More Than Anything I Like to Sing But It's Rare
If nothing else, I know how to make a good fuss.
But I didn't want centrifugal force, I wanted
a flowering tree. Of my entire family, I'm the one
who loves red and leaves doors open.
The truth is I stand in awe of the human machine.
I peer into people's bodies in the back of the ambulance.
I sit with my breath and my recipies. I can't speak
for the monochromatic. Excuse the expression,
but there is such a thing as owning, it's just not
about money. I don't know about the arabesques
my limbs have never described. I didn't say flute,
I said cello. Short of wearing a club, joining a uniform,
what so I do with my big noise, to make it
surely music? I am sad without leaves.
And meanwhile, the world turns breezily in its rusty socket.
The trouble with green is it starts yellow
and ends brown. The trouble with green is
it's so dangerously quiet.
Quarry
It's about serious digging, near-rhymes
with worry. A job on this scale deserves music,
accompaniment, good insurance–but most
of us begin alone, uncovered, in the dark.
I can't see but I quarry, I presuppose, I mean
to carry. Mine is the quarry of unmarry,
I'm wanting deep water, clear, no more
dead body. Rising out of icy blue, something
almost lovely, unblurry.
We Live in Bodies
That we do means everything to me now
as I try to sort you out try to imagine
sticking you in the ground veins
drained or bones burned to dust try
to imagine what will be left here
in my lap empty hands mind's eye
my cup of having to go on
We live in bodies clumsy and disobedient
and we love them even as we punish
with too much or too little
we think we're bigger than they are
and then we sit dumbly surprised
how easily that tiny jot of spirit can get lost
so many folds of yellow and pink tissue
There are those who have looked back looked down
from ceilings of hospital rooms and returned to us
we see their lips full and red again but their words
hover fleshless in vowels and consonants
our heads nod yes our bones say no because living
in bodies means blood in all its horror and beauty
means making each other hum and ooze making
baby bodies means we can lay our hands on their
bodies where and when we must not
as we age our bodies pale with the knowing
The fact of sagging flesh and bodily regrets
the fact of slowly applied pain the hand somewhere
applying it while in this latitude her small mouth
tugs and closes over my nipple
the power of a shriek the solace of singing
winding our twisted sinewy streets
bodies are the doomed and wonderful cities where we live
Glen Cove, 1957
A strawberry shortcake sits breathing sweetness on a cloud
above the
curvy cartoon fridge and I am seven climbing
phone books piled on a wobbly chair until the dull silver
radiator
looms, then a trickle and someone saying
cracked open. Am I dead? Am I an egg? I hatch out,
bandaged
under grapevines near a gullyful of trash.
The wooden lawn chair knits splinters into the backs of my
knees and I
will get no shortcake. Am I downcast or
defiant? This and so much else I reach for is gone–
the color
of the bulkhead being painted,
the kind of sandwiches my mother hands the splattered
churchmen,
and does she know she's pretty?
Rotten apples on spring ground are smeary bittersweet
and I am
the age of my daughter who still loves fog.
I hate it. The way last month's huge sadnesses and tiny
triumphs
are leaking onto her pillow as she sleeps,
and who knows which moments will get snagged and remain
to point to
who she's become once she's forgotten
the rest, her right foot asleep and her daughter
gap-mouthed
below her wide with the world.
