Cellophane Flowers never happened for me....

William, thicken your lashes

2007-12-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

Your loved ones deserve this William
William We offer big help

Earn your degree on-campus, online or both
William, Get a Rich Beautiful Lawn
Add value to your home with new windows!

William, are you tired of being lonely?
Looking to buy an engagement ring?

William Get connected
Please confirm your identity and claim
Dazzling summer totes for William!

William Are you running on low
Need to borrow $1500 by tomorrow?
William Life sucks without funds:

Learn to crack the code and make 94K.
You could buy land in paradise - cheap!

Go wild William
William watch it grow

William, You're so much more than your sun sign...

Im waiting for you William,
Fantastic, 100% as described.
Sleep good tonight
William Dont worry about the risks.

Paring

2007-12-02T20:28:00.000-08:00

A balcony, an awning. I think
the awning was blue and white.
I think the balcony was bars and terracotta.

A tide of shoots and babied
blossoms soaked the grate,
spilled off the brim, and waved.

Where you were born,
the grass and gilded hay are wed,
chicken footprints thread the orchards,

shooting poplars punch the sky,

but this is where you chose to live.

When you left, your children
locked the door; they cut off the electric
like a butchered bud;

They made arrangements.

Where is your linen tablecloth,
your little tins of pins and buttons?
Who waters your houseplants?

I dream a juice box in the fridge,
spared in the tepid dark.

Survival

2007-12-02T20:24:00.000-08:00

A cactus is easy. You water it when it occurs
to you. An ashy green akin to jade
means it's OK, forget it for a few more weeks.

It has the distinction
of being the only plant in the house.

All others died quickly or were eaten,
with the exception of a miniature
rosebush which he bought me in the spring.
That struggled hard to live
like a teen caught in a riptide.

Today one of its two big stalks
hangs like a sad phallus.
The skin is soft and patchy, dark spots
like a dead body

I touch my hand to a spine, press,
and my fingers go right through.

Its twin persists, hard and erect,
more than detached,
singular. As though it is,
and always was, the only one.

Charity

2007-12-02T20:23:00.001-08:00

First I tried with things that were already
in the cupboard:
dried seeds, particles of grain, a dash
of flat, powdery oats

But whipping his wings and
clutching his kinked foot close
He spilled the water we had put in the lid of a jar,
mixing these into a humid paste.

Next, he plucked through the bin
of blind worms we paid for, ignoring
the thatch of oats these ate and lived in.

Also I bought a carton of berries,
overripe, on my way home from school.
which he ate from our pinched fingers
and henceforth chirped for when he
felt the heavy human presence.
Also, his foot seemed to get better.

Five mornings in, we woke and checked
his cage. He had transformed into
a still, beautiful object, oddly worthless.
I did not know what to do with it.

Outside Marietta

2007-12-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

A one armed man gets on
the bus in Charleston
He ushers his daughter down
the dim lit aisle.

She has short pink arms,
napped in flax, though she can't
be no more than six.

I wonder where his other arm is gone,
by now a lonely braid of bones,
a carbon whisper, nothing.

Somewhere outside Marietta (that
could be anywhere, or almost)
the bus sighs into a gaping lot.

The man gets up, puts on his hat
collects his child.
The sun streams wildly.

A wide blonde woman
leans on a red old car.
Her arms are crossed in front of her
the same pale mass

of hair upon her head and on her forearms
and I know before they ever touch
she is her mother

and the line drops off.
You got to make more than one stop
to get where I am going

Three Day Old Bread

2007-09-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

It is not stale. It lacks the
density, the bounden callousness,
of the truly hardened.

Dressed in a coat
of clear and supple plastic
it has not yet been abandoned to
the fury of the air.

But tear off a hunk with your
teeth and you can tell:
The crust, tan and unwrinkled,
yields haltingly,

the soft, white pith, once plush,
has a wavering laxness,
like an aging waistband.

There is something of it
as a whole I do not like,
even as I bite and swallow.

A pact of dust, mulling silent
in the fine dust that preceded.
An adulteration, greenly present
yet invisible, dating back unto
the flower of the flour.

Bee

2007-09-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

My house is at the top of the hill
I am walking down. I am not wearing enough
to keep me warm. The stiff edge of my
right shoe cuts my heel. Only one of
my eyes is made up. My hair is wet.
I am late, of course. It is no longer summer.
These circumstances may or may not matter.

My step is quick and regulated but my gaze
is free and fickle. The sharp crack of something
frail yet substantial brings it down

to a burst of blond splinters and a
branch. Beside this lies a bee.
Its wings move thinly but I do not think it’s alive.
It is quiet and shiny, smaller than a bullet.

If my foot had come down closer, I would
not have known. And it would not have
mattered if I did. But curled on the
grain of the sunned concrete, it persists,
vaguely preserved in unknowable dignity.

The body is pristine, compact,
its colors are elegant. Mine keeps moving.

False Starts

2007-04-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

The woman wakes up a warm pile of limbs.
The room is dusked with shade, but
the sun itself is high and yellow.

She lifts up her body in increments
and grabs a towel from the floor
wrapping herself loosely in its puckered furls.

She picks up a bottle
and squeezes a liquid the color of custard,
and smears it under her eyes
with the tips of her fingers.

She goes away, and when she comes back, it is night.

The woman sits and leafs through
the pages of a book; she scratches
her elbow and looks out the window
at the stiffening trees; she kisses
the unshaven face of her lover;

She gets up to walk down the hall.
A slender pale form clots in the dark.
She takes a step back, frightened,
then sees it is only a dress on a hook

and ends laughing and laughing,
soundless and to herself.

A Platinum Blonde

2006-12-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

I was not looking for her
when I came upon the body:

foam green, skin straining
to withhold the sloshing matter.

I wonder where her teeth first broke
through the soft prison of her gums, and

Did her scalp flash now and then
in a white chrism of bleach,
or did she come in from a northern country
where all the little girls are born with yellow hair?

And did she think she could escape it,
if she did as she was told,
or if she ran away as fast as
a human being can?

Only to finish, here,
a gleaming object on a slab
bathed by the flax flash
of the coronor's camera.

Mine

2006-11-28T13:40:00.001-08:00

Between the black sap of midnight
and the pinprick of first light
I sluice my mind, waist deep

and sodden; I cull
the thin gold vein of reason.

If your leaden form lay
still before me, smell of your skin,
sound of your hair growing,
I would not think

to liquefy my hours upon
this crude, preemptive pyre.
I would not think at all about the future,

tucked away and dormant like
some undiscovered continent,

where even chaff gives off a cresting
glint, perhaps. We aren't old.

When it Rains (Platitudes)

2006-11-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

The snapboned woman sitting next to me,
head wrapped in a clear plastic bonnet,
is waiting on the same bus.

Carpe diem, so they say. They
couldn't have meant every day.

Once she was as young as me;
younger. Now her wet throat is swept
with folds, and doggish hair;
Her eyes are like almonds blanching.
It seems to hurt. I wonder how.

When I get home, the kitchen light is off,
not a soul, nobody says a thing
until the kettle starts to whisper,
whines, then shrieks.

"Give me chastity and continence.."
(an echo from a ruptured catacomb)
"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet."

American

2006-09-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

Buckshot sprang erotic
even pit the columns of the opera house.
But the holes were filled in
within the fortnight
(likewise, lizards do not mourn
their stolen tails, because they know.)

Statues cast in bronze
would turn as green as a clean sea
but talk about replacement, and
what looks you'd get!
Oxidation: gorgeous even gorging.

I was one way, I was so for some time;
and then, not knowing what it meant,
entreated you: "Come in, it's cold out there..."

And by the time the raze began
I feared you as the soil fears seed.

Come down on me like the Allies on Berlin,
hard, ardent, and relentless

That after, much has to be built anew.
Leave something: A percentage, a periphery,
the jutting, polished skeletons of opulence.

Predisposition

2006-08-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

I sit and watch the sheets
weeping on the beaten line,
the tears milky and clean,
the wet hems grazing air.

Out of the corner of my eye,
the hydrangeas shudder, beg decapitation.
They are twentysomething now,
blossoms the color of a sick tongue.
The decade past, they were puffed out
as bright and pink as gum.

You can't come down and play with me
so I toy with my thoughts instead:

(And anyway, you would have seen
a different garden)

I think of this: Now, wouldn't it be funny?
If you'd plant a little seed inside
of me, and we'd neglect to rip it out?

What if we gave it the name Soledad,
and it had nothing of its father?
Or if we called it Dolores,
and it had nothing of its mother?

On Will

2006-07-28T02:20:00.000-07:00

Like a boxer's woman, watching her
man's brain swell yellow
from dark blows to the head

and wondering if they ain't
self inflicted, after all,

Like a whore after Hooker's army
I'd follow

limping round in spoilt vermillion silk,
tin pots clanging one another
in the wind.

They say God bestowed the gift
of free will,
and it was used
to sink clean teeth into bad fruit.

Can't you see them wondering, then,
--naked, faces dripping--
about the voice from the sky?

Can't you see Adam, red
as a macintosh; Adam, blustering:
"Is this someone's idea of a joke?""

A Raid

2006-07-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

In the dark white snow, you come
to me.
With little warning, with
no time to prepare
like an partisan caught off guard
burning papers afore fleeing,

I turn over all the drawers in my head.

You are coming to me,
jack booted almost, over the gray ground.
the grass we won't see for months
sleeps soundly and serenely
under the indentations of a million feet.

Bodies shifting towards each other
like tendrils of mimosa,
your teeth cracking mine,
we meet through a thick sheet
of compulsion and steam.

It doesn't feel like infiltration
as it is done sweetly.
We know the etymology of violence.

Peter's Ghost

2006-06-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

Peter's ghost walks by
us as we scream into the hallway;

My face dark as a hurricane,
Your hands on my shoulders.

His body lies not half a mile from
here, resting in the saturated loam.

Red lipstick is ridiculous
in situations such as this;
What mottled sense could such a
clownlike mouth emit?

disembodied Peter, he would understand

He must have felt this kind of thing before
like broke glass cackling
in the crass purse of the sternum.

His ghost does not appear to me,
perfect and powdery.
He doesn't visualize en seance;
His is not a vulgar spirit,

But active nonetheless.

And he must know that
I also can understand
to toss one's perfect body
down before a train
might not seem mad

When all that you can hear when no one's talking
is the looping, furious rustling of the tracks.

(June 8, 2006)

My love

2006-06-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

is not agreeable;
The body rejects or assimilates
infiltrators, and the soul mirrors
with silly, cadet eagerness.

There is loss of blood
with or without incision.
Then there is the will, evaporating,
short glass of water
left in the sun.

There is a restlessness, veiled
in domesticity, which saps
and curdles, which curls the toes,
which drags out the odd night and
hangs it by the neck til it is
Dead Dead Dead,

but also can possess my body,
urging tightwire acrobatics
in the tar of early morning.
The face becomes beautiful,
The heart beats cleanly.

And exorcism leaves me sleek
and cool and breathing
hard; sick child whose fever
does not break, but shatters.

Horror Story

2006-06-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

My God. My God. Even now
he is here, he is watching,
he is pulling at my hair!
And before him, before them all,
there was something else.
There was always something.

There is a bowl of furrowed roses
on the top shelf.
Dash it to the floorboards,
Hurl the phone against the wall:
A burst of slimy water, glass, gears.

Fat clots of noise.

Am I happy or unhappy
watching your ribcage pulse
in the perfect rhythms of sleep?
You've left me here.
You cannot witness.

I was brought up fearing silence.
Your lashes flutter in the blue.

(March 27, 2006)

Surge

2006-06-23T10:00:00.001-07:00

The winter is collapsing
under the weight of its own
liquefying corpus

Once you flipped me over
with the deftness of a farmhand
shifting bales

Once, sweat like
a gambler with a dead hand
as you held me fixed,
hiding my blooming face
in the pillow..

The breeze fans gentle on the rooftops,
smoking chimneys, spires

I saw a crocus split
the salted soil.
I seen birds flying in circles.

(February 28th, 2006)

Heat

2006-06-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Itch I cannot scratch
Wildfire in the Heartland
And all things, now:
prodding reminders.

Two baby dykes kiss on the buckled sofa
in a back bar on Duck Island
The short hair straddling the long.
The long cupping her cherished ass.

Bodies moving in the music.

And me, nursing my drink tenderly
Thinking of your hands, your fingers,
tongue and bolt.
Me, wrenching my sweet, shuddering
thighs together.

An American flag waves stiffly
in a bitter wall of wind.

(February 12, 2006)

Filth

2006-06-23T09:59:00.001-07:00

I moved into a room in your buddy's
squat flat
I had found a cheap mattress, and
a man helped me carry it
down the cobblestones.

My mother gave me a pot
and two pans, her blessing.

I cleaned on my knees
and vacuumed, slim hips wiggling
The morning I graduated,
we fucked with tenderness
and you told me a secret

Now you stay
the weekends, sleeping late under the
torn mosquito net.
In the kitchen, small flies
orbit rotting fruit
Dust cakes the corners
of the living room. It smells.
We never raise our voices.

When you're gone, your friend masturbates,
door open a crack, watching me.

(Jan 21, 2006)

Complex

2006-06-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

I think there is a reason I don’t
dream beside you;

I might you as you are
not as you ought to be.

Your arms become the clasp
of a jagged banana clip.

The ceiling of our bedroom,
a watery blue mirror,

smoking cherry in the middle.

And like burning Rome,
smoldering Carthage,
something hot is chewing at
the baseboards

of the world we built together.
I can feel it now,
dreaming, I would even see it:
wallpaper peeling
like an orange,
I would sip the acrid fog.

You’re very tall for a Bonaparte
I’m so young for a Josephine
And the sky is too warring a yellow
to be good and real.

(January 2006)

Emergency

2006-06-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

The doorways are wreathed
wiry lights and debauched glass,
melting and streaming

So history repeats itself,
thinking nobody’s listening

and so your gorgeous blood must spill,
on the white blanket the paramedic
gave you when he strapped you to the gurney
He caps the sample, wipes your skin.

In the grey bombast of the morning
an idiot sun creeps towards
the middle.

Two winters past in
The theater lot, breath
plush as a bleating lamb,
heels kicking against asphalt,

I found you in the heavy lights
drunk with shock

you had caressed my
face and said my love.
You didn’t even know
my name again yet.

(December 05, 2005)

Born Again Virgin

2006-06-23T09:57:00.002-07:00

You scratched against my door
so lightly, I might have took it
for a tree branch grating siding.

When I heard your voice for the second time
I let you in, I let you go to town.
Like a fat man rummaging his
ice box late at night, you
were not sure exactly
what you had a taste for.
Floured breast, glazed ribs.

And I was mute, could
hardly move. My hide glowed
in the minced light.

In your big arms,
it came rushing back,
and, in your thick hunger,
you devoured it, peice of cake.

(November 2005)

Luxury

2006-06-23T09:57:00.001-07:00

I eat my dinners on
the wood chair in the kitchen,
arms plaited, oven
slapped open and glowing

the coy warmth streaming
on my skin.

He and I nestle closer
than we did before
and sleep the sightless sleep
of yoked unborn;

in the mornings
I barricade myself
in mansions of sheets
and miss class.

Now the man in charge has come
and flipped the switch;
the place smells of dust
and steam and church,

the radiators hissing like
sliced bulls,
snorting like pistons,

the hot air
rushing joyous through
the black gilled pipes.

(November 27, 2005)

O

2006-06-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

When all one's ever known is life,
the end seems strange,

contrived and ersatz, plastic.

Oh, I've seen the boneyards,

one in NYC
spreading out for miles
in clumsy hillocks

an undulating clear of stone,
synthetic flowers, dapper flags,

and across the sea,
where they stack them ten feet high,
bring white carnations and sugared water,
and etch their faces into china:

the belle epoch toddler in the sailor collar,

the twentysomething with long hair
and petroleum shades,
cast from his hog
into a levee,

and the scotchtaped photo
of your husband

who's been missing for
two years now.

You're sitting at the station
waiting for the same train,
watching the dust mingle
with the wildflowers
and biting your lip.

(November 15, 2005)

Ninny

2006-06-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

When I was six, Grandmother
gave me a gold ring,
a tiny snake with emerald eyes
and a pin prick of a tongue.

I lost it in the petting zoo
as the peacocks howled above us
and the caged goats wolfed
our day-old bread.

Next summer she got me
another, identical:
that one slipped
from my finger in
the wet lace of the waves.

What else?

A flash of blood on wet porcelain!

The shower doused it away
as I shook off the fall,
wiped the red off my thighs.

Years later, infiltrated
by a graceless ache
and three odd seconds of paralysis
but not a tear, and not one drop of blood.

I’ve lost something else
along the way—
great yet massless,
invisible and delicate..

Shook it off in a fit
or shed it without note
like a scarf on a cabseat;

Segments green in the brine,
(tongued by the sand)

dull in the buzzed grass,

and sully our sheets.

(October 28, 2005)

Motherland

2006-06-23T09:55:00.001-07:00

You do not forget, it doesn’t fall out your brain
like the dimes that two cent magician
snatched from my little ear.

But the image changes, softens,
plush in its overripeness
and with a faint, familiar sourness:
Low tide? A new mother’s curdling
bosom?

Force of habit, repetition,
and the erotic sublime
swarm like shrieking birds.

no surrender there,
only a raw-boned, slow, barefaced defeat.

Nor will this carnelian fall
rob your gaze and thumb your thoughts
like an open rolodex;
The glowing hell of winter
will only bring you closer:
no distractions.

Like a recurring dream
going out of syndication,
like grainy frames of film
bloated, tarnished
half exposed to the light
but clean enough yet
to make out two dozen figures
and a wheat-haired landscape.

(September 28, 2005)

Grotta Verde

2006-06-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

At a green club strung with
lights and plastered with bills,
where the young people rode down
from the city to dance

Through the noise of the sea pealing and
retreating,
klaxons and bicycle horns,
and the buzz of motorbikes.
The smell of cologne milling
through the air,
they met.

They fell in love, as people do
and set up in a two bedroom apartment
She worked as a seamstress
He worked at a factory
At twelve thirty everyday he came home
to a full table and to her.

Ordinary people, loud, good-natured;
They argued and made love:
Two children came of it.

The days went by, drained bottles
from a seemingly endless reserve.

Years later, a fresh widow, she rides
back to the city on the public bus.
She looks out at the fields,
the bright lights, people,
the muted skyline;

the offal which remains,
a grand, belieing opulence,

it's closing in:
devours her.

Thaw

2006-06-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

Beyond the stiff, glazed branches,
now weeping without restraint,

and the telephone wires,
crossing in a long cat’s cradle
over the brackish street below,
a virile sun prevails, kissing the
cheek of this blocked and unhappy town.

Cars buried in black-marbled ice
emerge like excavated fossils,
perfectly preserved
and beaded with frost
after two weeks of ceaseless snow,

dark streams course downhill
dredging twigs and grit, dirt and
oil

Peoples’ faces appear
framed in windows.
They open their doors hesitant
but leave home
forgetting hats and gloves, the calendar date,
closing their eyes to
the warm breeze caressing
their bare throats and hands.

(December 31, 2004)

Small Girl in Gold Moccasins

2006-06-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

Standing behind a Colorado
adobe, or is it
the waning, painted yellow
of a continental
summer house,

Her head is down turned,
eyes look left
as the flash catches her
through the healthy, stalking
twilight.

Her hands are not
and shall not be at rest
from this vague four
until her day of death;
but here they lie, subdued,
clasping one another like
terrified sisters.

The breeze that whispers through
nearby branches, the tall grass,
smoothes her hair,
weathering
the calm of this second's pose.

All bears witness,
all insinuates:
the naked soil beneath
the cement walk she stands upon,
her plain blue dress,
her halting step,
the golden leather of her
baby shoes,

the very air,
the black whirr of the camera
rewinding.

(December 18, 2003)

Irene

2006-06-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Irene was a strange one, a
pretty and primitive thing.
At 18, in what I called
her Wedding Daguerrotype
she peered, tentative,
behind strands of river pearls,
a white wing of a dress.

And then, demure at 28,
with an angular jaw, and
temples already sagging
a little bit.

I'd skipped careless over
200 year old graves,
the high grasses in
the family plot
while they tore a hole
in the iron-black loam
and set down an urn,
her jostled ash;

then we'd driven off, the
flat land green and almost
callow, the breeze paralyzed,
the even horizon
the end of a line.

For her it was over
long before. At 45,
an old woman already,
with a fallen face;
at 80, half-dead
and smiling
over the red-stained
rim of a Styrofoam cup.

Augustine, for Elizabeth Smart

2006-06-23T09:51:00.001-07:00

Small and blonde, slight, pigtailed,
she smiles offhand into the flashes,
point of focus dissolving.

Maiden drawn
into a shore of salt.
Virgin, plural wife,
fey contradiction:

From what mountains were you
chiseled, rosy sphinx?
What hands formed you,
warmed you, gave second
birth to you
as these nine months came to?

Her father calls to her
from within the snapping crowd;
father calls her,
’Stay close, Elizabeth!’
She is good, She is good,
smiling at him with eyes
as dull as dated razors.
He tells Gentlemen of the
Press she "left a
child, returned a woman."

And in tomorrow's headline photos
her face smarts;
she hides behind the black
rim of her coat, useless
hands lovely at rest,

dry
storms beneath her modest coif,
pounding against
that Mormon temple.

(March 2003)

Circling

2006-06-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

As the wheels of the plane
extend and whir,
trembling with metal anticipation,
I rest my face to the window.
My heart beats with the blind
irregularity
of the engine's changing gears;
look past to see

the dark green fields
molded with goldenrod,
Boxy housing projects
half-built, nude
at the lip of a woods.

A minute more, and closer
still, the captain's voice
is grainy and inaudible;
I can feel already
your hands in my hair.

And the mild turquoise of suburban
pools stares upwards.
Lakes tired with murk
lie flat and turbid.
Familiar patterns in
the landscapes are
overlapping

as the near arms of the city
close in on the land.

(Fall 2003)

A June Death

2006-06-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

One June

The winds blowing
in from the bay

Market sellers carting
crates onto trucks

as the crowds thin.

When turning the palisade
I caught the tigered form
of a cat heaving
on the asphalt,

a parked car beside it, a
man kneeling to the gravel
his hands kneading his brow.

I halted, ran forth.
touched its upraised back
"It's going," said the man

Beneath the waving the
junipers,

its face parted in a
cleaved slant, curdled protest
welled inside its throat.

Bells chimed, the hour
Changed

The cat convulsed and
turned away its
split face

hissing its breath and
braiding its muscles

as the clouds above broke
and the pleasant breeze smoothed
its reddened coat,

and quit struggling

leaving surrendered fur
and bone and muscle
warm on the street,
its blood on my hands.

(2003)(Revised: 2007)

The Room

2006-06-23T09:49:00.001-07:00

You show me in,
turn on the lamp at the corner
You take my coat, drape it
on a chair

Shelves of books, photographs of you
as a boy, blond and slender
garnish the walls;
Vents slit with a thin heat,
the wind presses
glass to the sill.

I sit on your bed, legs crossed,
pulling threads at my sleeve.
I sigh. You touch
the small of my back with worker's hands.
I do not move, but outside, trees
sway in the gale, windows go dark.
It is late night.
The air cracks with understanding

Wordless I slip off
shoes and stockings;
I twist off the backs of my
earrings, long brass flowers.
Your hand covers mine.

The night gleams mute and
ardent
beyond the starched blinds.
Snow salts the black lawns
in the neighborhood.
Outside, a car skids on water.
A dog howls in the distance.

(2003)

Almar

2006-06-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Combed like that, your
hair pinned like a
black pyramid against
the darkened violet of a
Cleveland skyline, softened
with wax outlines,
clever lights that come and
go with the flow of cars
that twist and turn
from drive to drive,

You were go

Bicisport

2006-06-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

Like the drum of wasps
in fluorescent dumpsters
with the swelling of the summer,
the honed and honeyed noise of bees,
late spring, as things begin to
lose their color

the television pavement, black
as soles, becomes alive,
a line for wasp-waist men
in plastic shirts and caps
to dive upon, like slender suicides.

And I think of my father,
portrait of father as a young man:
sundance kid mustache, lacoste
shirt, Resto del Carlino in his
vein less hands, standing behind
my mother who holds their
dark-haired baby in her own dark hands.

The television runners swerve
and swarm, and I begin to understand
my father: his selfishness, his
folly, his attractiveness to
his mother, Parents-In-Law,
and my mother.

He, sweating and making miles
on the roadside, his legs shaved,
yellow polythene hatcap fastened
to his dark-haired head,
while she slaved off under
the same white sun, cleaning shit
and cooking dinner

While he was off making miles
on the roadside on the thin-frame
bicicletta, legs shaved, back
arched, sweat on his brow
and his thin heart a concentrated
burning, glowing and
uneven diamond.

(2002)

Luca

2006-06-23T09:47:00.001-07:00

Was it the summer they did
the repairs on the Marina?
The yellowed morning glories,
tasseled in the afternoon bloodbath
of waxing sun and noise pollution,
pressed hand-like to the metal cranes,
loving, drunken, like one frail
human hand reaching blindly
for another.

Was it that summer or that before?
The summer the sun lay splayed
on the water in the vaguest
danger of drowning, in my eyes
can't you read the answer? In
my unchanged palm?

When bottles
rolled against the piers,
like cigarette paper, in
afternoons gone dark
as ashes.
When the following breeze
would sweeten with the smell
of pink, brocaded flesh;
killed crab, dead in the water.
When the image of you, the
flower of first passion,
took germ in my brain.

I remember well the way the
night softened the place,
the way I slipped off my
sandals and ran my feet through
mat grass, rough with salt,
where ten years ago a carnival
had hitched its metal poles.

I had run amongst pyramids of
sand, tall as monsters
the thick horizon gasping
and grasping for the morning
And your form in the dark
As you stood at the car door:
The most beautiful silhouette.

But now I've forgotten,
And so I forget you.

(2000)

Paris, 1950. A Fiction

2006-06-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

I.

The yellow leaves and fronds of Paris
late September, snap around the soles
of leathered feet, and dirty waters graying
ever as a head of fifty-year-old hair
gush bloodily at banks. The young brides
throw bouquets from church steps
under faint showers of rice, white flowers
which bloom and die in the scented
and decaying air of summer’s last
stand,

white bouquets of colored flowers
in rice paper wrappings, and young brides
whose unveined feet turn so lightly on the
Paris palisades, wear dressing pads that
make their shoulders big;

In a café far from Deux Magots
and the long closed Jockey, far
from Champs Elysees,
the baggy, brown silk dresses
of ‘24, Twenty five, Twenty six,
from black pearls, promiscuity,
youth and good-looks, I find a
chair and sit, unwrap a sandwich.

II.

Ekaterina, Feodora,
Margarita, Margosha,
Marina, Marinochka:
gone with the golden
chandeliers, the wine fountains,
I can hardly recall, as I
was young then;

Dead or alive, flung to all
corners of the continent, the world
after Ekaterinsburg, when I turned 18
cut my hair to a halt, and left
Petrograd with shorter skirts,
mother, and the pedigree whelps.

But no politics here, I must seem
as bleak now as an Eisenstein mother,
shot in the belt as my worth, as my
baby, plummets steps, and an
eyeglass is shattered;

but of course from
a different perspective,
and the rich always land
on their feet, yes? But
I fell on my back, in the clamor
of Paris, and was never a bride
and never bore bastards,
and now I am fifty.

III.

Little girl, why do you look at me?
little blonde girl, with the sailor dress
look the other way; it is not
polite to stare, doesn’t your
mother tell you, she’s standing there
next to you, she has blonde hair,
like you, but hers is yellow,
hers is dyed.

I cannot be so very ugly
as to warrant your distraction.
Won’t you let me sit at peace
And not look while I eat?

While in fact, as a child, I was
called a beauty,
I had a retrousee nose and
hair to my waist in that
same tired blonde as yours.

For I can see it all now, clear as whenever
these drab cottons, and patterns
are but the core of the organdy shell
of a gown which I wore
when I bowed with lauded grace
to the grace of a Tsar.

(2000)

One Night, Next to a River

2006-06-23T09:46:00.000-07:00

The night was black,
black was her hair as she sat there,
in the dark
at half past ten
in his car.

The river beside them was black as well,
as was the ground and the sky;
but there were stars in that black that shone
like the headlights of his car,
which was also white.

And she was wearing a white dress
that fell tight over her body,
her tight muscles, her shoulders
and the arc of her breasts
which the sun had bathed
and turned the skin dark
But not black

And he looked at her there,
through the gauze of the air,
thick with the smoke of stars,
then moved closer, moved in,

and that's as it happened:
with his face turned askew,
with her neck bent towards the window
and her eyes on the sky.

(1999)

Euripides

2006-06-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

You are
reading Euripides, in broken english,
sounding out the thicker words with your
soft, pappy mouth.
You are
leaning against the side of the boat,
your hand fingering the brine,
the page's yellow edge.

She is watching you,
as your black hair coarsens and parts in the
wan sirocco,
thick as a pound of tar
And then those eyes of painted glass.
A sigh.

It doesn't matter where you came from.
It doesn't matter when you were born.

She is 12 years old,
her skin is like new leather
and her dark blonde hair
is shining;
She wants you
to pull her dress over her head,
to blacken her pelvis,

to marry your soft mouth to hers
on the ancient, blazing
hard-grained
parterre of the shoreline.

(2000)