Life goes on, and all my wishes have whittled down to one:
To be remembered as someone who tried.

I have outrun everything but desperate sincerity

And this shape-shifting fear-hound,
Nightmare dog on the heels of every thought.

Mutt, I have spent every night of my life
With my fist down your throat,
Clawing for the name to call you by
To cast you from me like a herd of pigs.

You are aloof, sarcastic,
You pretend not to notice
When you're coming or going.

I'm embarrassed by how casually
You drive me over cliffs.

You are so close these days that sometimes
You wear my body
And I watch,
Dumb,
Numb,
And skeletal in a fur coat,
What you do and say
And wonder
If my voice has always sounded that way.

Even now, alone,
I hear your paws picking paths
Down the hall outside my bedroom
And the hot fog of your breath.

Your eyes are fearful yellow and always glowing closer,
Like the headlights of a train constantly closing in
On a cartoon woman chained to the tracks.

What ritual will exorcise you?

All I want anymore is my skin back
And a knife to your throat.

forgive me

There are times I disappoint you,

O friend or fear behind each face --

And times I disappoint me, too.

But the former does not displace

My doubting of the latter's due

In the dispensing of our grace.

.


We travel up, between, and through

Exchanged relationships of space.

No transgression is old or new.

We disentangle. We embrace.

roll call

Cast your life and grief in plaster relief.
When your lovers leave, keep and gild their teeth.

Pane past scenes in iron-framed stained glass screens
In cathedrals where the light braids its streams.

Concentric circles, the shafts bend and seep
And the shafts bow and weep and wash your feet.

Light fields spin to gold and back into wheat.
We watch in rows with scythes, and do not reap.

a blessing.

I sing the body imperfect:

Bless you, funny smile.

Bless you, protuberant, awkward tuber of a nose.

Bless you, toes (I like you the most).

Bless my too-long mid-face, keen eyes,

focused and soft with green gravity and easily collapsible:

Two cups to an eager pitcher.

Bless these piano hands, long thumbs, narrow reach.

Bless the surgical scar across my right-hand knuckle.

Bless the coltish buckle of my knees.

Bless you, spindly-speckled arms, 

pin-hole dusted with dark gold

like a lightly toasted slice of white bread.

Bless my freckled breasts, small buttons of a little jacket.

Bless this hippy pelvis, vast and hairy and

altogether a woman's.

Bless the collarbones of my broad shoulders,

jutting out, my mom says,

like budding angel wings.

Bless these ribs like ladder rungs.

Bless the limitless wind of my lungs.

Bless the muscles that shift like restless actors

behind the milk-colored curtain of my back.

Bless you, divoted stomach, bless your holy hunger.

Bless the warm curve of the back of my neck,

kitten-cushioned by baby hairs.

Bless the goofy, insistent outward poke of my front teeth.

Bless this swollen pout of lip, round

chunky cheeks, stolen from

the museum giftshop of my girlhood.

Bless the offset of their softness by 

too-high,

too-dark,

too-arched eyebrows and

my mother's cheekbones.

Bless my forehead, smooth rectangle.

Bless my two temples and bless 

the worshiper between them,

laboring behind a veil of bone.

Bless this serious face and bless the continuous breaking of it,

like a wave on a California coastline,

into laughter.

a prayer.

I want to catch myself in a moment of humility and immobilize,
Pin my entire body in that position like a captured butterfly
And press it into your palm, a flower between your pages.

There, in the files of signifiers and signifieds,
I will be as silent and slow as the bow of a rose:
her private obeisance to the weight of the rainfall.

Like the boughs in the winter worship the snow,
Bending their bodies at the dragging hem of its robe
Because they know the piety of
What collects sound without addition or distortion
And refracts light without absorption.

We all know.

Dear Lord, make me one of those mute mirrors
Cupped in the palms of the firs, face upward.
Make me a single flake in that congregation.
I will soak in every sound:
A listening so pure it consumes the spoken whole
And makes no reply or observation.

Bend me like snow bends both light and bough
Like a knee at the altar, the prism,
Unprison my receptivity.
Vanish me into reflectivity.

I want to hug the entire mountainside
Like one of those great white blankets,
Cradle the cold land in my arms
And coax it to sleep beneath my quietude.

And when I am done, and my white powdered bones
Finally melt and drip from their limbs,
I will soak, swim back into the soil, and disperse
With all this bundled in my arms
And release it, to rinse the earth.

(the sack-cloth torn, white ash is scattered, the child is born)

It will not yield

despite my pleading and fist-to-chest-beating
It will not wheel or deal
In relinquishing meaning
It will not cheat its own secret-keeping
Nor bleed or interbreed
with inferior species of speeches
It will not teach me, nor acknowledge my seeking
But it keeps a gold eye on these proceedings
Watching my weeping, reading, bookkeeping
And vain attempts at sneaking into its skein
With undisguised disdain,

Yellow-skin-sealed.
It will not yield.

Aside, a token moon-like eggshell, broken
and crumbled beneath my curled fingernail
glued by oxidized blood
shards of a fossilized veil
that might be mistaken, on a good day,
for fragments of castaway mail
and might be mistaken, on a blind-fingered day,
for snatches of song in Braille

from my friends,
waiting out back
toeing and and acting, eyes averted
(mine too)
down a line running oblique to the fact
that most of what we do
is meaning, diverted
a light that we all see,
but braided beyond recognition
or else absurdly inverted
into the yellow of a yoke we collectively pull
attached to a skein recklessly unspooled
into which we pitch,
but are incontrovertibly girded

tugged along by some giant way up ahead
whose footfall we feel, and fills us with dread
and the length of the skein trembles taut,
entangles and webs

but it will not yield.

But me, I spend my time inside, hunched
on a spare wooden chair,
trying to conjure a lunch
from an uncompromisingly empty plate

On ink, predominately blue-dyed
nestled between meticulous lines,
broken eggshell aside:
the yolk, intact
unmitigated fact
regally sealed, obstinate, glowingly wheeled

(of course) it will not yield

so I examine from alternate angles,
I falter, wrangle,
prod and push:
"core of life, burning bush
eternal tangle
hub of world's unbroken spoke
bud of my stutter, breath of my babble"
I choke, I strangle
"holy yolk! holy meal!"
I croak
"uncloak! reveal!"

but it will not yield

under the great unsparing yellow-eyed stare,
no artificial fluorescent incandescence
can whisperingly unbend to unveil an essence
(that I only half-suspect, these days, is there)

no incantation of mine
no hoax or rhyme
can undisguise this
can coax or hitch its way
into reality, into the skein

we are soaring through pain
on clicking wings of clocks

the safety hatch is locked
you can't
jump off
this plane.

some girls are so beautiful

some girls are so beautiful that they break your heart before
they ever open their mouths

and when they do, their words go through
so many revolutions in the air
and bounce back between so many mirrors
that they are blind, white noise by the time they reach you

and so you nod

and apologize under your breath
when they duck their heads to tuck a piece of gleaming hair
or they turn their long and muscled neck
to catch a glimpse of something
they hope to be half as beautiful as the simple act
of their turning --

you apologize that they are the wives that we covet

whether we are wives or we want them
you apologize that you can't hear their words
the way they mean them
you apologize that to some, they are nothing more
than a sin

than a dark and tempting thought,
than the guilt of desire undesired
or the rabid rouge of desire desired

you apologize that they are the object of so many sentences
quietly regretted.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

And I say it to the ugly woman too.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

I am sorry for my thoughts
and for all the others.