,
and everywhere, my love, from my skin to the stars.

Now, though,
I have forgotten all that.
What were we talking about? I have no idea.
Now there is only the glare of afternoon
and the magnificence of my cat child who has given me nine lives--
none of them worth a ****,
all as dead in the mouth as a finch with a broken neck.

Here I am, grime-faced at the bottom of a mine shaft.
Here I am behind this ever-changing Halloween mask.

Here I am gorgeous, touched by God and given favor.
Here I am, so eat my dust, see you ******* later.

Here I am untouchable, unthinkable, unclean.
Ask dear mother, she'll explain exactly what that means.

Here I am quiet, just a watcher in the wings
made of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

Here I am inside a book, inside an old cocoon.
Here I am reflecting light as if I were the moon.

Here I am in love with you, a fool to end all fools.
Here I am, a joker queen who can't tell **** from jewels.

Here I am to dazzle you with swooping magic madness.
Here I am one hour more, paralyzed with sadness.

Here I am, an urchin girl without a *** to **** in
to fetch your smoking pipe and tell you where you can put this in.

Here I am for Jesus, here I am for Puck.
To those who'd like to pin me down, I wish you all good luck.
___

Line 8 taken from "The Walrus & the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll.

Love has gone mad, like you my dear
and keeps night in a wine press like a caged bird.
I will save it, says Love, turning the handle
to birth a morning with broken wings of red curd.

Everyone here keeps their mouths in jars
to prevent you influencing their palates, dear.
Anyone with any sense has placed locks on every vine--
all that grows down the rows is the silent brooding volunteer.

Morning whispers madness through your skin,
and wears a crimson cloak made of feathers and strange paste.
I will marry it, says Love, hand in hand with Oblivion
serving wine heavy with grape skins and an odd metallic taste.

I cannot love you anymore.
I cannot argue, not another word.
Love has gone mad, like you my dear--
enjoy together your strange vintage
of dark mornings,
heavy tannins
and Love's dead, wide-eyed bird.

My love of the morning
my love dressed in dawn
My love early risen
and risen, so still
My love whom only
the noonday could ****

My love of an hour
my love in the dust
My love who only
does what she must
with a folded lily in folded hands
my love whom the afternoon reprimands

My love of the dusk
my love of the evening
My love barely listening
my love barely breathing
Who is my love whose love only leaves her
and lingers in shadows where no one receives her

My love of the night
who desires the moon
and the stars all gleaming
through tired trees leaning
My love of the earth, my love of the grave
my love of the sky, the blaze, the wave.

so much depends
upon

the red wheel
barrow

Tiffany! What did you give William at the concert? He's talking nonsense.

Raking leaves--walnut, maple, mulberry, ailanthus--
I saw how it was.

My dog Molly--sweet, skittish, a rescue--
knew the Aussie was the favorite.

She hid his favorite toy in a pile of leaves,
but not well enough--I saved it.

When we were finished, all the leaves at the curb,
the toy was gone, second time the wicked charm.

When you lose something--you lose the place you were
when you first saw it, who you were with, what you were doing.

Fragile things can fall and shatter and when you see them broken
your heart can break a little too--and there's nothing you can do.

I am thinking about broken things, lost things, hidden things.
The leaves have fallen, grown again, fallen again.

My Aussie is gone and the pure clear blue of September sky,
the lofted toy, and Molly too, have all passed.

Today I sit outside, careful with the mug on the chair arm,
even knowing that everything--and I as well--will fall in time.

I didn't win the pageant
because those ******* wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these ******* looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction on my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so ******.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and Macomber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
___

My voice slipped out as I slept,
taking the path between rows of white narcissus
to the upturned boat, just port side and starboard side,
no deck, no keel, with the world below and beyond.

It had normally slept in the blanket of my throat,
silent, cupped in a chrysalis.
Now it went up and down upon the earth
filterless, making many enemies, there when I awoke.

I hid my voice inside a bell, but it was only louder.
I stuffed it in the pages of a newspaper, but caged birds repeated everything.
I set it in the hands of my lover, and my lover left, cursing.
I hid it in the sound hole of a guitar and it spoke in every language.

I taught it manners and it died of boredom.
I taught it doublespeak and it ran for high office.
I taught it sanctimony and it attracted a congregation.
I taught it flattery and it was beloved.

Desperate, I taught it poetry and it lay down again in my throat
where my bones fell in love with it.
A doctor diagnosed the shaking as palsy
and prescribed a pilgrimage to Branson or Las Vegas.

When I met you, you were day-sleeping in somebody else's car
and running around scrapping all night.

With your shaggy hair and that roll of your shoulders,
you made me jelly-kneed right from the start.

Sunny, you kept your loneliness hidden from your running buddies,
your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars in the Texas night.

I kept you coming back by feeding you, like some Italian mother
with a full pantry and a real bad crush. Come onna my house, birichino.

You had nothing, expected nothing, and were fearless, so fearless,
but when I fussed over some new cut you turned boneless as butter.

When I drank you turned to a rumor, gone like smoke, hating the stuff
yourself, and somehow above it. You made me want to kick loose of it, like you.

How did I charm you into staying, my gorgeous one?
How did we teach other what love was, with your silence and my words?

Til the day I die I know my heart is full of you, and all that you gave me.
I held you in my arms as you gasped and ran free, in the black hour of your end.

Oh, I learned to care again, about life, about myself, about it all,
but it took a long terrible while. and it was the hardest thing I have ever done.

Girls always fell for you like autumn leaves, light as sighs, stars of a moment.
I know how lucky I was to be the one you gave your heart to.

It's been thirty-two years and I still say your name and picture your face
every day. Even the angels won't be able to tame you--I won't let them.

Wait for me. When my hours are over I will find you. I will come running.
_

I was young once, living on hope and ten dollars
in an upstairs flat in Royal Oak, Michigan.

I used to eat at The Busy Oak, where junkies and drunks lived in the weird apartments on the second and third floors.
I went to the movies at The Washington.

I remember buying a jacket at Joe's Army Navy Surplus,
and a bright red scarf at some corner boutique where 80s chic was so thick that it made this ordinary girl feel out of place.

The sky was a brilliant September blue that day,
and I was on my last fine free days of being semi-employed,
an art I had perfected all through my twenties...

I needed time to read Vonnegut and Tolstoy,
and to go see Far From The Madding Crowd and Desert Hearts.

Late that afternoon I sat on the wood floor of my little place,
listening to Joni sing I Had A King, while I read the album jacket and my dog slept in the only chair.

My door was open, as if to let the future in;
I was getting sober and I was getting older.

Who knew then that I would shortly get a real job, a car,
and marry some other damaged soul?

Who knew that the Busy Oak would become trendy stores for out of towners,
or that The Washington would become a stage theater?

Who knew that I would ride by those places every day, a couple of decades later,
having divorced, come out, come clean,

Or that I would still listen to Joni sing about kings and seagulls,
and still wear a red scarf against the chill?

Not me,
whoever I was,
waving to her future self
going by on the street like a ghost begun
but not yet walking the earth.
_

Back in bus-and-duffel days
turned out, less to than away,
half-high, with no plan,
I went up the coast.

San Luis Obispo, Carmel, San Fran
and on up to Portland.
That's where we go now
--people my age--
but this was then
when I had no means, no ways,
and just my naivete.

Out in the water, somebody said
to watch for the whales.
They live in the dark underneath,
and like me, come up, then back down
without learning a thing or so it seemed.

On the bus some guy liked
Gordon Lightfoot
"You've Been Talking In Your Sleep."
He spoke my language like a native
better than the pidgin kid that was me.

He told me a blue whale's heart
weighs as much as a grand piano
and can be heard from two miles away.
Bye daddy, behind me down the coast--
thanks for kicking me out.

I wondered, as Seattle became B.C.,
what if it's all just big empty water,
and me lugging some big booming beater for nothing?
Or what if I'm all ears
but the watersong was never for me?
What then?
And what now?

I look out these days not at California coast
but at Michigan lakes,
cold and deep, choppy or still.
I know only that I still don't know
and never will.

When I was younger,
I washed lettuce heads in cold water.
I would set them on my cutting board, gently,
as if my hands hummed with lullabies.

I lifted tomatoes from their cardboard carton beds
and lined them in a row like nursery babies,
my starched jacket always white and clean.

I knew romaine and bibb,
beefsteak and cherry.
I kept my hair tied back, my nails short,
the right knife sharp and at the ready.

I didn't know, then
that lovers remember the wine, not the greens;
the sugar, not the side plate.

I wish you were here to kiss my hands
with their swollen knuckles and cut scars.
What was I doing with my tenderness
when I had someone who wanted it?

When I was younger,
I had a paying job, a small talent,
and a driver with a dolly at the back door
coming every day to keep my walk-in cooler stocked.

I thought that was bounty.
I thought there was no harm in staying on through another fall,
never considering that what I made was not mine,
Or that someone else was paying for it all.
_

swallow builds its nest
from objects it can gather
steal lipstick, why pay?

I asked the Unabomber
if he had ever been in love.

You know--before Montana--
before wandering the unforgiving winter woods
holding a frozen tulip
and a rolled up poem
nestled inside a pipe as if you were a minstrel.

I asked him
if anyone had ever inhabited
the slow-cooking smoker
of his heart.
Was there ever the very emblem
of desirability
in the formula of anyone's eyes?

In your Harvard classes
full of second-week quitters
and callow
nattering plebes
was there never any elevated romantic
who might have solved for the
impossible equation
of your isolation and your need?

Oh Teddy,
you coward,
you murderous nutjob,
if the one whose heart could have stopped you
were to speak at last to your wobbling soul,
could you still be fixed
even now,
or are you already ******?

Perhaps my question itself
is like postage on a parcel
that can carry your remainder
softly out of shame
or suddenly into Hell?

Lies looking for girls to tell them
gather in groups--
little ions looking for a charge.

Girls grow up greedy to spout the wildest stuff
about each other
or boys
or you.

Girls spend hours in front of mirrors
telling lie upon lie.
I'm ugly/ I'm pretty/ that's enough/ never enough.

Girls grow and haul a whole hope chest stuffed with lies
behind them to college,
to the altar,
to the nursery.

Lies looking for girls to tell them are never lonely for long.
Diogenes ran a girls' school until he lost his mind.
The students lied and said he went sailing.

Sit with me. Talk.
Our mothers did the best they could.
We'll always be like sisters.
This tea is good.

Lies looking for girls to tell them
don't stop when friends go home.
They circle when you're
anxious
afraid
alone.

At sunset I shake all my gathered lies from my apron to the sky,
and when they work together,
oh my
how the feathers fly.

Verse

See the crone that comes
through the thorn-walk and the breaks,
with a ribbon for the coffin key
and a dead-scroll curled with snakes,

she will never die.
she will never die.
roll her bones through the catacombs--
she hasn't the grace to die.

Inverse

My eyes were tired, so I set them soft
in the cotton-bedded heart of a pale red box;
deep under the earth with the coldsong quick,
was nothing--and nothing--I reveled in it.

Verse

Hear the crone who lies
with a dead tongue, poison-sweet,
words chopped blind with a kitchen knife
tourniquet-wrapped and awfully neat.

her teeth in the flesh
her teeth in the flesh
slips gangrene dreams through the finest screens
making rot-milk sold as fresh.

Inverse

My soul was sick, so I intertwined
its feminine face with androgyne,
to speak itself twice in a language of thorns
to bleed--to bear--where vermilion's born.

Verse

Bury the crone who's filled
with a paste of hate in her hollow bones,
a candle kept in the bag of her gut
to wax the devil a hag-head stone.

she will never die.
she will never die.
resurrected, insane, infected,
she hasn't the grace to die.
__