Caterina, you are champagne
clear and cold as golden dawn
and the feel of you flutters
through my veins, and soars up into my heart:
your well-kissed skin soft as white rose petals,
and honey flows on pink rose petals, oh, you
honey, sweetness, and après-midi light!

The girl I love is sitting in her mother's garden,
clusters of rain-heavy blossoms dripping from her hair,
the golden curls at the nape of her neck gleaming,
the sunlight catching in her hair.

O, I am drunk on the richness of the sun
and the flowers and light, and on
glancing-eyed Proserpina, reading Lorca,
listening to the hydrangeas sing.

The girl I love, her body is a greenhouse,
lush and lovely, rainlily-white--
O, my goddess, glancing-eyed goddess of spring!

your skin is pale silk, my white hart, my Sol heart,
your blood as it thrums is red Eucharist wine,
your hair all the sun's godly glory and gold:
so Gloriana, lonely amora, who'd not call you the one and the only?

you speak of the sweet whispers that the waves could-- could!-- bring,
you, all fragrant with frankincense and rosehips and thyme,
you, avournine, flow to and away with the moon's ebb and sway,
and who'd not shiver and tremble before you, loreley!

you claim castle and crown with your easy warm grace,
you claim thrones of ice then complain of the cold,
and to touch your lips to petals is to touch her face:
but Titania, appassionata nostra,
caprice and impermanence, grace and countenance,
our lady of the lake!

have you seen Eurydice
and did she kiss you with gold on her tongue,
and when she bit your lips like a ripe-bruised fruit
did you taste the metal-black sheen of your blood?
and when you rowed her down the river did
her white chemise trail, unblackened, through the mud?
and if she kissed you, I don't blame her;
the Holy Ghost receives her subjects, penitents, lovers
with all the love in her wilder heart,
so tell me, brother Charon,
have you seen Eurydice?
I'd hoped she'd be in the river-weeds,
drawn down to the water from her faery meads.

In her dark eyes thou canst see thine own mortality
And with her white arm in some imperiously indolent gesture,
Long fingers carelessly pointing -- rosemary, rosary,
Rose petals rotting on a Sunday -- Baudelaire would like her,
With her nightshade beauty and red lips in a frown.

"Fier et nonpareil," like some rue-flowering queen
And not even the dark red of the faded rose
Resembles the color of her voice, a color which can't be seen
Morbid and beautiful and indolently morose
Et son visage serait celui de Baudelaire ***** rêves...

The Maiden Maddalena turned her child's face down
And shook out, unfurled like so many a herald's banner,
Her rapids of sunray'd scarlet-gold hair,
And with the frantic stretch of a marionette,
She let the white flesh of her arms extend
And let the shimmering sunrays spill into a glass.

I love you, as a saint
with an aureole of gleaming autumn-burnt hair
an ecstatic shining and bright as the sun,
spilling forth with holy oil
with the face of a white-rose angel from Botticelli's brush,
with the heart of a tar-black demon, a serpent in the fiery bush,
a heavy pink blossom all dripping with honey
a sinuous and serpentine moth-silk scarf, fluttering in the summer air.

and I love you, loving and knowing that
I love you, as a painter
loves a streaked and bright tempura paint
here, sun-kissed as a yellow flower today,
revealing its thin translucent colours the next
and I love you, as one can only love
another who can only love a mirror
whether one made from moon-struck volcanic glass
or drawn from the lips of another.

I call you Giulietta, amore dolorosa,
I plead guilty of wringing and clawing my own heart
and I love you, I love you, I love you, dulcet!
with my red paint like some Muscovy ivory ****** of an expatriate
but you, you're the *****.

I plead guilty to gross desertion
in the face of your tears in the hollow of the night
--oh, I love you, I love you, I love you, I can't not--
toss my hair, fix my earrings, gold against sable,
but it looks too much like the gold of your hair
and I crumble like the sandswept stone
of Ozymandias, of the relics of some ancient love
some ancient had for the contours of the Sphinx
and I just think up more sweet nothings for you,
because every word is a nothing compared to you,
and how I love and love and love you,
but you, you're a *****.

red ink and red lipstick
there is nothing so red and gruesome than
a fireheart, a bleeding heart, striking matches and flickering
on cold white sheets and with your skin white as poetry
(T. S. Eliot's sighs, Bukowski's love bites, a blush red as Plath)
and your bed is neatly made, and my sheets are a field of unmown lilies
and the creases are pressed out, changed,
scarlet lipstick streaks and crimson ink washed away.

I swore-- like a sailor who's lost her heart to the waves--
you could point to your ghosts
and I would burn them with all of my fierce and my fury
and all the fire that I had.

I wish I was your sister that no name nor space could come between
our fingertips, our morbidezza fingertips like Mandarin porcelain
and the space between our fingertips is the space between heaven and earth.

your mother
was a girl with ashes in her eyes and gold in her nostrils
a chain delicate as autumn leading from ear to the centre
of her heart, of the place where our priest's holy incense found its sole purpose.

I just assumed that she
was a wild wanton that ran through the ashes and dust of the
streets of the market at dust, and she loved and did not love
and not loving made it easier to lay on the tabernacle of a sacred courtesan.

we don't have those anymore
they drove them out screaming, naked, heads shaven
as barren and scorched as the desert in their dying breaths
and Maryam, we don't have those anymore,
the word is not courtesan but *****.

but I took it on faith out of love for you
when you told me with fire in your eyes that your mother
saw the face of God in between the sheets of paper
as a maiden pure, the Egyptian lotus in her secret sweetness only God knew,
Psyche drawing back the veil of Isis, looking at the face of her star-birthing lover.

to love you was to look at the sun
and be burned, enflamed, seared into agony and nothingness
and yet to be clothed in the flesh of the sun anew
and when I wore nothing but the star-strewn gold dusk of my skin
I wore the sacred mantle of a courtesan.

incantevole eternamente, encantatrice, l’Imperatrice!
mia cuore marcita, cara, Madonna della la menzogna mia!
O dia mia, di nominare ti’ una piaga, Pietà, piaga, purulenta corusca glorifica ti,
O dia mia, O cuore della vacuita mia!
se solo la sola vista vidi
erano i tuoi perfetta morta occhia, vacua Madonna della menzogna mia!

Sister, you are more dear to me than all the lilies of the field,
more quiet and wilder-sweet
than the last honeysuckle breaths of spring,
and the fall of your hair as you lift your face
is enough to convince me that I am safe.

Fiorentina, when the heavy rains stop and the earth begins
to flower and perfume herself
with the rich heaviness of soil
like a young girl at her mother's boudoir,
I'll be here if you want me to
teach you there's brightness waiting for you,
and part the hedge of roses with my lyre
and show you more than one way to fly out in the night:
I will charm down the worst horrors of our world and the next
if that will keep you safe.

your eyes are pearls drawn
they sing to me from deep beneath
any semblence of light

the water glimmers gold above
like the sun has has cast its lot
and waits for judgement day.

sweet and fair we call our loves
and sweet and fair they be
but when the knotted limbs grow rough
it's the sea that waits for thee

and take your crown of stars
and see it fits your head
for when the the stars come toppling down
that's all that shall be left.

more precious to me
than all the pearls in the sea
were your teeth, laughing.

there was light--
rupture, rapture, flare and flume in the sky--
your hair was the milky way, bellissima, mellissima,
prima donna of the Scorpio sky
gold and white in the night,
stars or diamonds dance and flow
and your hair cascades, ripples, gleaming gold:
He said light, and there was light.

Should the breadth of silence stretch,
Maria, sweet girl of the boughs of flowering
pear and tangerine trees, your stocking-foot
brown like the branch of a sapling tree,
and should the dark profundity of the earth
begin to part (among the hymns and litanies
of things I cannot comprehend
is how Orpheus sang down the earth to part
beneath his feet) then the rich black soil of spring
is where I plant the Could-flowering seeds
of all that I am not brave enough to be.

(chérie, avournine, Eurydice;
you will forgive the
thousand words I do not speak
when you know that language is
but the honeysuckle beneath your feet.)

a brown-feathered sparrow, brown like your hair
singing in your cabinet
heaven knows how it got there --
i don't know, i was reading voltaire
as it jumps around with a sense of entitlement,
i was bewitched by the spell of the so-called enlightenment
when all the enlightenment we really need
is how did a sparrow,
a brown-feathered sparrow, brown like your hair
end up in your dusty cabinet?

The cicadas are singing hymns, my dear,
the wind is lifting your hair like a wing
of some bright-flowing canary
and the juniper, bluebells, the ivy and moss,
ma fifille, ma mie, ma minette, ma poupée,
fleur éternelle de printemps, ma mie, ma mie,
in their first sweet spasms of spring
can hardly compare to fluttering fall
of your slip as it ghosts past my knee.

when I walk in strangers' flower-beds in my sleep
flowers which redly rush out
fervent flush of poppies, poppies
that lulled me back to sleep on a starless Sunday morning
when your sheets were white as poetry, white
as my arms' pallor and bowers of perfumed magnolia flowers
and pale as the poems I wrote next to you
before the sun glowed, the I and the you
and the middle word I will not write, writing blind
because to lose the poems that came to me
in the fading Byzantiums of my dreams
is like falling out of love,
          falling,
                  out of each-other's lives,
                                       out of love,
                                       (love, love.)

and I wake up, with flowers still in my eyes
and I will never lose the pink roses growing through my eyes
even as I no longer am Candide a-sitting at your feet,
because any world where someone like you could've bloomed
is the best of all possible worlds.

how soft are magnolia petals on my lips,
how sweet is their perfume, their taste,
i would break the bottle of its perfume
once, twice, a thousand times
the precious oil on your feet --
like magnolias i suppose,
white and fragrant, flower-sweet
and dry them with my hair...
i sighed a sigh only mary herself could hear
as i put magnolia petals to my lips,
and sadly blushed behind my hair
(the hair i'll never dry them with.)

Sister of summer, sweet sighing duende
Why are you so sad and pale?
The dawn sings litanies of your graces that make
The high sun itself mourn and quell!

Flower of autumn, with your crown of fire
Heart-seized and enraptured your eyes do make me,
Flash skies of dark'ning thunder in them
And the stars that bestir the crystal-cold seas.

Daughter of snow and ice-kissed queen
Your name is a prayer unfit for my lips
The white rose of your face the only dream I would dream
When the sun's burnt the last of its wick.

Lady in the orchards, brave lady, your tears are ever pearls
For spring has come and dawn has come
But I will never be the one to lead them in.

my delphine, dauphine de joie,
sovereign as the sea, I thought you were
a queen, a siren, my sin, with your fisherwoman's soul,
but you are a seal girl singing sweet nothings
and your gleaming gold hair is all a-tarnished from the sea.

I never knew it could be so lonely by the sea.
I am windswept. We do not weep.

A face full of light.
Strong bare arms and
Hair covered.
You can think still, you
Can keep your heart.
You can have my canned fruit.
Child turned away at the door

But bright tropical morning through
Caged bar doors
And the human heart can make even
The red late night light, your
Only light up through the
Little windows with the bars in it
Beautiful.

Caged but
Grey is the color of hope.

My heart's yearning, singing, flinging itself
our there to people with joy I

listened to the school nurse talk about
eating a mango with her bare hands

over the kitchen sink, red and ripe,
juice running down her arms

and I was so happy, I want to live where
ripe mangoes drip off trees.

where a mother wraps me up in her arms.
where it's too balmy to be afraid,

where I don't have to stand up straight,
back straight, don't have to live showing my fists

to show my back isn't bent, my heart is still beating,
my soul isn't dimmed or scuffed.

I want to write poetry that makes the
world sing and stories that give girls wings.

I want to be a child, unconcerned and wild,
wings at the heels of my feet, but
I want to help my sisters sing.

Sun, heart of fire, flames in the sky,
you, like a burning city-- am I then your scarlet silk Rome?
(I am everything for you, nothing next to you)
and the breath is knocked out of me by you,
my heart is clawed out for you and it is I, I claw it, with blood-red talons,
my blood is not for you, my blood is for the universe
and the universe is all you.

and for all my wit and words, daughter of fast-talkers and runners
breath and smoke and city-burners,
for all the words I've spoke and spun
there is nothing--
             no words--
                                   for--
                                                  *you!

my ink, my super-nova, scarlet, green, gold,
your hair is a flourish of saffron,
your lips are the Genesis of ink to paper.

fierce red-tooth'd Infanta
of a kingdom of
fire, of copper,
and of sun-drenched orange blossoms.

ride your sky-lion
youngest princess of the old
rich hair tangled with its roars.

she wept for joy and
laughed for the immeasurable brightness of life.
her sword is her lantern, her lover, her life;
she shakes the battlements
O our Infanta, sweet sister of mine!

you are
an unimaginable light,
the tongue I swallow
and the surge of you is swallowed down
and the white hands come, unfurl
come, little light to the greater whiteness
how I love you, how I have felt your fire
beaming uncontrollably in my ribcage
blossoming and swelling in my throat:
you are a thousand white moonflowers
I have to bite ****** my own lips to keep down.

and to be filled with your white light is
to shudder, like in a lover's embrace,
and you, God, is the name spat out,
a thousand thousand years in the making
and a thousand flowers swallowed down,
and how can I keep your glory closed in
when you wind me into a ball of light?

oh, but I am sick, I could curl up and die,
so strong and so violent is your love
and shivers race and tremble bright
down my spinal cord;
rip out my spinal cord, HaShem
and twist it in a polished white
spiked circle:
the beauty of a snake
devouring herhisits own tail.

Adonai, Adonai, light of our life
I swallow your beauty down.

my lady is crowned with flowers of saffron
and sunfire gleaming she honeycombs through her hair;
her eyes are rain-streaked as silver-stirred seas
and she holds grace and the depth
of an ivory-blushed wild rose's many petals:
mellifluous fanciulla della mar,
what magic she has, how strange she is still to me!

my heart needs magic,
healing, birdseeds and birdsong.
girl with garden hair.
monet's garden or
galapagos islands.
green swamp, barefoot wild.
heart open to winter,
frostbitten hands and open fields,
yellow butterflies and someone to dance with
i think. i
want to walk barefoot in the grass,
not like monet's garden,
not like a stroll through the flowerbeds
but at home, at peace, with my hands full of song.
Hope. a thing that never stops singing,
i want to spin magic out like thread. I want to walk in the sun,
I want to be soft and pure and free, and only be afraid
of too much rain and holes in the leaves.
i want to feel safe in my bed.
i want to kiss a girl with her hair up
and see someone dance.
but i feel like a plant without roots,
disoriented, cast out, careening free
like stumbling barefoot out the front door
with your body aching and heart in your fist.
and birds don't want my seeds.

i don't want to be a girl, a woman, a person
anymore, i don't want to strive
except in the way a wave pushes out,
or water runs down, i want to be a crane, a bell, a tree
a worm chewing through the leaves
a steady lull of waves, a fish that knows its school
or a bird at the beginning of spring.
as steady as the outpush of spring.
i want to flee at winter.

o! they talk about mangoes,
about trees dripping with mangoes
i want to be sweet
and empty of expectations,
no history.
i want to be eve
and only think of love and naming trees.

absent, white hands gleaming dully in the dark
absinthe nepenthe, queen of Eden,
our lady of the lotus-eaters!
flush, the fruit, your cheek, rose-red
breath, your lips, and trickles red-violet,
half the seeds, open the box, strike the match, bite.
(I never knew why they called it original sin.)

they replaced you, Eve,
with their ****** Queen,
and oh! how they praised her red-gold hair,
immaculata, benissima, ave Maria,
and how sweet and high their voices in their chapels of crystal and gold
but how they gilded it all, oh Eve, how they did,
and how they gilded it all to cover
the searching memory of real gold
(who could they blame? cherchez la femme.)

Bring me a smile, for I have none to spare
My wine-hearted maid of the sea stole them from me
And I will never go looking nor pining for her
As she looks for her skin in the eaves.

From sunlight through water we did weave her hair
'Til it shone with the gold of old stars
But I'd give you the honey of my lilit-daughter words
Had she not stole it from me with her eyes:

The dark in your heart and the dark of the sky
Met to dance in the storms of those eyes
Let me, oh, let me, just let me, I plead
Lose myself forevermore in their rains!

She's the grace of the undine and undulating waves
that crash round and chill you to the bone--

Would my love chill her bones, would she care,
Would she care, my wine-hearted maid of the sea?

and I am a troubadour, but I am not your troubadour
my scarlet silks flutter, ember-red, in the breeze, not to you
away from you, from the soft kind heart of the Fool-- like you!
and beautiful and red is Kamala's mouth,
but blood demands blood and poison begets poison
and I'd frighten the heart of a Fool like you.

oh, but I am Herodias' daughter,
and yet despite this all, have I ever demanded a head?

my heart is a concerto
in which Ithaca was but a concrete cage of steely walls
compressed on my heart, and the fluttering concerto grew too much,
and my heart is too much
with my ribcage but a tiger's cage
and wanton cruelty, and living's ecstasy,
and I am always first to arrive and always last to leave--

(et petite souer, saivez-vous?
la nuit, la nuit, je baise la nuit!)

deprived of a tongue, I breathe
all the more clearly.

ondine, ondine, here is your mirror.
you think your lips are your shield,
your heart a weapon sharply whet?
is that sunlight through water in your pale hair,
or is it a drown'd fishwife's tangle?
have your cheeks, my ondine, the blush of white rose,
or the underside of a fish's belly,
white and clammy in the gloam?
oh, do your eyes draw me in like grey clouds thundering,
or do they cut me like shards of beer-bottle glass by the sea?
ondine, sweet ondine, pray tell it to me!

more than anything, I want
to sit by your feet again;
I want to hear the harsh and bitter birds
of Goethe's words flutter from your mouth again,
and the white eider-down softness
of your cotton slip brush against my skin,
burning me with the feel of you
for I think I've found the heart of me lives
with the heart of you

I can never save you and I am terrible with
golden-haired girls with penchants for
shiver-shiver-shudder-lightning,
right through their bloodstreams
and I am a creature of ink and adrenaline
and that is all my bloodstreams have in them
and I can never save you and I can
only say I love you
and how many love-love-love-yous
can you devour before you feel content?

I don't understand anything save for
the wonder at how you could exist,
how like living petals your skin is,
how like the violent tide of spring you are,
how anything in this world could be so bright
and how even in sunlight you were a better Bat'sheba
than me, with the river of your hair baptizing me,
and I've never talked theology, not once in all my life
because I'd never felt the need to shake and shiver in the sun,
and I'd never trembled with the violence of any deity
until I'd knelt to you.

sacred fire that tears the flesh from my bones
blowing the whispers of little flowers
into glass beads the color of the heart of the spring-blown rose,
and I am only the half-hearted silkscreen copy
of the portrait of some Roman *****
until it's realized a woman is never an only,
and when I know the slippery pink petals of your spring-blown rose
I know the heart of God, and in love, love, I trust.