What I Want Is

To run away from myself,
to sprint at such exorbitant speeds
that I might break some unseen barrier
known only to crackpot physicists,
and separate, bluster away
a dissolute clay self,
disturbed by age
and past infirmity.

To half myself and lose
the worst, the fat
and agonizing twin
womanchild who refuses
to offer me, when pressed,
all my wit
and faculties.

To propel forward,
like a great white shuttle,
only that light,
unpolluted spirit--
whatever part of me
is designed to ascend.

Something left to save
when the rest falls limp,
wilts to personed rot,
ever lost, forgotten,
perhaps forgiven.

I think of this at night,
and twitch my feet beneath my blanket,
like a dog observed when she is dreaming.

The Common Fallacy

“Your history teacher need not be Lincoln or Napoleon. He’s there to teach it to you, not be it for you.”–– John Bloom

My Ethics professor
cannot date my friend.
My Ethics professor cannot
fuck my friend,

cannot bed that girl
whose fiction I critiqued
in class, noted it was too dark,
so much harping on lynch mobs
and beetles.

The sickness now:
his lectures
on hedonism.

Such scandal nags like sand
on a beach comber--
felt, here, but cannot be brushed
away. It clings now to parts so intimate
and in walking rubs, unseen,
those parts to raw
and septic weakness.

There is no severance
where severance is best.
There is only predacious
vulnerability, helplessness,
that Ophelia I know
and regret.

But then, in a moment
at a crowded gallery reception,
my friend’s shoe heel breaks
and she stumbles.
He holds her upright, gently,
his hands just beneath
her ribs. She balances herself
on one foot,

and when she leans
forward to remove her shoes,
he tenderly and without asking
brushes away a small smattering
of drywall from the back of her blouse.

She is unaware,
but this gesture is observed.

And in that quiet moment,
a discrete and
leaden pain arrives--
not so unfamiliar,
and somehow worse
than all the rest.

Apologia

The girl poet
was once compelled to write
of romantic love, though
despite her yearning, her appetite,
she had barely known
the prickle pain
of a boy crush.

But now she is a shrewd poet,
and with womanhood
she's set aside that great
imagined Eros.
Truly familiar with the scope
of what was once her girl-self subject,
the poet fears she cannot
wield her own ink
would she now let Big Romance
have its way with her words.

Instead she writes verse
on citrus, share-croppers,
menstruation and mollusks.

She chooses to lower
a dark, diaphanous veil
on love. In doing so,
she calls love
something different--
a garden snail.

But, here--see how she aches
and writhes when her poem,
her bug, is wrought with ought,
the cool criticism of her work:
its many shadows and ellipses,
its dance around an ancient fire
her readers can only guess.

They are so often wrong
about her motives; she does not
mean to distract,
only dress and laude a snail
as worthy.

And so is her love poem
ever more ardent
and heartfelt a cry,
a challenge now:

Love my quiet dirt crawler
slogging through muck
and waste and feeding
on others’ refuse, leaving trails
as crude as jelly.

Love my night mollusk,
my bottom feeder,
and I will let you know
what bare sustenance,
what doggedness,
what yearning brings.

Meta

I tell Eric
his poem is like a Magic Eye
illusion only other students can solve.
Somehow they peer through the static
and can see the gulls
swinging aloft through the canvas.

But I am squinting,
right eye twitching then
blurring and unblurring
gauzian focus,
unable to make out the image.

I am panicked as everyone else
coos and awws:
“Oh, the gulls! The gulls!
They’re gorgeous gulls!”

I can only imagine the scene,
the crawling, gray-foam waves,
the girl in the surf, her boyshorts
soaked through as she turns her back
against the curdling sea,
against the light, her face now burnt
a salmoned fame along her cheeks.

The instructor asks me to comment,
and I feel so ill, know so well
that anything I say
might reveal my blindness.
I am the girl who can’t
keep up with the conversation
at the cocktail party,
hesitating to laugh at jokes
she does not understand.

“Here,” he says.
“It’s in here.”
Eric traces his bone-cracked
fingers across the stereogram,
vomitous color,
points to a loop
that looks like “sand castle.”

I nod. I shake my head.
“It must be me,” I say.
“It never occurred to me
that this is how it’s done.”

In Medias Res

Arnold asked Jenny to close her eyes
so as not to stare him down
during intercourse. Sometimes
he took her from behind
to avoid this query
altogether.

But by then
the girl had already numbed
to the sting she'd once known
such a breach to be. There was no more
clawing at the fatty bulge above her pelvis,
no more whimpering through pursed lips.

Now was the time
of Jenny's anesthetic familiarity
with physical love.
And in her bend, her recline,
her thrust was the vestige
of a girl who'd once thought herself
well prepared.

The Dead

We are deflated bladders,
bruised fruit.
Our lips and hands – chapped –
we fall away to those
hungry microorganisms
nestled, alive
between the sandy lines
of our cells.

Preserved, we are made in rouge
and ivory pancake –
glown Girlie Mag portraits
for the perverted
and the alone.

Birdsong

Let us not misunderstand
a screech owl’s call.
It is no more a screech
than my own hollering
across the cafeteria:

“Can I borrow two dollars for pudding?”

Later, at the table, my partner warns me
never again to screech at him in public.

And my cheeks swarm pink
for the branding.

My raised voice is not unlike this owl’s cry;
his call is a call of need, a seeking of spirit,
a sometimes mournful trill that flushes
to the killing fields of night and bears
the question: “What’s there for me?”

But how misunderstood we are,
the earnest extension of want
or feeling is labeled
a blood-thinning shriek.

Screech is a word for witches,
old haggish wives
left alone too long
with their soured thoughts,
their cold, sagging breasts
and their unmitigated understanding
that a cry is a cry is a cry
to all men
and ornithologists.

The Successful Comic

Jim wants to throw himself
out his wide
penthouse window,
a stunning view
of bright-night Manhattan;
so close, so clear,
the Chrysler Building
trembles
with a tap on the glass.

For all his first-class flights
and groupie-granted blow jobs,
Jim still picks
the scars on his wrists,
says ‘a scorpion’s nature
is to sting.’

And for all the pictures
on his walls, framed
cell-phone shots –
celebrities he’s met –
Jim remains
the pale-faced fan,
the glazed eye
that sees so few stars
in this city sky.

A Traveler's Dream

When I find myself standing
on an old gray dinghy
in the waters of Loch Ness,
I am surprised to see how clear,
how very teal,
the water can be.

There, gliding up from the depths,
a black form
carrying the contour
of a colossal pea-pod;
it skims the length of its back
against the curdling blue
just below the surface.
The water breathes
for the rising.

And from the deep,
this strange form arrives,
dark and heavy, dry to daylight.
It heaves itself
into the fogged pitch
lingering above the loch,
slaps itself
onto a sinking
red boulder.

The leviathan
is a sea-lion,
a long, gray tumor extending
like a fin
from his anus.

Don't Forget to Breathe

"Nature likes to hide itself." - Heraclitus

Here we are
at the pool's edge -
grown women
grown out,
side to side,
wide and wide,

but not so wide (we are told)
that we might sink.

(There are kickboards just in case.)

Here we are,
each in our skirted suits -
but how would anyone know
for the beach towels swathed
knee to collar
'round our bends.
We are bunched and sopping
from the sweat,
the fear of an entrance
from a whistle-bound
boy lifeguard.

And here we cannot bring ourselves
to slip from the terry-cloth,
to pitch the shroud
but for a second
that we may plunge
into primed water,

cannot bring ourselves to look at each other.
We are better neck-deep in chlorine
than the embrace of a weighted stare.

Altruists

I carry this horse on my back
for fear I can’t be fair
any other way. This
is about our partnership.

Up the long road to town,
her legs extend beyond my ribs –
her hooves drag, pare trenches
through the dirt, the nip-tips
of her silver shoes wearing to dull,
perfunctory nubs.

Her tail sweeps up brickle burrs,
picks up flecks of clay; I feel as though
I am flogged when she swats at flies.

But this is for the sake of us.
And what is sacrifice
between friends?

Care For The Bald Eagle From MontanaorNationalism

My pride is that bucket
full of fish heads.

It is a rabbit’s vertebrae
plucked from the corner of her pen,

the scrub to her water bowl –
vinyl rim caked in scat,
algaed tufts of tailfeather.

It is the crackling of ice
in her cage’s keyhole,
snow gathering atop her head
at a snail’s pace
as we move the other birds
to the barn for the night.

She’s too big to budge.
And so she remains,
powdered –
expatriate on exhibit.

for Emily

* copepod (KOH-pee-pod): small marine or fresh-water crustacean.


My man had sat – a copepod –
On couches, till a day
His mother called, relayed the news –
His dog had run away.

And now he searches dumpster bins
And now he scours parks –
And every time a leaf may twitch
His sneakers screech reply.

And does he weep a lukewarm wet
For losses in a fur –
It is as though he’d never guessed
Such losses do occur.

A Gopher Tortoise (To Be Bathed)

Unbolted
cracked walnut
head like a barnacle –

Carried like a Reuben from his cage,
he stretches the blown kelly gum
where his arms are sewn to his shell.

Four feet above the linoleum,
the Tupperware dish and tepid swim,
he’ll extend his limbs,
spread the scaled spaces between his toes,
and prepare to fly away.

Middle March

Everyone’s gone fishing this weekend –
The juice shops are quiet,
And here I am, alone in the kitchen.
Even the catbox is empty.

Standing by the sink
I probe my mouth with soapy fingers,
hoping to find someone else’s chewing gum
lodged beneath my tongue.

I am Noah

A morning screened to somber shade
Fetched sevens of them slick –
For in the night the gulfs they made
Had caused a wet to stick.

The rain had come with clamant deed
To drive them from the soil –
They poured onto the blacktop bead
As grasses swam in oil.

Standing there on bus-stop hill
I plucked them from the stone –
And brought them to a darker gill
Before the sun-suck shone.

Yes, some might say it sets a squirm,
But I, in fact, am Saint to worm.

Darwin (Sketched and Abandoned)

Jenny paints the scene in watercolor
And tells me to caption her art.

In the Galapagos –
past the lady cormorant, Darwin sees
twenty and three bright blue
cockerels the size of old-timey spinning wheels –
feathers stretched and stodgy
languidly glistening outright
as apricot.

He calls to each fowl –
shrills a bright gurgle from the back of his throat
simmering clean and cool in high arches
out to sea.

Jenny does not understand.
"Where are the cockerels?" she asks.

When I point them out, she says that
I've mistaken pantiel bushes for birds.

I ask:
"Can't you make them birds?"

Jenny says that Darwin is sneezing, not calling –
her blue blots are bushes
not birds.
And that is that.

And so I write:

Darwin sees lovely pantiel bushes
and sneezes out their pungent odor.

"Better," Jenny says.

I say:
"Cockerels are better."

But, of course,
I would say that.

Vainglorious

I starved myself
in New York.
For lack of funds –
perhaps.

But
I reasoned
starving left me lean
and pretty.

I thought a good man
would catch me
alluring
and take me home
to keep me, care for me –
water me, though I would
refuse his sandwiches –
his nymphet.

But
on a subway platform
below 53rd street
I collapsed from hunger
smashed down
to the old concrete
and cracked my face
wide open.