Instinct, Joy Harjo
In the dark I travel by instinct,
through the rubble of nightmares,
groaning of monsters toward the crack of light
along your body’s horizon.
I roll over to my side, take you in my nostrils
test your for shape, intention and food
as nations fall apart.
Small winds tattoo my cheek.
Soon they will bring mist,
a small rain to clean the world
send rainbows to dress us,
for the ceremony
to rid us of the enemy mind.
We Can See It with Our Eyes Closed, Joy Harjo
You ask me what I am thinking when we make love
and our eyes are closed and the sun is climbing halfway
to the roof and the neighborhood dogs are all in love
with the spirit dog who makes the rounds and tortures them
with dreams of hills and running with the smell of heat
and then the train adds to the song of progress
making a web from city to city,
backdoor to backdoor and I know it is possible to
fly without the complications of metal and engineering
and all the payoffs, paybacks and terrible holes
in the earth and here we are in the territory of the wind,
surrounded by devils and thieves, forgotten by a trickster god
who has a wicked sense of humor
yet there is something quite compelling
about this skin we’re in, a solid planet of gases and water
doesn’t tell the whole story. I am intrigued by cloud
language and see you approaching as a red flower in a meadow
of yellow, or you are an apparition of rain just before or after
a famine of butterflies. We make an electrical reaction
like carbon dioxide, and did I remember to blow out
the candles lit for those who are dying and are leaving
or will leave this place? Grief is a land of wet tenderness. We are all
dying and will leave a trail like the plane jetting east in the direction
that becomes all directions, becomes all the millions of souls here together
looking for god or a little something to eat,
all of us blown away by the mystery of nothingness
as we shop in the streets for trinkets or bread.
We’ve been here before, thinking in skin and our pleasure
and pain feed the plants, make clouds. I see it with my eyes
closed. It’s so beautiful.
-2, Richard Brautigan
Everybody wants to go to bed
with everybody else, they’re
lined up for blacks, so I’ll
go to bed with you. They won’t
miss us.
Now Winter Nights, Robert Hass
We were sitting in a small room
and we talked around our lives
by talking about skin flicks,
death, voyeurism, the definition
of ‘sentimental,’ performing
rituals of the mind’s precision
on desperate stuff
of twentieth century pleasures.
There was a woman there—
cornsilk hair but not, a texture
of that pale gold from which sheer cloths
are woven in ancient,
fragmentary poems,
garments tossed aside in the last line
the scholars can make out
beside a phrase suggesting wetness
and the god of dawns. The bones of her face
were clear and formal. She had been reading
Thomas Campion all that afternoon.
Though she was earnestly attentive and
though we were learning Mohammedan angels
make love exclusively by means of delicate
and intensive masturbation while the windows
gave us back ourselves with wounds
of light, her eyes grew heavy
and she fell asleep. Her hair sprawled
in the same slow curve
as the fern above her on the desk.
Love in the Cathedral, Miller Williams
“…except you ravish me.”
In the beginning I couldn’t speak to you.
Not because the words wouldn’t come;
it was because they might. Not words like love,
blooming where they fall; words like come here.
When once you turned to look straight at me
out of a crowd, I thought I must have let
the sounds inside my head come out, like “let
us all go home.” I wouldn’t say to you
the wet, small words that moved inside of me.
I have thought that faith and patience would come
to no good end, that you would say, “See here!”
and never say, “Well yes, I think I’d love
to follow you home; to tell the truth, I’d love
to have some wine, then talk awhile, then let
you pleasure me.” Expelled to suffer here,
John Milton wrote of us. I look at you
and in my mind your awful kinsmen come
around every corner, looking for me.
You once talking about the weather with me
and that was something, but it was not love,
did not resemble love. Love ought to come
in recognizable clothes. One day I let
my plain and earthy self talk to you
most gently, saying plainly, “Please come here,”
but everything went wrong, a bah-bah here,
a bah-bah there. You have bumped into me
by accident, I have bumped into you
on purpose on the street where talk of love
was inappropriate, then I have let
my heart hide in the cold and watched you come
laughing and blind. No matter what may come,
give me this: that all this time I stood here
ignored to death and loved you while you let
every chance go; say your glances at me
suggested almost anything but love;
say I know you cry in bed, poor you.
Believe in love. You know that I am here
to let you loose. Here is my flesh for you
who ay abide with me till kingdom come.
Learning a Language, Franz Wright
She’s reading your minds
as you pass by, the
dipsomane déguisée en rose
While she waits
for her date
to turn up, the moon
in the man…
She know exactly what is going to happen
she’ll be guided
upstairs
to a bedroom, and turning around
he will show her his
gun
He’ll ask if she would like to
hold it,
which she will
amazed
at its lightness
and beauty
this thing
it must have taken 4 million years to make
squeezing it she will feel cold
and invisible light flowing
into her spine
So there is a door out of here after all
And to visit a new place creates one
in the brain
How do you say no
How do you say anything
to throw up in
Can I use this room to cry
Radiant fuel
body
of water
along which she walks, she is
walked
Why
did we leave, and how
are we ever getting back—
Haikus, Bernard Lionel Einbond
the white of her neck
as she lifts her hair for me
to undo her dress
the thousand colors
in her plain brown hair—
morning sunshine
The Lovers, Dorianne Laux
She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hands splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can’t bear it—
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body—
what she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly—she is rocking
and breathing—it’s more her body’s though,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own violation
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother’s attention,
she’s startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers—
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten—
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.
For Her, Mark Strand
Let it be anywhere
on any night you wish,
in your room that is empty and dark
or down the street
or at those dim frontiers
you barely see, barely dream of.
You will not feel desire,
nothing will warn you,
no sudden wind, no stillness of air.
She will appear,
looking like someone you knew:
the friend who wasted her life,
the girl who sat under the palm tree.
Her bracelets will glitter,
becoming the lights
of a village you turned from years ago.
For You, Ed Ochester
How sad to be a casual girl,
how sad to be bounced
in the rear of station wagons
along the shores of shrunken lakes.
How sad to listen to the men play
blackjack in the cabin and believe
Kafka’s Castle is a hamburger joint
and Truffaut a kind of mushroom.
How sad never to understand anything at all,
How sad to walk along the lake at night
and not understand why the stars have all
been eaten by the god whose name you
forgot at the moment but whom
Tibetans try to frighten with bells, cymbals,
and hideous dances on the edges of knives.
How sad to return to the cabin
and find the dead goose hung to bleed,
clamps in its nostrils, spinning
clockwise, counterclockwise—
that beautiful body hung like meat,
dribbling blood truly toward
the center of gravity.
