POETRY

Nine Ways of Looking at a Spoon
1.
n. A domestic utensil
consisting of
a shallow bowl
on a stem or handle,
used for conveying
liquids to the mouth
 
2.
We would fit together better
in the spoon position
if we weren’t so
bent and tarnished.
 
3.
She had no regard
for the implement
only that which it
contained.
 
4.
Give it to me now.
I want to chew it
and suck it
and drool on it
and drop it
and forget it.
 
5.
I am your slave.
Into which orifice
do you want me
to insert this spoon?
 
6.
Her Crusade was a search
for a missing spoon.
It was part of her
wedding set.
 
7.
I am not your slave.
Wash your own fucking spoon.
 
8.
He found that
disemboweling his enemy
with a blunt spoon
was harder
than he thought.
 
9.
They created a tool
from which
liquid will spill,
dirtying tables,
scalding laps,
if it is tilted
a hair’s breadth
either way.
Stupid white man.

Orion Flees to Canada
The garish sheen, the green film of the pond
will melt in winter, melt into white frost
as fine as lace. In Ontario he's fond
 
of white fields — north of Montreal he lost
his way — exactly why he traveled so far.
Baffin Bay approached, where only moss
 
and lichen thrive on land, dark sea below
the glacial grip, water so much like death
to touch. The oblique sun begins to grow
 
when spring approaches. Falling pillars left
for summer drift like broken shards, mirrors
collapse, the man like a lynx climbs the cleft
 
of what must be the last horizon's lure
to misanthropes — the hunter living on fat,
he salts his kill, and makes use of the fur
 
and hides of seal. While fashioning a hat
to shield his eyes, he lost view of the world,
the ghosts of ice embalmed in light, the vat
 
of spectral night in which the wisps are furled
before the failing sun creeps, spires of light
and stars embrace the hunter moored in height.

 

A Harvest Before the Revolution
Now press the razor's lazy blade on flesh
to shear the Russian's beard clear to his chin,
and cull with languid dagger's soft caress
 
the hair now gathered on the floor. The dress
the ballerina wore reveals pale skin.
Now press the razor's lazy blade on flesh
 
as she performs. The monk intends to bless
the ballerina and the Russian dandy's sin,
and cull with languid dagger's soft caress
 
some roses for the monastery steps.
The ballerina's face is long and thin.
Now press the razor's lazy blade on flesh.
 
Her hair's prepared by serfs. The monks profess
the marriage real. The Russian scythes begin
to cull with languid dagger's soft caress
 
his yellow fields. The wheat is tethered fresh.
Their work is hard. In ritual their wives spin.
Now press the razor's lazy blade on flesh
and cull with languid dagger's soft caress.

Too Much Light
She will not pack. She's going to be gone
again. Summer opens late this year.
Daylight is permissive. She comments on
it — amber images that won't cohere,
the birch trees' soft reliance on the light.
The sky is turning past us now, a shear–
ing off that's almost tangible. She might
as well ignore the garden's boundaries.
Birch and summer-heat are nothing. The sight
of distance, that leveling, is what she sees
or doesn't see. She's leaving soon. She'd say
she's reconfiguring. It's warm. The trees
are whining in the light. She says they pray
for her. She takes her leave of me this way.

 

Vacancies
Nothing ends — the central melancholy
turns like a wheel through silence. This has all
happened before — our voices, the soundless folly
of singing in circles, vacancies that fall
from the words we imagine into the words
we say. A verbal music, line by line
organic, partial. The truth in halves and thirds
develops and revolves, and we resign
ourselves to orphic circularity.
We'll make the turn late and in our flesh.
Reaching for that spiral harmony,
we'll touch it as it moves away, distinguish
something vague, uncertain, a trailing off
just outside the score. A kind of loss.

 

Window Glass
This amount of silence and no more.
You're telling me that glass is made of sand.
I don't know what this information's for:
a closed detail, but I believe you, and
 
I marvel at this fragile film of sand.
You're looking through it, at the redwood tree,
a closed detail, but I believe you, and
I'm looking, too, through brittle glass... I see
 
you watching darkness and the redwood tree,
the evening growing incandescent now.
I'm looking, too. In the glass, I see
your face reflecting, and I notice how
 
the evening's growing incandescent now.
Careful details: I don't know what they're for—
the sanded glass, your face in half light, how
there's this amount of silence and no more.

 

Charcot, who Died in Morvan
There's something mordant here. It's finally warm:
that's part of it. Charcot. Salpêtrière.
You're right about cymbidium.
 
The orchid's hyper-sexed, I would say,
a function of arrangement. Something I misread:
an element that's mordant here. It's warm.
 
How strange it is to fast like this, the air
becoming one-dimensional. Charcot is dead
and you are right about cymbidium.
 
Charcot? He died in Morvan, having mapped
a number of cerebral arteries.
It's warm here. There's something mordant:
 
no one's neurasthenic anymore.
Don't misunderstand me. We have the symptoms...
and you are right about cymbidium;
 
they're frenziedly obscene. We've lost the disease:
neurasthenia, not obscenity. Show me your orchid
again. There's something mordant in its warmth.
You're absolutely right, my love, about cymbidium.

Apoptosis
I’m sorry, but your geranium lost its bloom.
I did what you said: named it a sibilant name,
spoke daily to it, even watered it twice a week.
It was not lack of effort that killed it; it shook
off its petals from the table just as each cell
in our bodies (sweat-slick, on the bed & coiled
together) had known its own end: our limbs
drifted to the sheets, plucked from the stem.

 

Postcards to Myself

July something
Each night of the week she sits at a desk and pulls out a notebook. She does not mind the boredom, monotony, or the solitude that some would call loneliness. There are half-eaten apples bursting from garbage cans that attract roaches and poets seeking silence and a bit of food.

August 18, 10:00 AM
The morning is cool for summer and damp with fungus sprung from a night's rain. It was rain that drove The Poet away and it occurs to her that everything in the universe is cause and effect: little circles of verbs attach themselves to nouns.

That night — from the hotel restaurant
The plates are thick stoneware conducting heat to un-callused hands. There are roaches in the bathroom also; they don't like the rain either but have nowhere else to go.

Sunday
The Poet called today for some advice. It is annoying and flattering to her — his calls for the proper placement of a comma. He tells her to come to Boston. She almost leaves but thinks that there is something satisfying about rain and cheap hotels.

September 3
Across the lawn she sees The Student drive up with a bed on the roof. A stained mattress stares at her and the yellowed shade stares at her from both sides and she can no longer take it and leaves the hotel.

Same day, fifteen minutes later
Paranoia: n. [ModL — Gr, derangement — para, beside + nous, the mind] Psychiatry: a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions, as of grandeur or, esp., persecution, often, except in a schizophrenic state, with an otherwise relatively intact personality.

Next week
The Student begins to look like The Poet, she thinks. He takes on the same outline, the same brooding moods, and she wonders if he might come to her bed. The Poet calls, reminding her that he is yet, at this moment, still someone else. She cradles the receiver under her chin and slips into bed then dreams of a world without poets.

October 2, 4:00 PM
She has invited The Student over for dinner many times. He is The Poet but for his mind. The Student speaks of non-empirical knowledge and of self and mind as she seduces him. One night, in bed, The Poet calls and asks her questions about verbs and she never sees The Student again.

October 5
She keeps the blinds closed now to avoid seeing The Student avoid her. Across the street his voice drifts through her window as if over an intercom — distorted and nasal. The Poet hasn't called in days. She is out of stamps.

Barbie's Story
When they ask why Ken and I
never married, I show them the silk
and pearl gown still hanging in my
Dream House closet, dripping like milk
 
from a padded hanger. Sometimes I slip
it on to see my mirrored self through the veil.
Everything goes gauzy white like the lip
of a waterfall, and I never fail
 
to feel a touch of vertigo. No doubt it
would be a thrill to jump, but I know
it would be my last outrageous outfit.
So I enjoy my private fashion show,
 
then take it off and get on with my life—
always a bride, never a wife.

Signpost
Twice a day, going to work and coming back,
you see the abandoned farmhouse in the field,
beside the river and the train stop.
The square holes that once were windows
let the seasons' skies through.
Today it stood soberly and neatly
in its stretch of bronze stalks.
Days are made of signposts like these
which are noticed, unnoticed, mute;
a crumb of their meaning could spark off
while you are leaving for good.
And spark-eyed Charon will tell.

 

Just Before
Getting to the top of the slope
you gaze up at the spiky stalks
which guard the last strip of land
as if it were a stronghold;
dishevelled in the blue
they introduce you to the roar in front.
They have taken root
in the irises of the edge crevices,
in the wind's sunlit bites.
Here the open air has a spicy scent,
it's where a saint
may have lingered
loaded with sun blades,
dry-eyed, driven and erased
by sea lashes.

Migration Pattern
Sometimes it takes two seasons to sleep.
No one visits; I sink
 
deeper into a nearby basin. At
this hour I am too deep to be stepped on
 
by passing storms. The light from fireworks
advertises sex or food, it is quiet
 
enough to hear a thousand thoughts at once.
When I sleep, I am eaten through
 
with desire to break the yellows
near the surface, across sloping greens of
 
firmer footing. Night lifts this crush
crush of water from my bones. I long
 
to rest, without fear of anchors, being
woken every hour by the graze of trawlers.

 

Allergic to Sleep,
she paces the floors
like a puppy, listening to each footstep.
 
The house has eaten her family, their bodies
lie in neat rows, enclosed in sheets of thin moth
 
wings. She reads though there's nothing new in
her books, words passing quietly,
 
meaningless. Soon spring, when days push back
against night, spider bites heal into hard
 
calluses, from varieties of venom,
none intoxicating. She can't remember which
 
photos depict the sun, if it's night
she longs for, or if she only wants to sleep
 
through winter, awaken and warm
alongside insects who won't live out the summer.

 

What's Left to Say?
There is nothing left of the moon,
its shadows and mythologies pull
free as quiet as a gray wing brushes over waves.
 
It has wandered, rolled like a loose pearl
out of its place, only a memory
of the thing. What will I tell my problems to? What
 
iridescence will guide sailors ashore? The universe
is less impressed, one more body
cast aside, free from the swinging arc gravity affords
 
us all. I calculate its new neighborhood
of sky, see it swallowed by the background
grit of creation. One less guidepost to watch for
 
on dark trips between empty continents.

Tracy
Vanish without a trace. Trace around
the image and connect it to the text. Bless
yourself and others; outline beliefs
against hope weighed prudently with
passion. Trace the inception of possibility
along a stranger's cheek. Ruffle curls
that are not yours and wonder about the
scar. Trace the progression of interest
turned word. Understand the standing
throngs are eyes of hope turned inward
as they trace our body language. And then
there is me and you have disappeared.

 

Collapse
Too much water under our bridge to
salvage much from this mess.
Too much time wasted worrying
about molehills and growing them.
I always thought I could hold open
my heart's door to you forever,
never anticipated how tired I'd get, how
achy my fingers would feel keeping this grip.
My arms tremble their need to hold
you or anyone or someone who
would hold me back, wouldn't hold me
back. Who would want to hold me too.

Florence
Winds rise
like silent hands in summer,
mocking high balcony sills
and forcing
window latches.

The shutters have burst open.

White billowy linens
envelope the stone alleyway,

and grasp like tendrils
at the old city spires.

 

Old Photograph
She still hasn’t noticed the lotus flowers
made of red velvet
that climb the walls of the pub;
or the fronds of the plastic fern
trembling at the iron grate;

or the shadows of passersby,
casting formless protests
over the doors of the kitchen.

But when she emerges from the stock room,
with a jar of green olives, or gin,
the photograph confronts her:

houses with Victorian frames;
parades that bolster pennants
made of felt and yarn;
women bound in crinoline skirts
and wide-brimmed hats;
mustachioed men bridled
in the breadth of history.

She lifts her hand
to brush her hair from her eyes
and suddenly finds herself in the glass.

Outside,
twilight overcomes the
old façades of the city.