Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
The confusion of the language of the people took place
And the air turned into the air
For the first time
The people then administered health to each other
And learnt how to make hospital corners
Before the confusion
It could have been any language
And nothing had a form
But could act beautifully restrained
By the people's concentration
After the confusion
There was a great fire
That wiped out several domains
The people did not understand what this gross heat was
But it was recorded that one man yelled out
Nooooo! with unbending anguish as the flames engulfed
What the people could only assume was his body
One Day We Will Make Fire
After you had fallen asleep
I snuck outside and took my shirt off behind a hay barrel
To see what it would feel like to be naked outside in the dark
I recognized the hawthorn growing up the fence
Next to our house, except that it seemed prettier
I tried to identify the other plants
But could only make out the ones with flowers
The ones with the red flowers were still red in the dark
And the one shaped like a vase had closed at the top
At some point in time
We have been on a boat
And not showered for days
And hungrier than babel
And when we touched the shore
We called out Mercy to god
And began to eat sand
We were so hungry
We dug holes and lay inside them
At night, looking up at the moon
It almost replicated the distance
Monday, October 26, 2009
Emerald City
It is dark for a long time
You tell your dead son to go home
I have imagined you holding things that aren't there
Like slow dancing without a partner
You are left looking at everything without looking
You are exhausted
I will wash your feet and next, your hair
I will let you be sad
and cry forever
You will not have to stop crying
I will make your meals and show you
How to speak to people
We will not have to tell them about the past
I will buy you a white bowl for your fruit
And then a blue one
I will place you in front of them
And let you stay as long as you like
If you turn around to look at me
I will not stop singing
Thursday, September 24, 2009
A Good Light
The most beautiful realized eye is always cavern-like
It would not bulge out to attract you, or startle you
I am sure also that it has a horizon line
And half a body that it does not use
We play a game where we imagine what it would look like
If our hair grew long from some location other than our heads
Like a skirt around your neck, for example
Cardinal fox, imagining something legless
This is how we annul each other
Right beneath a window that actually says light
Sometimes we pull the screen down
So that a pale analysis wakes me in the morning
I can never fall back to sleep afterwards
It is like a virgin's head is blocking my view
And the sun just happens to be directly behind it
Inanimate Objects
You stop to look at a flower on a hillside
And swoon without trying
Who does this anymore, really?
A bleached bone in your garden
Lost at war
Lost at sea
The part where Harold runs his hand inside
The aged, wooden crevasse
The ingenious love of an amputee
A clothesline somewhere on a mountain valley
Take your time to behave some way
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Untitled
You are that woman
Who lived in a house that leaned toward the east
The foundation slowly gravitating toward the creek
In the room where we would sleep while visiting
In the furthest corner we once found a patch of grass
Growing up through the floor boards
My father had told you that this meant for you to move on
But I could hear you sing The Rose at night
Out there on the porch
And the crickets had no need to come inside
A birth place has no need to hold down fort
And so you stayed on and in the spring
A couple of swans moved into your backyard pool
And you fed them bread and would read to them
You were the one who would ride your bike
The 20 miles into town to the local grocer
Just to buy hand packaged jam
And when you’d bring it back and
Spread it over hand made biscuits you would tell me
About your previous lovers and how they all thought
That it was sexy that you were a Reader
But that in the end, you had wanted a baby
You had a way about being quiet
You had your fingers stitched in a mountain
Of irreconcilable differences
And so you would leave and come back
To this house and every year you would buy new glasses
So as to serve your visitors
There is a feeling sorry sometimes
When we hear that someone lives alone
In the middle of nowhere
There is the constant echo off the neighbor’s plot
Of shot guns being fired
In the winter, he brings you chopped wood
But you must find the kindling yourself, he tells you
You studied literature and world religion in school
I have a feeling that if you were to open a book store
That people would come in just to witness you
Surrounded in silence, propping up a head
That reads as a winter stricken field
A face that reads like a valentine
News Week
Your baby is a racist and this moon is tilted into sections of this magazine. And this article has something to do with genetic research. There are prisms I am seeing for the first time in an image that you lent me awhile ago. It’s about how divers used to pull themselves down the length of a rope in search of crustaceans. It’s how the boat can be seen bobbing above their heads, quietly as if occupying the space of a sparkle. There, a little shark sperm has just floated past. You can tell it is shark’s because of the fifth gill. It is how function leads to survival and sometimes how survival is aggressive- aggressive enough to cut open it’s own sides and build a tunnel so that water may pass through. “It’s in the rotunda” is something you might say once you have made it. It’s not working out between these two researchers- they just haven’t agreed to disagree yet. Your baby is a moon face and it will not stop crying.
Untitled
Insufferable a nuance can function
Like the nuance of dependability in the argument we had
About whether or not our depending on something could simply be
A projection of the nuance of self-realization
This is when you decided to tell me about love, or rather
The love that I was pulling out of you
When I think of this, I like to subjectify it into metaphor
Mainly the one where you send me to the hardware store
To buy lots of rope for a swing you are building for me
And when I get to the store I realize that I don’t know anything
About rope except for visually sizing it up to what it might feel like
In my hands while holding onto a swing.
Untitled
The people in your family keep using the machine in your car
They all want to know why they have been born
It is your right to put on these clothes upon waking
I used to believe that if you did not sleep naked your bones would harvest another interior and that this fuzz would behave as a suit with a white collar peering through your eye sockets. I tried to explain this to my family and to let them know that I would be taking questions afterwards.
The Inconceivable Mansion
Every morning he rises and waters his plants by the window
I have cried unnecessarily for him
His good teachers have led him to the riverbed
And left him alone
He has given us music, he has given us words,
Things to look at
He has pushed his breath in and out
While we lay on his chest
We have been told that a bear lives in the woods
Behind the house
We have been told that every morning he rises
And waters his mouth
Monkeys
I remember watching white monkeys
On a television show when I was a child
In the captured image they are glowing on the screen
Glowing and moving like fireflies in the night sky
They had tiny peach faces and I watched them
Use their mouths to clean and call one another
Their mouths slow to turn over the forms of recognition
Ooh ah ooh ah
Their tongues rolling the filth of family ointments,
Rainwater, and secretions
Their glowing, white bodies in a fury of movement
Through the trees, their hands the only thing in slow motion
As they touch and touch and touch
All Summer I Read a Book Called The Body Artist
The main character is a body artist for three reasons
1. She has broken bread from her rib
2. She has given her bread to grief, and grief has eaten it
3. She is reenacting the movements of her body as she moves
Water Birth
You were born under the sign of the fish
A pause. Or the pause of a boat in water
You once fell in love with the girl
Who had the neck of a swan and tiny shell ears
You had wanted to kiss them, but could not-
Your lips moving nearer, they would spatter bits of ocean
For which you were not yet ready
Bits of sediment arranged by the moon tides into unmanageable categories
Here her loose hairs, here her Nordic cave eyes, here her sloped shoulders a thousand times moved around
Here, you watched her shapes becoming a single corruption of light,
letting you hold on to the image longer than is possible
The burn-out trough of your pausing
Awhile later, she will ask you to kiss her
You will open her jaw with your fingers
Cupping your mouth over hers
And deposit a stone from the back of your throat
You know this will scare her, the way the water
Can remove an entire shape from existence
At Times
It feels good to see a strong arm
Wearing a watch
As though the two set each other alight
In their reiteration
One at risk of saying too soft a word
The other orated with the caliber of death
Fish
Right before they have something important
To say or do
Once in a ploy to get me to eat fish
My mother disguised it within a ball of fried dough
There, she said, something you have never tried
I could not taste the fish, although there was the taste
Of something unfamiliar, something important
To try and uncover
Red Blue
There is a red phone bleeding in from the other side of the paper
Its pressure points are as coordinated as pulses
You have seen something like this before in the movies
Where they steal the engraving of a secret rendezvous
Off the hotel pad
This will not incriminate you
There is this one movie where a beautiful woman
Holds a large wooden propeller
Somewhere else another character is having an affair
And items have been stolen from the man who owns the propeller
You want to see the beautiful woman’s face again
Only this time, you want there to be a blue sky- the empty kind
And her face to be a mask that sort of sits in front of it
Advent
This island, a thermal collaring
to the coordinates of Tragedy.
A small group of oceaners
swam to your shore,
after a shark had been spotted
amongst them.
If you keep looking away from the island
you will see its ghost, and something
to be born beyond that.
The most beautiful dead eyes
are the veils of muslin hung out to dry,
that were left intact after an entire civilization
mysteriously disappeared.
This is always happening, the sacrificial colony.
The spirits are changing under pressure.
In the center of the island
a goat has fallen into a ravine.
Blood on rock is not the same as blood in water,
is not the same as blood in hair.
Hatch marks on bone
is how you found the cave’s opening.
Why did you lie about that shark in the water?
Vikings
How can I tell you that we are in love?
A disembodied hinge was found
on the shore, sometime late last night.
When we opened it
we found a secret message-
salt lick for our eyes.
It reminded me of when soup
is served in vessels of bread.
As you eat the soup, you may also
slowly remove the edge of the bowl-
to equalize your consumption.
Afterwards, there is no evidence that
you have eaten at all.
You will stand to leave the table
and walk home to your French girlfriend
who is always telling the sexy stories.
Like the one where they take the raw bird
into their mouths,
wait for the heart to beat on their tongues,
then swallow it entirely.
Detecting Light
Somehow, the plants have communicated with one another
Slowly breaking down the edges of the air
Into a signal
And do you love this garden for that reason?
I have seen your eyes melt into a bouquet
Your pupils managing your vision
A wild dictation of Flora, Fauna, Flora, Fauna
It takes another pair of eyes.
Untitled
The Prince moves swiftly through the forest.
His beautiful horse is silent.
Between the branches overhead
There are spaces left open for a quickening.
The sky is beginning to resemble the sea.
There is nothing that belongs there- on the sea.
Things have been made to inhabit this space.
Things have been built to float
It is in the nature.
The Prince and his horse are following a river
Which deposits into an ocean
Hundreds of years ago on expedition, explorers
Tried to discover its beginning and end
They were given clues and conjured up symbols
To explain its distance and direction
The horse needs more water than the Prince.
The Prince sits down and watches his horse drink.
He imagines what it would look like if his horse were to sweat
He is reminded of textures, of absorbencies and repellants.
He is thinking of a tear now and how it would fall
From that sweeping black eye.
Untitled
Sometimes when I sit behind you
I cut your head out from the space around it
And then I call you The Poet
How long have you searched for the name of the gates
Of the sacrificial enclosure?
And which one is readier to diminish in light?
When the sun rises in India
The shadows are cast in such a way
That the shallow troughs of sand
appear to be full of something
Once, upon a friend’s return
I was told a story about a place
Where people go to sin, purposefully
Afterwards, in a ceremony
A black cloth is wrapped around your body
Until you become as dark as the night
How you must feel to become this dark
Is like pressing your finger inside a tiny ribcage
Like that of a mole or a bat
You have seen a light in the woods
And have kept this to yourself
None the less, your behavior has become
Lulled and focused on the shiny object
Now you will have to choose between
Seeing your reflection in a mirror
Or in a pool of water
Untitled
You should try and remember the drawing
Your son made about evaporation
In this drawing the sun has been given arms,
But no legs
And is reaching out for the basin of water
You will notice that this is a transgressive tenderness
That perhaps he has seen from you
From the basin of water
The definition of evaporation spills forth
River Barge
There is such a thing as a barge filled with land
Moving down the river
Tom and I have seen it and have speculated
That it is more than the sum of its parts
After this conversation, Tom partitions his raft into three rooms
He is still recovering from a broken heart,
Otherwise there may have been four
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
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