How I know I cannot say
but you are dreaming me
and I feel fingertips
that palpate at my heart.

Testing for
a warmer beat,
a softer, darker chamber
I have kept unlocked,
unwatched,
am powerless to bar-

for you're the one who dreams me,
in warp more real than real-
say all the things I shouldn't feel
yet slip
into my life.





The Renderers

We are ants
swarming a ball,
moving en masse
through madness
shouldering food.

Building, mating,
moving hunger
outward
toward a dead
or dying
star.

In midst of this
appear some
to whom a song
occurs-
who hurl it
with the lungs of God,
demand it heard. Bukowski,
Plath and Ginsberg
had the giant hearts and voices-
giving out with whoops of meaning
the seriousness
of roses-
how bleeding
can touch bleeding
making birds
to rise above the pain,
ask questions-
raining grace to fall
as love
to live
as words
to lift
the small
to lift
us all.





Resurrection

When you least expect
grace, there
she is
hanging from the ruff
of deepest sleep.
Morning comes. That
is the
miracle.





Anemone

I have seen the sea.

I am sure I peaked from shells
earlier than windowpanes.
My name
was Anemone then.





Seducers

Some words want me.
Some words bring me
to a place so fast, so soft
so hard and near and so
I thrust them in.

Some words sing me.
Some words tingle
tease me, please don't
make me ask again
I want them so.

Some words wound me.
Some can open every vein,
can pull the brain out of
the head so shed me
words. Come copulate
the sound of me in words,
like beds of words
and spread me slow.





Southern Exposure

Rolling through the Carolinas
softly, like the wheels are made of moss,
the circular whirr of tires and heat
are all I know.
Deeper, into Georgia
where the kudzu-covered trees rise up
on either side of highway, I see topiary corridors of
dinosaurs
and minotaurs
and monsters in the fevered haze of noonday sun.
Blooms like
splotched blood
on shrubs I cannot name,
and bees the size of sparrows
grow below the Mason Dixon,
in the land whose clocks
run backwards to an antebellum summer torpor,
sensual
and slowly rolling hill on hill.

My blood runs hotter,
thicker
-hum of motor strokes my nerves
so quiet, I can feel a pulse
behind my knee.

My mouth feels swollen,
reddened, juicy. Hair upon the nape of neck
is curling with sweet sweat, my perfume fills the car,
and it is
just like this, the rhythm and the languor:
some part of me
is making love.
The South has slipped inside, I ride
the waves of highway faster,
ardent
like a lover's hips.





Summer Storm

Ozone charge of air
that scares the cats-
They twitch their tails
at what cannot be seen.
Screen door grid of sky-
it gathers green where bluest was
a wind rise, a pine bent low
and praying as
a thunderclap rolls lead.
It hits the house and skull
to roar inside the head,
lightening flares the sky
with brilliant spiderweb, threatening
all that's precious, all that scorches
burns or drowns.
The cats will hiss
and ricochet
like bullets on the rug,
and I hug hope.
The old tree grabs the eaves
to shake the shingles loose.
Rain assaults petunias
pressed to ground
and pounded flat
by bombing water.
Meteorologic warfare
will attack a summer stupor
with an army of percussion.
When the world has shrunk to hammock
and the hum of bees, it comes.
Just as suddenly, it rushes off.
Proud puddles
leave the memory of loud, then first the birds
chirping of delivered day, the dripping silver drops while I mop windowsill
with soft cloth
and count myself survior.
Cerulean world of flowers
slowly standing up- See!, there is a sun again
and buttery peace and cats,
inclined to warmth
are curled and cleaning.





What's Left

I guess, in the right light
I might still be that shard of moon
beam, maybe.

I guess,
with the proper music
throbbing something like Saint-Saens
I could

begin

the beguine. Maybe if my perfume
had a note of lilac still,
I'd spill
every man
from his chair
tipping to see who Spring was,
will myself back
ward, but I have this:

this true voice,

this heart you could plant
a crop in,
and the way your heart will stop
whenever I
softly
speak
your
name.





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.




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