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( Tucson, Arizona )
End of SummerYou are the beautiful lip against my nipple but the red cup, a raspberry is yours speaking you hold up your hand an oracle perhaps while I sleep on into the night another monsoon or not displaced from water to this curtain of heat long ago the goats you tended in New Mexico answered you deep bleats and soft eyes meeting yours their white bearded heads and your palm above my left breast, the heart unmoving, as the water moves out of the city into the earthWhite GoddessHow long you sleep female without a head, head now piled sand by a friend in capris. Say the head is separate from the body. On this shore (Pacific), I house bliss drowning languages, squares whose perimeters do not complete run ninety degrees drop off the face, reappear as rosebush in Chinatown balcony— Fire-lantern I grip your neck, not yet alive I while the poet lies beside you caresses your ear, educates Sun I am the eye the poet disinheritsPolisIf it’s parallel to Greece, they are building a subway system, a métro to reach all over Athens. Loosening the stones of the Plaka, I might cry. Tunneling deep into the city, a (warm) animal who has never been asleep, only accumulating layers, rings, pleasure upon pleasure, domus on domus. Suddenly it’s dark, you enter, the train is slow, creeps before a sudden surge through the sheath under the city, rails cut out. They’ve walled off in glass or plexiglas markers and maps of domi, I pretend they are (Roman) (some are) only seen from the entrance of each age, horizontal terra half-walls, white stone, form compounding form, split diagonal running headlong into 300 years later. This time just a slit of rubble sandwiched for the eye. Kiss me while we pass them – our homes, destinations, entrances. Beneath the light shoals of a small inlet caressing Cape weeds, marshland, thicker salt than any Mediterranean name, the same métro beneath surf, sun-reflected wave. An archipelago can be made of sand only two meters wide, by noon it has receded like salt flung over a boat to clarify. Eyes to the plexiglas. A wife who rarely strayed from her square house sleeps, powdered bones and stone, vacuum-packed air separated by a line of glass. We may live in the shoal, hours to float salt-weight, breathing mirror under sea.
Found BodyI have traveled two coasts in a given year, and not seen the sun from either side as the moon we see in ourselves cool, female, indolent— I have not seen her. In every case, not here and when I return, it will be easier to pretend intimacy direct and impersonal enough, fresh limes on sale in the T station displaced immigrant we mistake for American or vice versa Black, queer, Asian faces allowing me my freedom. I can pass and do I care to call attention to the change humidity yellow rain of the desert steady as air, always as clean. You drive eighty or thirty mph no one knows. It is a line, a very straight line on the horizon we feel as I remember the sky near Taos, or rather my own face under its weather. I want no lovers on the mind no body distinguishable from desire.Always One DirectionIf I could I would walk right out of here the hundred lives we are meant to live and can’t won’t forgive the moment of death even in elation the gauze wrinkles up against the chin, the skull sways, a clear grip from behind. Wrap me in a clean ball and drop me in the hole. My hair parted evenly my limbs symmetrical in the box, we are satisfied leapt from the carriage of a thick-bellied plane one more language embraced by gravity, blown the hell out of here. Brains, skin & meat did I say you could roll back like eyes I have no memory of who she was and her lover jammed on the bed fucking (tenderly) a last time, back to mouth, and she never turning to see the face, as she came, of the woman who held her. There was hand and swell— There was dog like an animal dog ugly ass and shine dead bones under the glow of a pink bulb slow shuddering of tears the sea, I could have pushed her into, or myself sea without circuit always one direction where the sand pulls out a deep caress to the soles, sleepy, we could become— never have to see each other again.Week of Stations1 People in fields fold their hands. We hover where the wheat grew shorter this season, this field among us, gray from harvest. 2 A young wife and her lover at 2 a.m., roll over the glass where window shot-through, and scattered over their spooning. Young wife breathes from her lover in the bed, red and sheared bright with their skin. 3 He holds her scalp in his slim hands and washes brown with cold water, from a pump in the kitchen. Who she shivers as he grinds nails from her hair, the bare sunlit room. 4 She is over seventy missing three teeth she lost at thirty, her husband is short. We are farmers the shingle broke her in half when the sky went black we work in fields, live— How old is the house? She is leaving. 5 They are fucking in the upstairs bedroom, the sound turned off. Her lips are caught between the thighs of a woman. Love each time shall be different. Water, salt. The black eye he gave her shines in the moonlight as she comes. 6 December, a flurry of bees where we came together. Our palms opening from the same small lake. I wore green, like the water, rocks grown with algae. She beats the waves he leaves behind, tell him how she will not breathe down there. 7 In the field my friends early April with a feast and cloudless day. I left all the doors open, ready to burn where the girls took to grass with grapes to feed each other. Which mouth is hers, is mine. Lips and tongue go red against any sky, our color, our homes.Note:“Week of Stations” originally appeared in Laurel Moon, a literary magazine run by students at Brandeis.
I - Into the Shelter of Dark Caves
II - In This Bend of Quiet
III - Silhouette of a Plume
IV - The Loose Connections
Review: Desi Di Nardo
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