To say I was not really space at all

  Going and going

  I always said

  I was the poem thing

  I always knew the people in the other world

  I always knew my spirit husband

  Waited for me

  Under the palm trees

  I know he still waits for me

  His blue-green arms outstretched

  I know he sings for me a lullaby

  That only we know

  I know I have had other children

  And they sit in blocks of ice

  On another planet

  Waiting for me to leave this world

  And take the rainbow flame to them

  To give them my hand and voice

  To give them my head again

  To give them my lips and eyes

  To give them my beak

  All done here for all the taking

  To give them my body

  I know my children and husband wait for me

  In the other world

  To give myself over once again

  A NEW REALITY

  I am in the hills of Europe

  No the banks of the Tiber

  Everything is beautiful

  But it is not you

  Women wear so much person

  Red and white and yellow and white

  But to think I will never smell your hair in the rain

  Is something I cannot bear

  All the facts and figures

  All the mathematics of an entire generation

  All the mathematics in ten layers of being

  Will never equal my love for you

  Will never equal what it means to have lost you

  Dear She-wolf, my She-wolf, to not have you here with me

  LILAC FIELD

  To perform death is something only humans would do

  No animal would sit there

  With a blank look on its face

  Just because the camera is there

  No no an animal would look directly in it

  Or cover its face, like the overweight

  Woman in the picture in the magazine

  By the room where I keep my bed

  What people don’t understand about beauty

  Is that after all it is not fleeting

  After all it is so gross to be that way

  That someone sees among you

  After all, to call into question

  I painted my lips, my eyes

  Only our scholars know that

  To perform is to be malleable

  To perform in language

  Or was it

  The large purple insect I let in the room

  Or was it the furred face—the hippo or the gorge

  That I was the devil in the wood

  In my own bones that I knew the face

  That I took that face

  Was it midnight blue sky

  No, were my wings iridescent

  Even in these lines

  The voice moves you

  What sense of exquisite cause

  Thought

  Moves you past these lines

  Into conversation

  With the undead

  I don’t know

  That is something

  You will have to answer for yourself

  I came back to this place to help you

  And that I did

  Shoot sparks of green and grey

  Through time

  What skin sack

  I put myself in

  I mean for what, why,

  Or who

  Did I manage to do this for if not you

  Lilaced thing

  The soft rustle of beetle wings

  In air that is warm and grey

  And is not strong

  But there is there to carry us past it

  THE GROVELER

  You want me to abject myself

  And tell you how grateful I am that you talked to me

  I am grateful I am grateful

  Thank you for talking to me

  I am at your feet

  Ready to do the walking for you

  Your words move through my mouth

  I am ready to speak for you

  And I will do so

  You were

  Something or someone I loved

  But I am a traveler

  And I love no one

  But the empty road

  That guides me to the next person

  That shows me only to my maker

  That says eat eat when it finds the lonely hunter

  I don’t know I had an axe but I did not cut you down

  Got you a hundred presents

  And fed you and brought you a violet wrap

  And wrapped you in tinfoil

  Sweet sweet little candied fish

  I would have liked to taste the sugar off your skin

  Instead now I realize the rotting from within

  The sugar the ice on planets and stars

  The romance of the evening

  Coated in ice from your dead flesh

  Already rotting from within

  MOVING

  Yes, I am moving but I am not

  I will never see my body dead

  In the way I have seen yours

  The soul never sleeps

  I told you

  After you were gone

  What was your name

  I kept moving on

  Until I did not need you anymore

  I kept entering the same day

  Until it was not the same day

  Anymore, I left it

  I thought of one universal thought

  The idea that we all feel

  The same way

  But it was a new kind of water

  I was swimming in

  It was a new place

  I was going to

  THE BED

  I don’t even sleep in my bed anymore

  I just go and sleep in the room

  With the old woman who understands me

  She waited on this earth for me

  She didn’t die for me

  We sleep and sleep

  And we are in love

  I don’t sleep with men anymore

  In any way

  There I said it, in this poem

  I say it all of the time to the people around

  I tell the people around

  No I don’t belong to anyone

  Because I don’t and I never did and that’s the truth

  If I belong to anything it is to the Prince of Wands

  On a chariot of burning ash I see him coming towards me

  Or waiting there

  Should I go to him

  His skin is clear and young

  But his eyes are old old

  Or they are not, but they are deepening so fast

  Deepening so fast that they blacken and twist

  He has four virgins to his side

  He has a lion with which he travels

  He has a box of things that are separate and strange

  I think when he looks this way and that

  That he is making a play for me

  I think in so many ways he does it all for me

  What would it be like

  To leave and go

  To leave and go

  Most do nothing

  What would it be like: I touch the sun

  And it doesn’t even care

  It expects me

  I have lived this life with some relationship to the moon

  But the sun has glowed and burst

  Seeing me on a stack of shirts

  Sleeping, then not sleeping

  Dreaming of burning princes

  Waiting for it really

  My ferocious, feline suitor

  Glistening with yellow charge

  Why it has known I would not even be

  Part of this

  And it didn’t wait

  But turned in a vortex of time

  Until I met up with my friends

  And sang a song that it could hear

  Blooming sun, it sets a yellow table

  With marigolds and ivory shanks

  And sits the prince upon it, who has golden threads

  In his beard and eyes

  And who is not wise, but is a visionary

  So that he sees me and you

  He can see everything

  The Sunday tablecloth

  Large and suspect

  Yellowing colors, but with orange slices

  The prince’s eyes

  Now yellow too

  And on the plates a yellow egg

  And lemon

  And was it he

  Who sang to me

  When I was a girl

  In the fields of violets

  Was it he

  Who lifted

  The curtain of dawn

  To set upon the stage

  A clearing of blue

  And in the distance the forest of wonder

  The stag, silver and sure of himself

  Who had waited

  For this moment

  Throughout a lifetime

  Who is to know

  I sleep and sleep

  And the old woman wakes me

  She knows it is another day

  And we whistle while we go about

  Feeding the children and opening the house

  To the other people

  In the midst of this

  I take her up

  Just breeze her up

  Into my arms

  And when we kiss I know it was worth everything

  And when I kiss my one true love

  It is true, I know

  I know I know

  I will never truly be a person

  I am a devil

  No, a demon

  A red-heather belly

  The red-lace of eyes

  Or a shoot of green

  Always coming from something

  I was never here

  I was never there

  You thought I was

  You thought

  You’d seen the last of me

  But I will never die

  And you will

  And you will die

  No you will die

  And when you ask for my mercy

  It won’t be I

  But she

  Who will give it to you

  And merciful she is

  Or so it seems

  But the sad truth is

  On this earth

  And the next

  There is some such thing

  As patience

  But no such thing

  As mercy

  No no

  No such thing

  As mercy

  ONCE IT’S IN THE PICTURE

  Once climax is in the picture

  The desire is over

  But baby I desire you over and over

  And it never stops

  And when I really get going

  I really get going

  You animal lover

  Your face has stripes and eyes

  Just like the devil

  But you are even worse than that

  You don’t even move

  Just a tiny lump of flesh

  I animate over and over

  A doll with bright blond hair

  I rock back and forth

  In my chair with my babies

  With my little fowl and kin

  With green flowers

  That flowers

  And flowers

  And flowers and flowers

  POEM TO FLORENCE

  It took a year without you

  To make me write about you

  Strange California city on the peninsula

  I could have sworn

  Had I been there before

  My lover who said I connected him to his forgotten things

  What is the dull river Lethe

  I don’t know, but I think it’s evil

  And when I drink of it I don’t see stars

  Instead I see the lime groves

  I see a dull aching fall

  With limes and peaches

  I see a woman

  I could have sworn

  That I’d seen her before

  Grass green fence

  It is there

  So we hop along it

  Until the place of fawns and simple things

  The pink azaleas blooming in the shaded wood

  A child I’d seen there before

  Who could have—was she mine

  No no but she was my sister

  My sister with her mouth so heavy

  So full of things she’d wished she’d said

  There were things I wished I’d said

  And done

  But it is too late now

  So I go

  Heavy with my offering

  This book, this book

  I WANT TO BE ALIVE

  More than anything I want to be alive

  I want to jiggle

  I want to jiggle on you

  And gurgle

  And urinate on your backspan

  I want you to eat my menstrual blood

  And soft juices

  I want to eat your shit until I dream

  I want you to come shit all over me

  I want to bury my vomit in your shit

  I want you to kiss me hard hard

  In the nighttime

  And not give up

  I don’t want to be a thing

  I want to be becoming

  The nighttime

  I want to be the nighttime with you

  You know, I loved you

  I loved you

  I was wrong

  THE DOGS

  The dogs run away

  And around the streets

  I see their bodies and want them immensely

  To be with me until the end

  I can imagine a hundred of them

  All by my bedclothes

  Waiting to be fed

  I think I like the animal

  Because it doesn’t give up much of a fuss

  I hate the people who depend on me to live

  But an animal who does it is of the other place

  You are the kind of thing who takes from me

  And never gives anything away

  And when you call to me with your synchronicity

  I can’t help but run to you

  You my horrible star

  I can’t help but run to you when you call for me

  YOU THINK LANGUAGE IS SILLY UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU

  I write you

  From above an ocean

  Wilted and stale flower

  I used to think you were odd

  Until you burst in my mouth

  Like the most obvious thing

  All in all I was glad I had had

  Another moment in the rain with you

  What is all this beauty

  If you can’t cast a thing beside it

  It was me, I astounded everything

  Even the animals almost gone in the basin

  You walking towards me

  In the ghostly smoke

  When you took off your raincoat

  It was not to keep you hungry

  It was not to keep you simple

  It was to keep you wet

  Wet and violent flower

  That I shook at the people

  When I described you as an ocean

  It was because I was still close to it

  When I looked on you dead center

  It was to remember the thing with the soft outlines

  It was to remember the thing

  I had grown used to forgetting

  COMPLAINERS

  Some people don’t want to die

  Because you can’t complain when you’re dead

  I hope heaven is just a bunch of men lying around

  Ready to do what I say

  Ready with dicks and some such

  When I’m dead I won’t be looking for a partner

  As much as a heavenly creature

  After all I was promised virgins

  But I don’t care about that as much

  As the eyes looking into me in abandon

  Like porn but better

  Because there will be no screen

  There will be no holy divider then

  Between me and my brethren

  And the smell of sunshine

  Will emit from every brow

  That’s the kind of thing I expect from death

  That’s the kind of thing I’m waiting for

  SADNESS

  I feel

  Actually beside myself

  Like beside my self

  Like be side my self

  Like really

  Recall the sense of self

  The lemon air in deep summer

  Recall the look

  The look that meant nothing

  Recall the nothing

  That you meant to me

  You with your brown hair

  Nothing worse

  Than a head full of brown hair

  What could be worse

  Than a head

  Full of brown hair

  I’d rather be hairless

  Than to see your hair

  All loose and dark and shiny

  WHY IS A MOUSE SAD?

  Why are mice so sad, with their crying faces

  And why do they perform a shard of sadness in me

  To see them

  To create a mood of their scurrying

  I don’t know I don’t know

  I feel safe without them

  With them, it is all horrible

  Like anything could happen

  Did you know that the universe

  Unfolds a million times below and beneath

  The scale that we exist in?

  More than a million

  This knowledge is astounding

  It makes me realize

  Just how dumb I am

  And how silly we are to be afraid

  Here are mice on our scale

  And the universe below and beneath

  And above

  And airplanes

  And places that scale the sky

  Are just animals within the animals

  And being a human is nothing

  It is a construct we have created

 

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