White dress across the bed
eyes red from staring in the dark
each door an 'Out'
if only I'd walk through it.

It's folly to do what you know
will kill you
finally.

Like the way we drove all night
to a New Haven motel across from Yale
- hymen intact, wracked with nerves
while you bailed out of car
to make it to the room
before your bowels
exploded.

You shit yourself
and threw the BVD's
into the dumpster.

You spent the night in the LazyBoy,
champagne in hand,
staring, looked for doors
while I lay on the bed
penoired and pardoned.
Fed quarters
into Magic Fingers
stroking me
in ways
you never could.

I'd had the lack
of grace

to laugh.

A bill I stood
the next eleven years.





One Criterion

Find a person
takes you
as they find you, broken,
blackened, just a discard, hardened edges
stuck to cardboard box. No frills
or put on faces
-hold on tight. I've only had
one
who saw my bitterroot,
and loved it; loved the anger.
Loved all of me
clean through,

even when it cost him. Forget
the flesh, forget the violins
and moonlight, listen to me: if you have a man
who hugs you when you want to hit,
-he's it.





Sun King

First apartment
third floor
walk up
cell or cave of
banishment from bedlam
marriage. Mattress on the floor,
two cardboard boxes with a tea towel
spread on top: a clock, an ornament
or two-
low stall
to stow my books.

The street below
bellicose river of horns and buses
belching blackened pollen
coated everything
each time a window cranked
past painted closed.

There never was an empty feeling
like those rooms, before or since.
A matchbox kitchen falsely cheery/gaudy
70's wallpaper
curling at the seams
as much as
I was-
stuck
defibrillating
faith
in life or sanity
but if that cut off portion of the world
felt like
it held just me

it held
you
too.


Climbing
up the stairs
with such a
gaity,
walling off an hour or two from life
you found as odious
as I found mine,
you spilled into my narrow strangulation
till you broke straight through to flesh
more real than any
I had felt upon my bones before, and on the floor
untutored- but as born to it, your mouth
was first to make me cum.
No splendor since has made me feel immortal
or invulnerable as those first lips
that slipped me back into
myself,
a place I'd never been.

Those rooms became Versailles
to carry here
right to my fiftieth year-
you haven't lost
a lick of
luminescence.





Symbiosis

How can these impulsions
pluck you from the thousands
whose synapses fire and sputter,
pick and glean, thresh and cut the chaff
from grain
to find me cleanly
in you,
thrust right through?

The one to one
undoing of the privacy,
the peeking
into one another's sighs,
and why when I am typing
like a Morse code rat-ta-tatter,
do I feel I am transcribing
not just one heart's pangs,
but two.





Veal Pen

Pent up life of any kind
the hemmed and hampered,
thwarted, dying dreaming
of the sky, I come to comfort you.
Nuzzle here a while
now, little one.

For they are always
Little Ones,
the stultified and stopped.
The ones that feed,
for they are food
for other mouths.

The tasty ones
grown salty
in a brine of hottest tears,
and if I kick you, it's a way
to tenderize.

The words
I will not say, the words
that bring on shame:
You make me
hungry.





The Vintner

Cobwebs came to corners
patterned hammocks holding
adolescent angst. My room
for twenty years still sits
atop a hill within a square
of brick. Each year
spelled its own vintage.
I imagine them
the sweet,
the chardonnay
lined up and racked.
The walls
that held such ferment
for the girl who grew there
haven't disappeared.
But empty now of dreams
it's just a room
used for the cast-off chair,
the foldaway, the linens
growing grayest at the edges,
and tucked below, a woman
locked in dreams herself
called 'mother'~
the keeper
of the wine.
Wrapped in years,
played in a loop
her hair like cobwebs
white and fine
like my memories
spun truest
caught in corners
line on line.





Weak

I am weak from lack of sleep,
weak from this daily flying of you
like banners from my heart
repeating thoughts
of lust and love.
Prayers softly leave my lips
for God to keep you safe
and alive,
alive,
alive is what you made me feel
from first, typing as though the keys
were parts of you,
tapping on skin,
softly Brailling my way to life, blind search
for Grail
home here.





Signs And Wonders

In these days of clapped fate
and booming plumes
of smoke,

when every mote of dust
feels doomed, when flesh itself
is perilously tied to tides of history run red
with murder, I have a daughter and a daughter-in-law
whose wombs are heavy for delivery.

Two kicking, crowded boys
wait
for their
waterbags to break, anxious
to come gasping into oxygen. See trees and grass
and find the world about them full of
mama arms and love.

At this time,
when we are at our
worst behavior, perhaps
the time

the Bible says

woe unto them
that are with child, and to them that give suck
in
those
days

wherefore if they shall say unto you,
behold,
he is in the desert; go not forth:
for as the lightning cometh
out of the east, and shineth even unto the west,
so shall also the coming of the
Son of man
be

and I
stagger
at this passage
from Matthew,
Twenty Four.
Remember it preached when I was little,
how I sat in fear, and shook. Afraid, as were all Catholic children
brought up in the fifties when the Fatima story flew
through schools; we lived in dread of that third letter, kept by the pope,
unopened, certain it predicted World War III


and we're sending
in
more troops.

And both baby
boys
are due; it's nature's way
when women give birth to boys in times of war,
to safeguard
for the future-
so my grandmother used to say.

I have a prickly feeling
up the spine that's
forcing prayer
where there was never prayer
before, and I'm watching the sun for signs

to see if
it's
spinning, turning
pinwheels.

Drawing
closer....





How You Heal Me, How I Am Healed

No, I can't
possibly ever

without
being
taken
unawares
breathe such comfort,
coolness
that hardly lifts
the diaphram. Not a sigh
exactly,
more like intake
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh then
cool leaves flutter,

flicker down my throat
when you speak
like that,
and I
rise
from it
when there was only
fever bed before.




Two Lives, Two Moons

Old moon
I'm glad you're still around
with Jackie
Gleason's face,
cheeking up
black skies with a fat
whole look of something heavy
stuffed and wound and secrets
like a ball of twine
grown tighter at the middle
where the denseness is supposed to be, not
wearing your weight on the outside
like a winter coat. Your light
is a moat around you, reflective walls of bright
to shine me warm
when you're butter yellow low
and sitting in the trees; you please me
old man moon.

Unlike your changing
sister, sometimes lime
then white
and cold
and merciless in her unforgiving high beam,
showing the night to be a large and empty hole
between the days.

Just as there are
some
who cannot lay a death down, let it sleep, but carry it
kicking mean,
unburied in its corruptive state
no matter how soft or sad the song, it rides a razored rail
of unforgiveness like your sister moon, the white one
made of teeth, her grief too deep to gentle shadows
with its angry light.

Despite the subscribed
and banded arm
she wears a meanness of white knuckles that'll never be
pried this side of the grave she's only
halfway out of; I lost a father I loved
and wrote a poem

just one

but live my life
as though he still has breath
as though he lives in the moon and when I laugh, he grins
like Gleason
up in the trees.





On To Page 7 .............. Return To Contents



This site sponsered by
<xmp> <body> </xmp>