In the kitchen (from "The Disappearing City")

I wake up feeling the tightness behind my eyes

which means I had the dream where you were on fire.

I couldn’t do anything to stop it (tied hands, bodies,

                       

            all the bodies filled with salt)

so I couldn’t even cut myself open and stuff you inside

where my warm mucous cave could choke out

the flames of your paperhands, laced with ink

(the delicious taste of ink) and the green dress you wore

with your hairy legs poking from beneath, turning trans-

-lucent at the calves. Mr. Cactus Legs, take me dancing

                                                                        tonight

And all morning—as I make rye toast and try to fold the egg

white over the yolk (the pocket of heat, the surprise, the gush

                                                            of sunshine)—

I catch myself dancing in the kitchen,

just a two-step here                             and a two-step there,

my mouth aswill with grape juice,

and you—your vanished knees.

This is my blood, don’t cry now, just drink it.

Just turn there in the green dress, and let me spit juice

all over you until you are nothing but ash.

But I don’t know what to do with the translucence.

Damascus

I look out over the flinting sea,

standing from the shores of a dream. I want

to find my sister there, floating just above

the dark water, but find nothing.

In every direction, the tern-filled sky opens

through the clouds, its burden of light

shared by my searching. I listen intently

for any voice other than my own to call me

out over the white-flecked water—anything

other than the small hum of my own heart.

I turn away, ready to awaken, when

from the depths I hear the leviathan

low my name—all the water within me

rings with its ancient rumble—and I turn

back and walk into the waves.

Notes on Unadornment

There is a house that joy lives in, but he's always busy with the computer. Lonely's house is full of guests and lobster, dancing. Always late into the marble night. And every time I visit kindness, always someone else: despair. So I wander the parking lots and beyond—yellow fields of soy—and call the ache inside devotion.

Childhood Noir

Jacaranda asks me what’s wrong

and I look at the sun from my big rock

beside the elephant ears’ soft green bodies

I’m forgetting too much¸ I say

It knows I shot the bird even though I didn’t know

what would happen, even though my sister shot one too

and cried and the Daisy BB gun smiled and smiled

and and and

but the other trees adorned with chameleons

whisper their lies in susurrant cant

all the pink petals look fast in my direction

and then away again

I don’t know what the trees plan on doing

but their limbs stretch out casually, trying

to slip their arms around my shoulders,

even the bright Poinsettia tree

unhinges its red mouths which bleed white

all over my hands, and while Daisy and the bird sleep,

Poinsettia coddles around me like mother

and bids me, Drink of my candy leaves

XVII: The Star (After Mocschus)

Oh apple-bottomed Amaranthus, sweet to self’s core—

where lie you upon my waking? Did Apollo, that dappler,

that circuit-driven thief, pluck you from my side?

Did he turn your thighs, soft as the old goat’s beard,

into sunlight, that freckl’ng domain, so as to hold you o’er me

or keep you from me, as his wont? I had a whole night

of dreams to tell you…

I break my fast with honey, wishing for that combed

from your eyes, so much sweeter. In absence my stomach burns.

As I gather water in my gourd, I look over at the ravine,

the deep stitch of earth left wide for a god’s traipsing.

My hands numb in the cold water, yet were that deep cut

the sun, I could not break in my looking.

That night in dreams, your tongue laps into my small strawberry

flesh. My back arches again and again as if racked. Oh my mouth

and Ah all the hairs on my flesh Amaranthus.

Bears wander in from the North, zephyr-driv’n, though

I see no blood staining their giant mouths. Thirsty fur

shags about on them, the ungloss’d color of stone.

Did you send them, Amaranthus, to comfort me, while you

watch from afar through a pool of water, my self-spending

into dirt as the dream of you plays within my body’s music?

The bears lap the little goat flesh. They could of me as well,

such am I without you. Amaranthus, my nimbus of light

through these, my darkest days, did you send them

to touch me with their rough tongues and quiet my longing?

Spend yourself into the looking-pool. Even the touch

of bears most welcome now. Shall I be rent, bottom

first, by the furried pricks of ursines to please you?

Will you promise then, Amaranthus, to quit your distant watching?

Lobster

            for my grandmother

She flew to see us, my First

Memory, Beautiful Manicured

Hand—Jonelle

with those little pills in her purse,

malaria medication—

I’d say I heard them shake

but I’m not sure.

Jonelle—getting sicker by

the day, the doctors

holding her hand, my grandfather

holding back her blonde hair

as she vomits into the basin,

nobody knowing

these little pills were worse

than that which they prevented.

We had flown in the night

before the funeral.

I stayed home that day,

knowing nothing

besides lobster for lunch.

Lobster—what a thing!

I opened the fridge, peering

over their cold, slowed forms,

red as blood turning

through tubes. Hours later,

the adult processional into

the kitchen—I was picked up

so many times, the kitchen light

so close to my head, the scuttle

of lobsters a susurrus

beneath the talk of Jonelle.

Boiling water, the room hot

with relatives—I wanted to know,

I wanted to know what was going

to happen to the lobsters.

Dangled over the water, one dropped

with a plunk by my uncle.

The screaming. Adults talking

about Jonelle, the flowers.

Sick yellow of rhododendrons.

The kitchen filled with

the screaming of lobsters.

Untitled

But what about after you die? Soul aside (such a large word for all this), what about the peculiar kinesthesia when you touched his body and heard electronic music of the spheres, roses blossoming off each finger’s alight? What about your sister’s voice, serious as sin, saying she does not want you to end up in hell? Her aching brown eyes, the bridge of her nose a paradise of freckles. What about all of the words, the pages of sounds, each image burning with your scent? Even those, reckoned by fire, by your own failure to last.