lowering into the hum of empty bones
among a tired floor
i feel unknown
i feel shaken by drowsy notes
from unruly voices
translating parts of me
between the cries for father and peace
between the silence on my lips that kiss
at the grave digger’s feet

i left in the early morning
                                      before my own breath could
                                                                ­                    wake me.

solicitous,
the dark squeaks through,
sinks in the holes
in the lungs—the worms
found her too.

appendages of the hands
become mushrooms
grown from the soil of old hysterias
to sate the browning mind,
the eyes no longer do.

in the caricature of her boots,
the prints left in frenzied twos
are auxiliary to the compounds
of blues
that do not do

anymore than the supercilious
breath she left above ground
when she was twenty-two—
latent now in a grave
where the light can’t produce,

but the heart still beats.

I emerge at the calm before the storm
where they can't reach me by the quake
anymore.
Before the plunge I am unwithered and unworn
calling Mother at the folds where it was torn.

Cast as foetus and bag of stone
I am pulled down into a blend of effulgence
and the lungs linger in my mouth
before settling for breath between the bones;
marked by nascence and polished.

Held in an agitation of hands I am lifted
onto the summit of all things,
and she cries at the final separation
of our veins,
of our beings.

Do you know that it’s in the way
you move;
that the breath of mine outlined the heart
of yours
and my body beat as a whole.
It’s in the drumming waves that
I found myself suffocating in the
raw submission of your hands and the
gentle rhythm of the hum that went
“alive
alive
alive.”

Not that it was supposed to mean anything
in the beginning,
but that it graced the blueprints of
my veins and shook the bones
in me,
and protruded from me,
and grounded me
into a grave of every fear
and bore roots of taboo words
on my tongue.

Not that I was supposed to feel anything,
but I did.

Or if the morning doesn't come
by the time you find home
I'll paint white doves by your feet
to take care of your bones,

so that if you can't open your eyes
by the time I come around
I'll lay in your grave, meet the gray ocean and
let you be

and then
maybe
you'll get to know peace,

and the wind will tell me it's okay for you to leave.

I can't part water into verses of basic poem:
the classic forms make me choke.
I can't pull the heart out and serve it up
into every wave that pillages the pores
and I do not know how to raise myself from
comfortable fetus to raging sailor.
But I am still alive
and I am sober apart from the fish.
That is enough.

I'm a survivor of many things,
but I still don't understand
anything,
and what did you do those
three whole days
while that ship was under siege
and the thousands of my
nerves screamed at you--
Captain!
Did you hold the anchor
close to that cross nailed to
your sleeve?
I'd have been a different
kind of woman from the one
you left in me,
and if I wanted to be a
*****
I'd have gone to a different corner
of a different street.
But that God of yours doesn't like me,
and if I can't have the sea in
your eyes I'll suffice with a fist
and live off the swelling.