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 built this desk higher than was reasonable.  
Apparently, I wanted the pleasure of my own excitement
more than a comfortable writing life.

The legs rise, Dr. Seuss spindling, a long
way toward ceiling, and I bungee corded an aviator
seat onto a tall stool at a  breathtaking angle so that
I have to be very careful sidling my **** up and finally,
oh, er, off, on!   This batting about of language, at great
heights is not for the faint of heart.  It’s much
warmer up here, and I’m too high
to get down.  So I stay a course through powerful urges
for Chips with Dip or One More ******* Load of Laundry
and occasionally, in my bored
willingness, I stumble

upon some shimmering confluence
of words that makes me want to rip out
my hair and buy a new howl, or spend
my life trying to become
a white sheet, hanging alone all day
with the sun and the wind and then the stillness of night

and the dew, leaping from blades
of grass to sway a ways with me in this
soft shiver of not yet morning.

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.

All I can do:  

snip threads from the skirt all night I have danced in

                                  Too far away

Cut then, a hole in the center of the lambskin chemise I wear over my chest and heart
not the shape of a heart understood
but the form of a heart that does not require understanding


Only what you do not need can you fully
have.  All I
can



do:

stay on this rug between.  Try to wear holes in it
to glimpse the woman I was before the one poet

told the other: this language will
fail.  And it does.  And
they are saved.

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.