You already know about
                       everything
                    I know about

and because you do I get
                                 to get
lost without my long running
friend: that urge
to explain/destroy      my own machinery
(I mean intrinsic mechanism)
or I mean
               something else and betterer and more accurate and  
                    
                   Who am I without
the ceaseless explaining?

Who are you to come so
fully loaded
            (like Herbie the ******* Love Bug)
?

(Ah) comes the balm of genuine curiosity.
I have been so long falsely
expert.

I am just beginning.  Stupid
and frankly new.

If speaking does indeed
rob us of our fullest
human aplomb,
than let us be bereft
together, beneath the rafters
where language gives way to
shadows and owls, let us
watch a while
the dancers below,
one couple a little apart
so aware of the Being Very
Near they are barely more
human than music.

He sends an edict into
the small of her back, and the touch is less
than he intended, so full of
ready was she, to be
spoken to thus, that she
spring releases into a secret garden
of lone twirling,
each fold of her skirt
rustling something we can't quite
hear up here in the quiet perfect dark.

If language is a dead space ship between us
if its a sleeping chicken
instead of a casserole,
if it's cold tea,
a fake hug,

if it gets lost in the corners of the ceilings
and never reaches her heart
if it can't ever remove the training wheels
if it only knows dog days
if it will always be a contender

than we must start fires in the stars, with whatever we can
and stop pretending we give a **** about accuracy
or communication or being understood
I don't want you to understand me! Who gives figs for stuff like that any more?

I want you to set stars on fire in my name.
I want you to carve the lines of my body into the bowline of a pirate ship
I want you to not be able to leave the room
tear the bread in half,
don't return the library books
don't ask what I think
and don't stop asking
me to dance anyway. Even if it's an old
fashioned dilly. Even if I didn't
wear your mother's
dress, or ever can anything, even the
beautiful tomatoes that covered the red
clay. Ask me.
No matter what I say.

I’m reading Italian Vogue and trying to set my spit on fire.
Where the **** did all these sneaky longings come from?
Yesterday I was a woman with a reasonable hoard of contentment.

Today I am shiverfish on this tiny rug between us
learning the shapes of my own long latent
and thank god still purring longing

these days my pages are full of the most horrible poetry.  Don’t give a fig kind of poetry, the kind of ***** greed to feel at all, to hang on kind of poetry that simply should not be shared.  So, here it is.

I’m making a dress.  I’m rinsing
my lungs out with vinegar.  I’m recoding my dreams into Sanskrit

I’m climbing out the window and taking the roof
I’m dipping the frogs in eggs and fire sauce

I’m reorganizing my clothepins collection
from spring to pinch and back again

I keep Neruda in my pocket and take
a hit every hour or so: *everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

The long white curtain is still hanging on.  The baby still
sleeping somewhere in all of that.  I don’t mind
a thing.  I don’t mind at all. See how slow and good
it can be?  He says and points to my gizzard.  The one he
insists upon me having.  The same one I have given up insisting I don’t.  
I’m addicted to the pith and gaff of his arguments,
how stalwartly he rows them down the narrow
passage of our trying not to hurry banter. I curl into the slow
lilt of how he doesn’t mind strolling around inside of promises,
like Burt showing Mary Poppins another chalk Paris.  Look!  A
riverboat!  Lights and parasols.  Pretty lovers laughing on the prow.

We’re both still wearing your T-shirt
inside the stewpot dreaming we do between ***.  Aprons
and porches, babies and waterfalls.  
The kinds of props you bandit from other people’s dreams.
Shorthand for lovers, with an hour to prove they exist.

Last night the whole world froze over
and this morning, while the sun was drinking coffee and
******* same **** different day
I burned my way to the shore
like a meteor in a car, too warm to make sense
even to myself
in the newness
of this wanting.  

The small glaciers in the marsh shifted
and let go as I passed.  The folded heron unlocked his sleeping head.

for Nave*

Busyness makes one idiotic and forgetful.  And we nearly sunk the night
didn’t we darling, leaning on the wrong swing.  

(It is always the peach tree.)   Katrina doing her Harpy on Fullblast thing
with such deftness and professionalism she leaves us no room to respond

to legs and offers of spread cheese.  And poets cave in like lonely black holes
if they cannot response as fully as they have peaches in their coffers to do so,

or at least they think so and so do we so I escaped to shower, and tried to make
the water hot enough to round me straight again, but my skin still gets in the way.  

I wanted to peel off everything and douse my soul straight in the hot and the lavender, questing
for a readiness beyond the pale, some state rare, and infinitely usuable.  

It was only when, and this is true, when I decided to make a list of
why I love you that the water went in

and the lavender grew instantly between my toes.  And Rosemarey Clooney
danced you in to me and you were a happy Papa at last, and we knew enough.  And there
was finally room enough to
mambo home.

I want to be the girl tied and flung

aloft wildly

I want you at the other end of the rope
doing the flingin’

for G*

of course to take you in my mouth, deeper still but more than that to
peel you from you, spine from wing, sated rind from hoof, dazzle eventuous from the rhurbarb

pie still on the sill and still cooling.  I want to do with you what
ice cream does with a warm pie, a little butter unzip

to be a sugar cube and hurl
myself off the silver tongs and into your steaming, baby, to answer the question with my first tongue.

wild and crude as oil, he can't figure
what this place is, or is not.  No comparative framework

Just blown circuits, but what other
thing can a rose garden ever be?  

When he grabs the baby
and jams her face into the roses

the pair, darting in wild spirals
rose to rose to rose, his disbelief

nearly topples them, and he howls
“Can you ******* BELIEVE IT?

He is a man
having his insides dynamited out

and dancing to
keep from having to look

His woman smiles and smokes
and strolls along behind.  
And when her smile reaches me,

not a: to keep away the bounty
kinda smile

but a: we are the ******* rose garden, smile .  And the sudden

delight comes for me on a felled swoop I did not
see coming, thank god, or I’d a done a thing
to get ready for it and that
spoils the pudding again and again

so dastard and unexpected, I make
room for it, despite myself . What else

is there to do but to long to be a thousand fathoms
simpler,

in the way that water is simpler
than lemonade, simpler even

than that:
to smoke,

if I want to.  And be happy,
if I can.  And to love a man utterly undone

by a beauty he knows
no name for.

dating an inbetween man is like sleeping on a bridge.  You will see
every ******* star.  And
wake with a chill.