Ardor
When we woke up the roses
had all been trampled, blowsy
froth and armored stalks,
and we stood there in
the weighted morning air
wringing our hands. Nevertheless
there was something magnetic
in the slightly wavering complexion
of where they once stood,
in the ground now ornamented
with expensively calibrated
color crushed and shredded.
Oh to borrow for just an hour
in this tediously agnostic
circumambulation such divine
conviction: to move through
this world as a pillar of fire,
an immaculate decimation—
Powder
i. O
Some blade wedged
in. A tongue of meat
and all the marvel of opening
what needs stay clamped
to live. That was me, twitching
on a tine, acid-stung
and gulped for taste
and to a powder
ground what’s left:
nacre. Dumbest chalk.
ii. Puff
Vervain, sandalwood, white
mint. Purses, silk-lined,
and a tablet of soap.
Pearl mirror, such spectacle
and opiate. Fur puff
to dip the powder out. Disease
so exquisite it staggers
the days into glorious
mourning: that all the rest
weren’t just like this.
iii. Quinsy
Bone-ache, hot. Steeped
muslin. Throat veiled
to pulp, such web, rhubarb
asphyxiate, something
delivered on a spoon
or in a net. All hail
this packet of xanthine,
powdered quease. Stopper
the heart-fist in its own
gone syrup. Quinsy-
sweet, that clot.
Barometric
That weight—
a magnet. Sodden clouds
pressing down everything.
Sphagnum, gypsum, pearl
iterations. Obsidian. Sphalerite.
The woman kneeling on her pain
in the garden, weeding. The woman
sliding into cedar water. The one
collapsed among the ferns
and wild mint. Pentagonal
beetle, carnelian and jade
stuttering in her hair
with all five limbs.
Jigsaw
I asked a soldier about the camouflage
and he said nothing. Kiss that soldier,
place your hand over his heart.
He has been reinserted with missing
pieces and extra pieces. Such
graffiti and noise. Jigsaw
this soldier. Out in the field,
wheat, and in the wheat, weevils.
A helicopter lands in a field
of soldiers wavering like—
These mines dismantle metaphors.
These soldiers have eaten
the flag. Give them engines,
watch their childhoods fall away.
Never said
the fawns had leapt the fence
into the mountain lion’s maw
or that the falcon arrowed past,
a vole pierced in its talons,
releasing the most wrenching
cry. I said I cared for you
and had for a long time. Not
that the shoulder of the wolf
was broken when she fell
from the ravine and her pack
began to shy away. That the sundew
had caught the damselfly
in its sticky pearls and it was
lose a leg or die. I simply said
in slanting evening light
I’d like to have a child.
Jealous
in the jaw: wire me
shut so I can bite
back what I said:
our peace collapsed
as peaches rot and sink—
sweet rot, takes hold
a spot then grows it—
that’s what I meant,
a piece of meat gone
soft and sweeter: sunk
into what was: our truce
grew frizz like mold,
velvet-blue I nevertheless
ate—intook—accord
so fraught—it tastes—
here, look. The clabbered
skin split. I’ll bite,
you’ll snarl, we’ll part
for good. Let’s
leave. The wasps,
they’ll pick clean
what we wrought.
Vertical
I spun around
to lose my bearings.
Not a single bird sang.
Not a single word
through leaves
to tell me where I was.
I picked my way
through moss and fern
and mushrooms
of a thousand kinds,
some kicked over
and tenderly white,
those gills. They
hurt. So many things
here pitched and
fallen in. Kindred.
I could plant myself
on a stump and let it.
How deliciously quiet
my feet to mulch
my hands, my throat,
and thought.
Some seed blow past
and root, or root
elsewhere in other rot
feeding all that
aching vertical.
Quarry
A girl is swimming naked
in dark water. She doesn’t see herself
as graceful but the water tells otherwise,
the way it loosens and strikes
and burnishes. Exposed
ledges, rock’s crumble on surfaces
and the surface of the water broken
by her body, marine and white.
There is also a freckled boy
contained in his body’s wish
to outstrip but for now
mere stripling, too slight
for the shoulders and limbs
that pummel and thrash
to make himself bigger.
The girl and boy
pinwheel in the water
and do not touch
but are connected
by invisible currents
their bodies manufacture.
Her eyes are closed
but she knows where he is,
diving from the turtle rock
a little clumsily, the muscles
like lozenges
in his thin legs twitching
as they push off.
Days of this. Weeks.
Then, detaching itself from
sun, water, blasted rock
another body comes,
a grown man, all smiles
and cigarettes
and offering. I still dream
that the red-haired boy held my head
under water
to spare me what the man did.
This house
The storm tore through us
like a child’s graphite scraping
at the white page until
there is no white,
no page. Now the earth
is sea. It churns up
all that’s buried, all that’s free.
There is no holding it.
So we hold each other
and rock, and rock.
I always thought
at the end of everything
there would be something.
But I’ve already let it go.
Milk
The nurse has made up the bed so crisply.
Tucked the corners’ origami
/> soundly into the aluminum frame.
Your lips glisten, moistened with a square
of sponge. I hold your hand—weightless
thing of parchment and twig—
no more your daughter than a seed
cast from hoof-split rattlegrass, no more than
an asterisk sprung from thistle, caught, wished upon,
let go. I inhale the antiseptic scent of bay,
of balsam. Rooted here, in this cheap plastic chair,
as if I’ll miss something,
as if my missing it would matter.
Just as—branch-snap to feeding deer, wing-shadow
to the scuttling mouse—it has always mattered.
The window frames a square of light
white and blameless as milk. I turn from you
and drink, and drink, and drink.
Slap
I want to write my lover a poem
but a very bad one. It’ll include
a giant squid and some loose change
and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging
headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots
and only at the last minute averting
disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also
a bow and arrow and glossy red apple
I perch in front of my heart. To be honest
my lover doesn’t really like poetry,
which I guess is why I plan to write
such a bad one, so he can feel right
and strong and good in his beliefs.
Tonight when I go see my lover
he’ll hold me as I’ve never been held
except by him and then I’ll have to give him
back. When you get new things
you treat them like glass for a while
and then get used to them
and manhandle them
like everything else.
I don’t want to give him back
but partly it’s not up to me
and partly I don’t want to be his
old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam
arrestingly until the certain, premature
end. You can compose a whole life
out of these rollercoasters.
You can be everywhere
and nowhere, over and over
life slapping you in the face
till you’re newly burnished
flat-out gasping and awake.
Wormhole
In Hazardville
between Enfield and Springfield
near the state line
near the Basketball Hall of Fame
shaped like a giant basketball—
in a hotel room increasingly seamy,
you are fucking the one you want most
and have wanted always
and there’s no one to fantasize about
because you’re staring your actual fantasy in the face
doing every single thing you’ve fantasized
and it’s like some wormhole opens
or black hole who can keep them straight
or maybe a giant earthquake or volcano
but really more like a cosmic event tearing
open the very fabric of the universe
like in some episode of Star Trek
and that’s what it’s like also to come at the same time
because that never happens either,
your cries interlapping like sine waves
or actual waves of two enormous oceans
folding over one another, capsizing
the space-time continuum
that dictates even if you get what you long for most
some odds-annihilating occasion
you won’t enjoy it anyway
because you’ll be in your own fucking
head the whole time thinking
how you’d damn well better enjoy it—
but this one time, this one
staggering time, you manage it,
you together are glorious,
and somehow outside that improbable
epicenter you’ll leave
a huge cleaning tip for
the world ticks on,
sans apocalypse,
the universe apparently
large enough to contain
even this.
[ iv ]
Rapture
I once turned to swan
in the post-office line, the people
waning there with their parcels
and address stickers oblivious
to the enormity and genius
of my wings. Imagine a white
white enough, a tender
tender enough to suffuse you
to a child’s sleep
right on your weary feet?
But the ledgers and the pencils
and the stamps. The daily adhesive.
The bruise and bruise and bruise.
Take heart, oh beautiful people
of the post-office line. I hereby
lend you my ascension.
In my numb and glorious
profusion I enfold you
and your piglet grief.
Clerestory
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I survived that voltage and barbed wire.
Now each day is clerestory,
each night a palimpsest of scars.
The militia pulls on its boots and waits.
On the altars, doves peck each other bloody.
A spider traverses its unseen wire
in the rarefied ether of the clerestory.
He told me it wouldn’t scar
if I rubbed salt in it. Wait
for the psalm to surface in the blood.
Close behind is the conquering army.
A trapped dove crashes through the clerestory,
a bewildered militia of scars.
I strip the insulation and wait
for ignition: for sweet oil to bloody
the engine. Too late. He’s left me
behind, a shipwreck of transept and wire—
you will know me by the scars.
By the crowned and pulsing weight
of every lost and bloodied
thing. Gilded and radiant is the enemy.
His last message traveled the wire
and vanished. God-blind is the clerestory.
All that’s left is to hide and wait
for the report of jackboots in a forest of blood.
To some, it is a symphony.
We collect feathers and bind them with wire
and twine. These wings are our clerestory.
The engine stalled, that metal body scarred
the rails, and in its wake, the blood
bearing its testimony.
The bodies dragged. The shallow graves, the fire.
Who stabbed out the windows of the clerestory?
What will annihilate these scars?
The immaculate landmines wait.
We are bound by blood to our enemy
while God feeds stars to his clerestory.
Why aren’t they detonated? The whole world waits.
Masochist
We were listening to the song
about the boy who keeps losing
limbs and the girl who loves him
anyway ’cause she’s
a masochist. In this way
they’re meant to be.
I’m going to talk now
about groundhogs
and how they galumph
across the sunny lawns
of our childhoods. I’m tired
of disfigurement.
Tired of the mirror.
Of the red tail
and the shriek
and the arrows piercing the sides
of the groundhog
and lifting. Even
of the lifting.
Ring
Control was all
I wanted: a
handle
on the day, the night
when it curved,
when it swayed,
when I could sense
the teeming stars
in light, in dark
the sun’s bare wire.
Some switch
to turn it off:
each shadow
pinned to each tree
like a radius
of infant’s
milk it spilled.
And the leaves,
their gossip
of claw and beak
and wind and heat
and wing. Tether
lake to bank and
cloud to peak.
And weather it.
All this to say I’ve
taken off my ring.
Hive
In the night, fear’s stepchild: all hail
the ticking brain. And ash in the fireplace
and in the stove. What am I doing with these
old-woman hands? They don’t belong to me.
There was one perfect moment of détente
where you called me the love of your life
but you were stoned and possibly on pills.
Your touch, iambic, when we met
and the rest, sheeted mirrors and grief.
Next door they’re perpetually building a house
of schadenfreude and light. They’re draping it
in butter-yellow paint. The bees will take up
residence. There’s honey in the paint.
Bind
He had no idea
what I constructed for us
in the dark
how my head bent down
or tipped back,
what ugly words I made of it.
There was a tree
Terrible Blooms Page 3