Seeing Eight

I can't keep my concentration on you.
I feel and almost brush against, see
the breath of
the web of connections
conjunctions
- we're, don't, they'll, you've,
can't, I'd, would've -
The strings bounce and pull each other
pull under me (with you).
They exist. They exist.
My legs and pincers on this tight thread
vibrate under my legs and pincers on
a tight thread four rings away.
A me and another "you" I can see
in kaleidescope
seeing me
then scuttling away
in this sticky constellation
with some another possibility.

5, 24, 08

medicine

When I know I'll see you I cry
with unadulterated remorse
that "I" includes "will"
"will" stands between then,
more than months, than road.
I'm sick with miss.
My throat waters from swallowing
air
rolling into me, empty
bringing months, bringing road.
And any shade of your skin or hair
or teeth in the sunset
only tastes the same as
"will."

may 24, 08

Pale

Every pink thing I try to like, I wear and bear
I drop a pen, headlong onto the front,
or break it on some tree branch
I wouldn't push down and break.
My pink looks like my mother made me
and i still love my father.

5, 24, 08

Drawstring

As she was dying we noticed
she would draw up her shoulders
and stare at her knees.
First, just when being helped
to the bathroom,
then when refusing to finish
her hamburger and gravy pulp.
Then when refusing to stay
awake to sing.
There was so much effort.
This is dying? So hard to do.
Then today, I found my subject of study
the hem of my underwear between my knees
as I helped myself to the toilet,
with my shoulder blades gathered up
by a string on my spine.
I wondered how long she had
put so much effort into
each living deed.

may 24 08

Neighborhood

A window, a florescent moon
cut into the concrete sky
built on a dark giant,
a black farmer
breath to the floor
ebbing to the
skin of his
wife, jade white.

5 . 12. 08

Baby

My ideals were offended in bloody underwear.
A red shadow only stretches after women and death.
And they said "baby"
until it moved up under my ears
and bloomed an apple blossom,
as if blood made apples,
as if blood made petal clusters to hang above babies.

What are women and death
that they should drain so?
The things they treasure, they hide.

may 12. 08

this is

Bread dough
scraped from your palms
someone sweeps together
and points to the beginning.
This pulp of dried sweat,
flour and water - this is
our soul.

may 6. 08

2 madeleine, i miss

What will she look like in heaven?
Myopic.
Neck too long to see her hooves
trip, scattering scraps missing
the wastebasket (a plastic latticed safety deposit).
How will it hurt to bend a neck inside out?
Twist its nozzle upside around
till her head thumps on the floor
smashing into wadded glacier deposits
and filling her lake again
with what is true
- the part she knew had no shore -
and what else is true
- the sand in her lake, the skycap -
Then they'll invite her in.
Fashioned some comic crazy straw immortal.

may 10, 08

madeleine, i miss

She moves me,
a grandmother who never
stopped writing in the dirt.
A woman there to the ones
who come.
And I do these things for her,
to her because
I never sat my
dusty hands over hers.
I imagine her lifeline as a transportation.
I sink rocks into a movement.
That's her - stones
sunk to the bottom of an
aging rush.
Where death is like another
decade
to be insecure and haughty over.

may 8, 08

What Tips the Bowl

They felt alien without
their breaths, their skins
rubbing another's.
Shakily, they climbed and fell
down from shoulders to caress another
with noses.
Re finding the primeval bowl
that pours its contents from
under hips to the base of navel.
They shovel earth
back into houses they made
on the shoulders of the horizon,
the hard floors they made to keep
the bowl steady and indifferent on breath or skin.

5- 8 -08

to the Touch

Naked to the touch,
I shiver to a cymbal crescendo.
There is an eye at the thick of a needle
to slip into, and then through.
Nothing fits but the bloodiest muscle of self,
that slick, compact drop
which cannot sacrifice one glint.
It curls to your touch,
it glints like that thrashed cymbal.
We two are made of that, are squeezed as that.
Too self to bring apologies, anything
but the memory of a needle we came through
to touch.

may 8, 08

Upturned Umbrella

A body bowed up
spine through crown
with everything underneath
a terrorized nest. The warm birch branches
rolled together, against one another, unable to hold
air water matter.
Rocking between a squat and a kowtow
barely tipping the silky web of an upturned
umbrella, filling
as if for a bath.
Everything outside that tipsy arc
lands on it.
A bath is just the world gathered
into an upturned umbrella.

may 8, 08

Self Addressed Envelope

If she sent her shoes
would you put them on and walk
away from whatever
you're writing
and just say it in words that
breathe and disappear?
Would you put her shoes,
toes to toes,
blue scuffs to what ever she's got on,
and tell the truth?

ap 11 0 8

A Nose Does This

Close your hand.
You're not here.
All that shows is a nose and
why should it be all that's left?
Nothing to land softly against
but a nose.
It will not land like that.
It will slide over what ever is left,
breathing between our skin
keeping it apart.
And only landing
after all is exhausted.

ap 11, 08

Playground

I forgot
I almost
forgot.
I'm not supposed to keep
being this insane.
I'm supposed to love you for it,
then go.
Wander some distance from this play ground,
this sunrise field.
Take a walk to some disaster noonday.
You take a smile at it.
You play so.
I peek over the shoulder of such a short shadow,
and you've rolled our place into a knapsack;
you're coming with all the ludicrousy of rose embryos.
And I stay this insane.

ap 11, 08

Between Others

Am I on the earth,
sticking up from it into something other.
Or am I under it, in it, a cave, arching and dark.
Or an egg, close and almost translucent,
almost the almost of something other,
close to picking a chink, close to collapse.

ap 10, 08

signed

What does it say when it
says fuck.
What does it say when it
says fade.
What does it say when it
says all
and not another
(not come or stay)
except signed,
someone here.

ap 11, 08

Baritone Ring (another Her Ring)

her ring against porcelain,
some tall, thin shape,
and the ring silent there
is wide and dark, wanting to be violent
over something.
It shadows long, thin fingers
so thin they rest on everything
without lifting or holding.
They are so unable that this very mug
is holding them,
and they show it.
But the ring does not care.
It will rest so deeply on something
that it will be like holding.
Its finger gives a start at the thought;
the ring gives a low but clear ding.
ap 11, 08

Her Ring

Her ring on a mug,
some country blue lattice,
cool under her natural manicure,
under cool red fingers, never chewed at.
Her cold ring, loose, hanging between her knuckles
clinking, beaming
with a dip where a diamond used to clutch.
Beaming like that's better.
The porcelain alters to a low burn,
molecular, dull, like boiling something live.

ap 11, 08

Settled and Gone

She moved the plants higher, dug a ditch,
froze the deli tray, thought of Charleston,
of May, of next May.

He thought I have you again
of coming back to the house with
her in it only,
of Charleston, of summer tomatoes.

She heard settling
of pages, of water ruined and well massaged pages,
of the still, of distilled metal to quiet,
quiet sheets,
her own breath.
The quiet parts between her own.
Of space and often
the things not in corners.

ap 10, 08

Handwriting Analysis

Skinny,
but not a liar
and not an architect,
though stretched like a derrick
hanging over something underneath.
Blue coordinates measure only breadth,
unwavering as a graph,
braced,
to pull something from the depths.

ap 9, 08