Painting
He'd go down to the basement
wearing his dark blue work shirt,
to the corner of the windowless,
cinder-block room where he had
his canvas propped, and somehow,
after years of being tangled up
in knots of possibility, after
days of talk, after wrestling
with the angel of Not-painting,
he squeezed a wildly orange
Vermont landscape out of those
bright oily tuobes, smeared it,
all its red-leafed, golden blur,
onto the rectangle of cloth
and gesso that had been waiting,
like me, for his stroking hand.
Persephone
I
Under the tiresome flat brightness
of sun, everything sticks in the humid air,
especially flesh. Her opaque powdered skin,
surrounding arms and presented cheek
sicken me. Can't she see I've grown
beyond a mother's embrace. The endless
candy tints of flowers, clothes, boats
and fruit all cloy. It takes years
for shallow August to melt into Septemer.
I hate the smell of her orchards, overripe
apples rot on the grass, covered
by swarms of bees whose abdomens pump
in delight. I live for the first cold
twilight, the dry leaf scent, the color
of dark gold everywhere, deepening,
when the long, purple shadows signal
my coming escape, when the sun's
more oblique angle will bring him,
his black eyes, the depth of night.
II
I won't go. Or, when he who drains
all color from the earth comes
to claim me, I'll show him what ice is.
I'll be numb as death to his touch,
shrouded inside like a bulb's dormant core.
I hate her for making a bargain
that links my fate to the sun's decline.
Can't it stay September, when the fields
swarm with grain, bowing the tired stalks,
when bright melons grow round to the point
of bursting and everything is ripe,
fecund, and the apple, in its red heaviness
cleaves to the bough? Can't we stay
at this moment of fullness, all formed,
ready for birth, but not going, so
our closeness does not end with the first
cold night, when the dark other,
who plucks all friut, arrives
to take me into that separate world?
III
There is no place without loss
as I shunt between two worlds,
timed to that huge burning star.
When day enlarges to outlast night,
I'm banished from his presence,
rise above ground. Either he is gone,
my large dark partner, and although
I dread his gaze, or think I may not
survive the pairings, I still feel
the icy pull, the deadly penetration
of desire; or I am missing her,
the mother whose brightness feeds me
honey, grains, apricots, in the long
summer grass under a lavish sun. I could
drown in her beauty, remain an infant
forever, or dissolve in her arms,
if there were no necessity of leaving,
no longing for return, regular
as equinox, to his deep world.
from Isthmus
Pulled to shore, morning, fog bound
no outward gaze beyond the self
still curled up in flannel pajamas,
strange desire to watch
the ink trail unfold, cursive line
stretching towards...
Know yourself and you're alone
all ties lost, unbound
little zeppelin floating out
in the currents of the unseen.
Propellers are nice. Go somewhere
beyond the edge of what you know.
Gone–the boulder cracks into quartz core,
gems hidden beneath obdurate dailiness:
me here, you at work drawing lines
of a building that does not exist yet,
unfold, unfold, reach back into me,
our path, the arc of possibility
has to land on someone
if it falls in the forest.
*****
Dazed to have this–
the arc between the two land masses
of you and me, isthmus,
that reach where space translates
distance into worldliness, feeling
the appendage even at work, a stretch
of land, something sandy and grassy,
invisible, earthbound.
