You never stripped me
clean; my layers have been
lain before
you, as a gift,
an offering,
a ritual obeisance
to the You. I ask:
How can I increase
Absolute vulnerability?
I am
bleeding energy from the lack
of tissues, of vessels, of congeries
of fractures and breaks
regrown in the bones
to the heart
of my matter: Take it
all under the microscope—
believe the empirical
because I can no longer
separate yours from mine
and I’m ready
to be clothed
in your eyes.
Looking down the road into the future, she said, is such a mismatched bunch of words. Looking down is staring through your fear into the past. It’s rolling broken head over bloodied heals because you weren’t watching where-what you were trying to reach. I have more mountains to climb after the range I’m already assaying. Those are the future. They’re nowhere but up the road, path, poorly marked or fully unblazed trail.
What’s to say, others have used all the words.
Roiling waves, brisk breezes, foaming water.
Nothing new there. Color moving from green,
To blue, to gray, to pink reflections of sunset.
We’ve all read it before, written it, thought it.
How to share the oneness we feel at seaside?
Probably it is enough to just be, and let torrents
Of words past suffice, as we draw in the good.
Seeds heed to the wind’s gentle reprimand
As flocks of birds join and divide wildly overhead.
We sit here.
Beneath the wise oak trees
And beside the naive pine saplings.
Near the river that ebbs and flows
Through the current’s (an experienced sculptor)
Persistent etchings.
Yes.
We sit here
And we are
should he ask you to be his wife whilst kissing
linger in locked lips a while longer
White Doe is waitlisted at Barnard &
Accepted at Vassar with full scholarship
Having been the first magic creature
To ever apply
She was bored with staring at the sea
She wanted to be a part of something
Institutions suited her, she thought
She visited her parents’ church
No one could understand why
A magical creature would ask
To be baptized
So, she went to college
And she lasted a year before
Dropping out.
All white deer
Don’t do too well in the wild.
She can laugh about it now
Though at the time
It felt like the end of the World
These patterns of anti-ecstacy and
ariel winter kisses are a kaleidoscope
of swarming black. Death’s deciduous
tongues wrapping cruel worn whisper’s
inside my ears. The screaming fungus
of the love you have for her is a
murder of crows dashing and diving
between the waiting sheets
contained inside my heart.
The teary mucus moments
that I swallow creep into my mind,
diseasing my baby soul, ripping away
all foundations of my entire whole.
And, I know that I deserve this–
this brilliant revenge,
since I couldn’t hold myself up
when I wanted to leap off the bridge
and that admission turned you away.
And in that vunerability, my lips landed
on another man’s glance. But, still–
could you ever see my wealth of love,
or my desperation that was sitting on
the precipice of tangled ill thoughts?
Intimacy, where is it?
Honesty, is it possible?
Where are you?
What about me?
Or us?
So here I am, again,
making our bed.
Surely we know our lives are not about the noise
which continues endlessly
blocking our awareness of what matters.
Today’s noise will be forgotten tomorrow
and so it goes without ceasing.
We have to still the mind to hear the eternal.
All the regret in the world can’t change the past,
so I atone today with random acts of kindness.
What endures:
the consciousness of which we’re a part.
From my window
It is a day in June, the grass tall,
covered in dew, with birds foraging
like a herd of small cows,
but seeking worms, insects, things that move.
It is a day in June and all
I see on the lawn is ageing.
My wandering brain, its circuits firing, allows
as how Dayana is asleep, but would approve
of me thinking that she is yet in her bed.
At thirteen, she has reason to seek sleep.
If she were looking out over Guatemala City,
her view would be other rooftops, grass in the distance.
I imagine that Amanda awakens in passive resistance
to being a poet herself, for words are not her thing. No pity
has she for my pursuit of matters as deep
as poets go to define universal feelings as I am led.
May my words like the wide, red light
of morning, bring an end to night,
and joy to the birds, the young ladies,
and to my new grandchild who seeks
her own way this day in June.
