Poetry 365

It’s done; I planned, did it deliberately,
and wormed a place in you with some dull lies.
And now, does a hurt anger in your eyes
whip back? I’ll slash the cords you lash to me.

Cast off. Wakes mingled. O sweet piracy—
flesh grappling below rafters, cries…All cries
stop when rising depths choke your replies.
And then blank surface and white debris.

And so it’s over. Nothing…then the night.
We sit. I sense you lost somewhere below.
Depths of you move, fingering me with fright,

and the night whirls, goes empty, and I’m wound
down to you, weightless, crushed….O, when I flow
into you, fear comes, both of us are drowned.

Such time as I’d drop by
you’d lead me to the den
straight past your parents, who’d
pointedly sit there glued
to talk shows, CNN,
the volume turned up high.

So what if dystrophy
shriveled your tits and clit
as long as you’d crouch, eyes
famished, between my thighs;
I treated you like shit,
your only hold on me

exerted on my twists
and turnings in the chair;
then as I’d start to come
your rage at being numb
pinned me exploding there,
gripped as with cuffs on the wrists.

here is another bone to pick with you
o mother whose bones i worry for scraps,
nobody warned me about daughters;
how they bewitch you into believing
you have thrown off a pot that is yourself
then one night you creep into their rooms and
their faces have hardened into odd flowers
their voices are choosing in foreign elections and
their legs are open to strange unwieldy men.

7
I have reached that middle ground
Luck sometimes takes, I think:
Not quite to have a winning streak
Or to be able to cut my losses,
Like love, which must speak,
And to whom all words are useless.

8
The last outpost of bodily desire:
The blank place even shadows flee.

9
The alcoholic wakes at 4 A.M.
To hear the water tap let down its drop
While the moon-slicked fire escape hangs in air
And, knock-kneed, drunk, his body moves in need
Stumbling barefoot toward the Frigidaire.

True as the circumference
to its center. Woodscreek Grocery,
Rockbridge County. Twin boys
peer from the front window, cheeks
bulging with fireballs. Sandplum trees
flower in clusters by the levee. She
makes a knot on the inside knob
and ties my arms up
against the door. Williamsburg green.
With a touch as faint as a watermark.
Tracing cephalon, pygidium, glabella.

You are driving to the airport
Along the glittering highway
Through the warm night,
Humming to yourself.
The yellow rose buds that stood
On the commode faded and fell
Two days ago. Last night the
Petals dropped from the tulips
On the dresser. The signs of
Your presence are leaving the
House one by one. Being without
You was almost more than I
Could bear. Now the work is squared
Away. All the arrangements
Have been made. All the delays
Are past and I am thirty
Thousand feet in the air over
A dark lustrous sea, under
A low half moon that makes the wings
Gleam like a fish under water—
Rushing south four hundred miles
Down the California coast
To your curving lips and your
Ivory thighs.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: “If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden …” I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.

Her smiling eyes in the glass
Glimmer as she undresses
But what is so amusing
He neither cares nor guesses

As, centered on one elbow,
He stares at her glowing breast.
She calculates, she reckons
How fierce his interest.

Her luminous eyes mirror
What her shrew thoughts assess
Before his arms encompass
The sweet comptometress.

Animals own a fur world;
people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly bare.
And the way these worlds are once arrived for us kids with a jolt,
that night when the wild woman danced
in the giant cage we found we were all in
at the state fair.

Better women exist, no doubt, than that one,
and occasions more edifying, too, I suppose.
But we have to witness for ourselves what comes for us,
nor be distracted by barkers of irrelevant ware;
and a pretty good world, I say, arrived that night
when that woman came farming right out of her clothes,
by God,

At the state fair.

Whoever had the thought to render bear fat
and burn it in a lamp was touched a bit,
or bored, or left alone to ponder light
too long in some dank cabin: bear fat pops
and stinks and brings no cheer to our condition.
My brother Squire would burn such lamps to read
the Scriptures: eyelids smudged, his head immersed
in smoke; his Bible, like a gutted beast,
spread open to Leviticus; his lips:
for prayer. Then I would go outside to muse
upon the many things which need no light,
the chiefest being tears and copulation,
then others, like remembering glad days
or moments which occur without regard
for stars or lamps—my thought: what matters most
is borne of darkness then makes its own pure light.