"The Balance Wheel"

• Where I wave at the sky and understand love, knowing our August heat, I see birds pulling past the dim frosted thigh of Autumn, unlatched from the nest, and wing-beat for the south, making their high dots across the sky, like beauty spots marking a still perfect cheek. I see them bend the air, slipping away, for what birds seek.

"My Friend, My Friend"

• Who will forgive me for the things I do? With no special legend or God to refer to.
• I forgive you for what you did not do, I am impossibly guilty.
• Watching my mother slowly die I knew my first release.
• But my sin is always my sin, with no special legend or God to refer to.
• To have your reasonable hurt to belong to might ease my trouble like liquor or aspirin.
• And if I lie, I lie because I love you, because I am bothered by the things I do, because your hurt invades my calm white skin. With no special legend or God to refer to.

"You, Doctor Martin"

• Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure.
• And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death.
• We chew in rows, our plates scratch & wine like chalk in school. There are no knives for cutting your throat.
• I make moccasins all morning. At first my hands kept empty, unraveled for the lives they used to work. Now I learn to take them back, each angry finger that demands I mend what another will break tomorrow.
• Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
• Your third eye moves among us & lights the separate boxes where we sleep or cry.
• What large children we are here. All over I grow most tall in the best ward.
• You twist in the pull of the foxy children who fall like floods of like in frost.
• And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, counting this row and that row of moccasins.

"Kind Sir: These Woods"

• ("Not til we are lost... do we begin to find ourselves" - Thoreau, Walden)
• It was a trick to turn around once and know you were lost; knowing the crow's horn was crying in the dark, knowing that supper would never come, that the coast's cry of doom from that far away bell buoy's bell said 'your nursemaid is gone.'
• Then you were dead. Turn around once, eyes tight, the thought in your head.
• Kind Sir: Lost and of your same kind, I have turned around twice with my eyes sealed and the woods were white and my night mind saw such strange happenings, untold and unreal.
• And opening my eyes I am afraid of course to look -- this inward look that society scorns -- Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.

"Music Swims Back to Me"

• Which way is home?
• La la la, Oh music swims back to me and I can feel the tune they played the night they left me in this private institution on a hill.
• Imagine it. A radio playing and everyone here was crazy. I liked it and danced in a circle.
• ...remembers the first night here. It was the strangled cold of November; even the stars were strapped in the sky and that moon too bright forking through the bars to stick me with a singing in the head. I have forgotten all the rest.
• They lock me in this chair at eight a.m. and there are no signs to tell the way, just the radio beating to itself and the song that remembers more than I. Oh, la la la, this music swims back to me. The night I came I danced in a circle and was not afraid. Mister?

"Elizabeth Gone"

• Your old skin puckering, your lungs' breath grown baby short as you looked up last
• You lay in the crate of your last death, but were not you, not finally you. They have stuffed her cheeks, I said; this clay hand, this mask of Elizabeth are not true. From within the satin and the suede of this inhuman bed, something cried, 'let me go let me go.'
• They gave me your ash and bony shells, rattling like gourds in the cardboard urn, rattling like stones
• So I threw out your last bony shells and heard me scream for the look of you, your apple face, the simple creche of your arms, the August smells of your skin. Then I sorted your clothes and the loves you had left, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, until you were gone.

"Some Foreign Letters"

• I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart.
• And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back... but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
• I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand.
• how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors.
• this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl
• When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen

"Said the Poet to the Analyst"

• I confess I am only broken by the sources of things
• as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings
• But if you should say this is something it is not, then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny and ridiculous and crowded with all the believing money.

"Her Kind"

• I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

"Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward"

• The doctors are enamel, they want to know the facts.
• They guess about the man who left me, some pendulum soul, going the way men go.
• Yours is the only face I recognize. Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.
• I hold you and name you bastard in my arms.
• I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise against me. We unlearn. I am a shore rocking you off. You break from me. I choose your only way, my small inheritor and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.

"What's That"

• watched it swell like a new balloon, watched it slump and then divide, like something I know I know -- a broken pear or two halves of the moon, or round white plates floating nowhere or fat hands waving in the summer air
• You know how parents call from sweet beaches anywhere, 'come in come in,' and how you sank under water to put out the sound
• And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street and are there and are true. What else is this, this intricate shape of air? calling me, calling you.

"The Moss of His Skin"

• to be folded up together as if we were silk
• The black room took us like a cave or a mouth or an indoor belly
• I lay by the moss of skin until it grew strange. My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree.

"Lullaby"

• The yellow moths sag against the locked screens and the faded curtains suck over the window sills
• My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth
• I will ignore the bed. I am linen on the shelf. Let the others moan in secret; let each lost butterfly go home. Old woolen head, take me like a yellow moth

"For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further"

• something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me
• I tapped my own head; it was glass, an inverted bowl. It is a small thing to rage in our own bowl.
• At first it was private. Then it was more than myself; it was you, or your house, or your kitchen.
• And if you turn away, because there is no lesson here, I will hold my awkward bowl, with all its cracked stars shining like a complicated lie, and fasten a new skin around it as if I were dressing an orange or a strange sun.
• Not that it was beautiful, but I found some order there.

"The Double Image"

• I let the witches take away my guilty soul. I pretended I was dead until the white men pumped the poison out, putting me armless and washed through the rigamarole of talking boxes and the electric bed.
• I lived like an angry guest, like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child; I remember my mother did her best. She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled.
• We talked of drought while the salt-parched field grew sweet again. To help pass the time I tried to mow the lawn.
• matching me to keep me well, only my mother grew ill. She turned from me, as if death were catching, as if death transferred, as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
• I wintered in Boston, childless bride, nothing sweet to spare with witches at my side. I missed your babyhood, tried a second suicide, tried the sealed hotel a second year.
• And you came each weekend. But I lie. You seldom came. I just pretended you, small piglet, butterfly girl with jelly bean cheeks, disobedient three, my splendid stranger.
• I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
• You call me mother and I remember my mother again, somewhere in greater Boston, dying.
• I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

"Division of Parts"

• Spring rusts on its skinny branch and last summer's lawn is soggy & brown. Yesterday is just a number. All of its winters avalanche out of sight. What was, is gone.

"All My Pretty Ones"

• Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.
• The diary of your hurly-burly years goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass. Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
• Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

"Young"

• I lay on the lawn at night, clover wrinkling under me, the wise stars bedding over me, my mother's window a funnel of yellow heat running out, my father's window, half shut.

"Lament"

• There's no doubt about the trees spreading their thin feet into the dry grass.
• In the entryway a cat breathes calmly into her watery blue fur. The supper dishes are over and the sun unaccustomed to anything else goes all the way down.

"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph"

• Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on... and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth.
• and think of Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes.
• Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye.
• Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun & come plunging down while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

"The Starry Night"

• It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye.
• Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die: into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry.

"Old Dwarf Heart"

• When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head.
• Her eyes wobble as thirty-one thick folds of skin open to glare at me on my flickering bed. She knows the decay we're made of.
• But if I dream of loving, then my dreams are of snarling strangers. She dreams that... strange, strange, and corrupt.
• Good God, the things she knows! And worse, the sores she holds in her hands, gathered like a nest from an abandoned field.
• At her best she is all red muscle, humming in & out, cajoled by time. Where I go, she goes.
• Oh now I lay me down to love, how awkwardly her arms undo, how patiently I untangle her wrists like knots. Old ornament, old naked fist, even if I put on seventy coats I could not cover you... mother, father, I'm made of.

"Remember"

• By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore & the grass was as tough as hemp an was no color -- no more than the sand was a color
• and we had worn our bare feet since the twentieth of June & there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock & some nights we took our gin warm and neat from old jelly glasses while the sun blew out of sight like a red picture hat & one day I drew my hair back with a ribbon and you said that I looked almost like a puritan lady
• and what I remember best is that the door to your room was the door to mine.

"The Operation"

• woman's dying must come in seasons
• I walk out, scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw that were this summer's lawn.
• Clean of the body's hair, I lie smooth from breast to leg. All that was special, all that was rare is common here.
• Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
• The rooms down the hall are calling all night long, while the night outside sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling & see yellow eyes flick in the rain.
• The walls color in a wash of daylight until the room takes its objects into itself again.
• Day is worse.
• I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence.
• On the stretcher, citizen & boss of my own body still, I glide down the halls & rise in the iron cage toward science and pitfalls.
• The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle as they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin.
• The soul that swam the furious water sinks now in flies & the brain flops like a docked fish and the eyes are flat boat decks riding out the pain.
• My nurses, those starchy ghosts, hover over me for my lame hours & my lame days. The mechanics of the body pump for their tricks. I rest on their needles, am dosed & snoring amid the orange flowers & the eyes of visitors. I wear, like some senile woman, a scarlet candy package ribbon in my hair.
• I grumble to forget the lie I ought to hear, but don't. God knows I thought I'd die -- but here I am, recalling mother, the sound of her good morning, the odor of orange & jam.
• All's well, they say. They say I'm better. I lounge in frills or, picturesque, I wear bunny pink slippers in the hall. I read a new book & shuffle past the desk to mail the author my first fan letter.
• Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came along, Anne, and run along now, my stomach laced up like a football for the game.

"The Abortion"

• the earth puckered its mouth, each bud puffing out from its knot
• I changed my shoes, and then drove south.
• where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair, its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly, a dark socket from which the coal has poured: "Somebody who should have been born is gone."
• the grass as bristly & stout as chives, and me wondering when the ground would break, and me wondering how anything fragile survives
• he took the fullness that love began
• Returning north, even the sky grew thin like a high window looking nowhere. The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.
• Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death.

"With Mercy for the Greedy"

• I detest my sins & I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep.
• True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical & horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
• All morning long I have worn your cross, hung with package string around my throat. It tapped me lightly as a child's heart might, tapping secondhand, softly waiting to be born. Ruth, I cherish the letter you wrote.
• I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it.
• This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

"In the Deep Museum"

• My God, my God, what queer corner am I in? Didn't I die, blood running down the post, lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost? Surely my body is done? Surely I died? And yet, I know, I'm here. What place is this? Cold and queer, I sting with life. I lied.
• If this is hell, then hell could not be much, neither as special nor as ugly as I was told.
• It is panting; it is an odor with a face... It laps my sores.

"The Fortress"

• Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood.
• I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep.
• We watch the wind from our square ed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty.
• since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the win, clean as oilskins.
• The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting & sighing.
• Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land.
• Outside the bittersweet turns orange.
• Your feet thump-thump against my back
• what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild?
• I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch.
• I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

"Old"

• I'm tired of faces that I don't know and know I think that death is starting.
• Death starts like a dream, full of objects & my sister's laughter.
• Sweet taste [of blueberries] -- my mouth so full & the sweet blue running out all the way to Damariscotta.
• Leave me alone! Can't you see I'm dreaming? In a dream you are never eighty.

"Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"

• Dearest, although everything has happened, nothing has happened.
• Over my right shoulder I see four nuns who sit like a bridge club, their faces poked out from under their habits, as good as good babies who have sunk into their carriages.
• Without discrimination, the wind pulls the skirts of [the nuns'] arms. Almost undressed, I see what remains: that holy wrist, that ankle, that chain.
• Oh God, although I am very sad, could you please let those four nuns loosen from their leather boots & their wooden chairs to rise out over this greasy deck, out over this iron rail, nodding their pink heads to one side, flying four abreast in the old-fashioned side stroke; each mouth open & round, breathing together, as fish do, singing without sound.
• My dark girls sing for this. They are going up. See them rise on black wings, drinking the sky, without smiles or hands or shoes. They call back to us from the gauzy edge of paradise, 'good news, good news.'

"For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God"

• God has a brown voice, as soft & full as beer.
• Eleanor... is standing in my kitchen talking & I am breathing in my cigarettes like poison.
• She stands in her lemon-colored sun dress motioning to God with her wet hands glossy from the washing of egg plates. She tells him! She tells him like a drunk who doesn't need to see to talk. It's casual but friendly. God is as close as the ceiling.
• Though no one can ever know, I don't think he has a face. He had a face when I was six & a half. Now he is large, covering up the sky like a great resting jellyfish.

"The Black Art"

• A woman who writes feels too much, those trances & portents!
• A writer is essentially a spy.
• A man who writes knows too much, such spells & fetiches!
• A writer is essentially a crook.
• Never loving ourselves, hating even our shoes and our hats, we love each other
• Our eyes are full of terrible confessions. But when we marry, the children leave in disgust. There is too much food & no one left over to eat up all the weird abundance.

"And One for My Dame"

• How suddenly gauche I was with my old-maid heart & my funny teenage applause.
• Each night at home my father was in love with maps while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs. Except when he laid in his bedroom on a three-day drunk, he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk, his matched luggage and pocketed a confirmed reservation, his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.
• I sit at my desk each night with no place to go
• He died on the road, his heart pushed from neck to back, his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac.

"Flee on Your Donkey"

• Because there was no other place to flee to, I came back to the scene of the disordered senses, came back last night at midnight, arriving in the thick June night, without luggage or defenses
• keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes the way a child holds on to a toy
• Today crows play black-jack on the stethoscope.
• Everyone has left me except my nurse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
• The curtains, lazy & delicate, billow and flutter and drop like the Victorian skirts of my two maiden aunts who kept an antique shop.
• Hornets, dragging their thin stingers, hover outside, all knowing.
• Who remembers what lurks in the heart of man?
• Upstairs a girl curls like a snail; in another room someone tries to eat a shoe; meanwhile an adolescent pads up & down the hall in his white tennis socks.
• Six years of such small preoccupations! Six years of shuttling in and out of this place! O my hunger! My hunger! I could have gone around the world twice or had new children -- all boys. It was a long trip with little days in it & no new places.
• In here, it's the same old crowd, the same ruined scene. The alcoholic arrives with his golf clubs. The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn into the lining of her dress. The permanent guests have done nothing new. Their faces are still small like babies with jaundice.
• Meanwhile, they carried out my mother, wrapped like somebody's doll, in sheets, bandaged her jaw & stuffed up her holes.
• My father, too. He went out on the rotten blood he used up on other women in the Middle West. He went out, a cured old alcoholic on crooked feet & useless hands. He went out calling for his father who died all by himself long ago.
• But you, my doctor, my enthusiast, were better than Christ; you promised me another world to tell me who I was.
• I spent most of my time, a stranger, damned & in trance -- that little hut, that naked blue-veined place, my eyes shut on the confusing office, eyes circling into my childhood, eyes newly cut.
• I was your third grader with a blue star on my forehead. In trance I could be any age, voice, gesture -- all turned backward like a drugstore clock. Awake, I memorized dreams.
• my hands swinging down like hooks to pull dreams up out of their cage
• I threw myself down pretending to be dead for 8 hours. I thought I had died into a snowstorm. Above my head chains cracked along like teeth digging their way through the snowy street. I lay there like an overcoat that someone had thrown away. You carried me back in, awkwardly, tenderly, with the help of the red-haired secretary who was built like a lifeguard.
• My shoes, I remember, were lost in the snowbank as if I planned never to walk again.
• That was the winter that my mother died, half mad on morphine, blown up, at last, like a pregnant pig. I was her dreamy evil eye.
• I carried a knife in my pocketbook... I wasn't sure if I should slash a tire or scrape the guts out of some dream.
• You taught me to believe in dreams; thus I was the dredger. I held them like an old woman with arthritic fingers, carefully straining the water out--sweet dark playthings, and above all, mysterious, until they grew mournful & weak.
• Was it last month or last year that the ambulance ran like a hearse with its siren blowing on suicide -- Dinn, dinn, dinn! -- a noon whistle that kept insisting on life all the way through the traffic lights?
• I have come back but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! The innocence of it! That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat with his fiery joke, his manic smile -- even he seems blurred, small and pale.
• I have come back, recommitted, fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger, held like a prisoner who was so poor he fell in love with jail.
• allowing myself the wasted life
• Soon I will raise my face for a white flag, and when God enters the fort, I won't spit or gag on his finger. I will eat it like a white flower.
• Is this the old trick, the wasting away, the skull that waits for its dose of electric power?
• This is madness but a kind of hunger... It is hardly a feast. It is my stomach that makes me suffer.
• There are brains that rot here like black bananas. Hearts have grown flat as dinner plates. Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow. Ride out any old way you please!
• In this place everyone talks to his own mouth. That's what it means to be crazy.
• Those I loved best died of it -- the fool's disease.

"Somewhere in Africa"

• Death with no rage to weigh you down
• Your last book unsung, your last hard words unknown, abandoned by science, cancer blossomed in your throat, rooted like bougainvillea into your gray backbone, ruptured your pores until you wore it like a coat.
• I think of your last June nights in Boston, your body swollen but light, your eyes small as you let the nurses carry you into a strange land.
• for you are stronger than mahogany & your bones fill the boat high as with fruit and bark from the interior. She will have you now, you whom the funeral cannnot kill.

"Consorting with Angels"

• I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the pots, tired of my mouth and my breasts, tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
• There were still men who sat at my table, circled around the bowl I offered up
• But I was tired of the gender of things.
• Then the chains were fastened around me & I lost my common gender and my final aspect... I was not a woman anymore, not one thing or the other.
• O daughters of Jerusalem, the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black & I am beautiful. I've been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I'm all one skin like a fish. I'm no more a woman than Christ was a man.

"The Legend of the One-Eyed Man"

• look into my face & you will know that crimes have dropped upon me as from a high building and although I cannot speak of them or explain the degrading details I have remembered much
• In the first place who builds up such ugliness?

"Protestant Easter"

• Maybe Jesus was only getting his work done & letting God blow him off the Cross and maybe he was afraid for a minute so he hid under the big stones.
• Maybe Jesus knew my tunnel & crawled right through to the river so he could wash all the blood off. Maybe he only meant to get clean & then come back again?
• The ceiling is an upside-down rowboat. I usually count its ribs.
• Maybe he was drowning? Or maybe we are all upside down?
• Who are we anyhow? What do we belong to? Are we a we?
• After that they pounded nails into his hands. After that, well, after that, everyone wore hats & then there was a big stone rolled away and then almost everyone -- the ones who sit up straight -- looked at the ceiling.

"For the Year of the Insane"

• O Mary, permit me this grace, this crossing over, although I am ugly, submerged in my own past & my own madness.
• Although there are chairs I lie on the floor.
• I count beads as waves, hammering in upon me. I am ill at their numbers, sick, sick in the summer heat & the window above me is my only listener, my awkward being.
• The giver of breath she murmurs, exhaling her wide lung like an enormous fish.
• In the mind there is a thin alley called death & I move through it as through water. My body is useless. It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet. It has given up. There are no words here except the half-learned, the Hail Mary & the full of grace. Now I have entered the year without words.
• I have this fear of coughing but I do not speak, a fear of rain, a fear of the horseman who comes riding into my mouth. The glass tilts in on its own & I am on fire. I see two thin streaks burn down my chin I see myself as one would see another. I have been cut in two.
• O Mary, open your eyelids. I am in the domain of silence, the kingdom of the crazy & the sleeper. There is blood here & I have eaten it. O mother of the womb, did I come for blood alone? O little mother, I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.

"Walking in Paris"

• To be occupied or conquered is nothing -- to remain is all!
• My room in Paris, no more than a cell, is crammed with 58 lbs. of books. They are all that is American & forgotten.
• We will set out tomorrow in stout shoes to buy a fur muff for our blue fingers. I take your arms boldly, each day a new excursion. Come, my sister, we are two virgins, our lives once more perfected & unused.

"Menstruation at Forty"

• I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar. In two days it will be my birthday & as always the earth is done with its harvest.
• This time I hunt for death, the night I lean toward, the night I want.
• Will I give you my eyes or his? Will you be the David or the Susan?
• Can you be the man your fathers are -- the leg muscles from Michelangelo, hands from Yugoslavia, somewhere the peasant, Slavic & determined, somewhere the survivor, bulging with life -- and could it still be possible, all this with Susan's eyes?
• I myself will die without baptism, a third daughter they didn't bother.
• My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left & one on the right -- It's a warm room, the place of the blood. Leave the door open on its hinges!
• full & disheveled, hissing into the night, never growing old, waiting always for you on the porch... year after year, my carrot, my cabbage, I would have possessed you before all women, calling your name, calling you mine.

"Wanting to Die"

• most days I cannot remember
• Then the almost unnameable lust returns.
• Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
• In this way, heavy & thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
• I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea & the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body.
• Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet.
• To thrust all that life under your tongue! -- that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
• Death's a sad bone, bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison.
• Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook & the love, whatever it was, an infection.

"Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman"

• last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe... and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms & garlic buds all engorged
• And once, with our first backyard, I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.
• Oh, little girl, my stringbean, how do you grow? You grow this way. You are too many to eat.
• Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
• What I want to say, Linda, is that women are born twice.
• What I want to say, Linda, is that there is nothing in your body that lies. All that is new is telling the truth. I'm here, that somebody else, an old tree in the background.

"Your Face on the Dog's Neck"

• Tell me, where is each stubborn-colored iris? Where are the quick pupils that make the floor tilt under me? I see only the lids, as tough as riding boots. Why have your eyes gone into their own room? 'Goodnight,' they are saying from their little leathery doors.
• But when your eyes open against the wool stink of her thick hair, against the faintly sickening neck of that dog, whom I envy like a thief
• Or will your eyes lie in wait, little field mice nestling on their paws? Perhaps they will say nothing, perhaps they will be dark & leaden, having played their own game somewhere else, somewhere far off.
• Or, perhaps, my darling, because it is early afternoon, I will forget that my voice is full of good people, forget how my legs could sprawl on the terrace, forget all that birds might witness, the torn dress, the shoes lost in the arbor, while the neighbor's lawnmower bites & spits out some new little rows of innocent grass.

"Self in 1958"

• What is reality? I am a plaster doll; I pose with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
• I live in a doll's house with four chairs, a counterfeit table, a flat roof & a big front door.
• Someone plays with me, plants me in the all-electric kitchen.
• They think I am me!
• Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend! They pry my mouth for their cups of gin & their stale bread.
• What is reality to this synthetic doll who should smile, who should shift gears, should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder, and have no evidence of ruin or fears?
• But I would cry, rooted into the wall that was once my mother, if I could remember how & if I had the tears.

"In the Beach House"

• The doors open and the heat undoes itself; everyone undoes himself.
• My little cot listens in all night long -- (even with the ocean turned up high, even with every door boarded up)
• Inside my prison of pine & bedspring
• stay mute and uncaring
• Stay close, little sour feather, little fellow full of salt
• while summer is hurrying its way in & out

"Cripples and Other Stories"

• God damn it, father-doctor, I'm really 36. I see dead rats in the toilet. I'm one of the lunatics.
• My father was fat on scotch. It leaked from every orifice. Oh the enemas of childhood, reeking of outhouses & shame! Yet you rock me in your arms and whisper my nickname. Or else you hold my hand & teach me love too late. And that's the hand of the arm they tried to amputate.
• I knew I was a cripple. Of course, I'd known it from the start.
• Would the cripple inside of me be a cripple that would show?
• You hold me in your arms. How strange that you're so tender! Child-woman that I am, you think that you can mend her.
• For years she described it. She sang it like a hymn. By then she loved the shrunken thing, my little withered limb.
• Mother frowned at my wasted life. My father smoked cigars.
• My cheeks blossomed with maggots. I picked at them like pearls. I covered them with pancake. I wound my hair in curls.
• My father didn't know me but you kiss me in my fever. My mother knew me twice and then I had to leave her. But those are just two stories and I have more to tell from the outhouse, the greenhouse where you draw me out of hell.
• Father, I'm 36, yet I lie here in your crib. I'm getting born again, Adam, as you prod me with your rib.

"Pain for a Daughter"

• She who is too squeamish to pull a thorn from the dog's paw, watched her pony blossom with distemper, the underside of the jaw swelling like an enormous grape. Gritting her teeth with love, she drained the boil & scoured it with hydrogen peroxide until pus ran like milk on the barn floor.
• Blind with loss all winter
• Blind with pain she limps home. The thoroughbred has stood on her foot. He rested there like a building. He grew into her foot until they were one. The marks of the horseshoe printed into her flesh, the tips of her toes ripped off like pieces of leather, three toenails swirled like shells & left to float in blood in her riding boot.
• and then she cries... Oh my God, help me! Where a child would have cried Mama! Where a child would have believed Mama! she bit the towel & called on God and I saw her life stretch out... I saw her torn in childbirth, and I saw her, at that moment, in her own death & I knew that she knew.

"The Addict"

• Sleepmonger, deathmonger, with capsules in my palms each night, 8 at a time from pharmaceutical bottles I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey. I'm the queen of this condition. I'm an expert on making the trip & now they say I'm an addict.
• Don't they know that I promised to die! I'm keeping in practice. I'm merely staying in shape.
• The pills are a mother, but better, every color & as good as sour balls.
• I'm on a diet from death.
• Yes, I admit it has gotten to be a bit of a habit -- blows 8 at a time, socked in the eye, hauled away by the pink, the orange, the green & the white goodnights. I'm becoming something of a chemical mixture.
• My supply of tablets has got to last for years & years. I like them more than I like me. Stubborn as hell, they won't let go. It's a kind of marriage. It's a kind of war where I plant bombs inside of myself.
• Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it. But remember I don't make too much noise. And frankly no one has to lug me out & I don't stand there in my winding sheet. I'm a little buttercup in my yellow nightie eating my 8 loaves in a row & in a certain order as in the laying on of hands or the black sacrament.
• It's a ceremony but like any other sport it's full of rules.
• What a lay me down this is with 2 pink, 2 orange, 2 green, and 2 white goodnights. Fee-fi-fo-fum, now I'm borrowed, now I'm numb.

"Live"

• The chief ingredient is mutilation.
• Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became a perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie & even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I played it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll.
• Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
• And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick & then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer.
• There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize that she does this daily!
• God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks & better.
• A husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchins, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it & cook marshmellows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes.
• I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty & the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass & all of it. I say live, live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

"The Breast"

• because the child in me is dying, dying
• It is not that I am cattle to be eaten. It is not that I am some sort of street. But your hands found me like an architect.
• when I lived in the valley of my bones, bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings. A xylophone maybe with skin stretched over it awkwardly.
• Later I measured my size against movie stars. I didn't measure up. Something between my shoulders was there. But never enough.
• I am alive where your fingers are.
• I wear silk -- the cover to uncover --
• So tell me anything but track me like a climber
• I am unbalanced -- but I am not mad with snow. I am mad the way young girls are mad, with an offering, an offering... I burn the way money burns.

"In Celebration of my Uterus"

• They said you were immeasurably empty but you are not.
• Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia, one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast...
• one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming & one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.
• For this thing the body needs let me sing for the supper, for the kissing, for the correct yes.

"Loving the Killer"

• Though I never touched a rifle, love was under the canvas, deep in the bush of Tanzania.
• Though the house is full of candy bars the wasted ghost of my parents is poking the keyhole, rubbing the bedpost. Also the ghost of your father, who was killed outright.
• Tonight we will argue & shout, "my loss is greater than yours! My pain is more valuable!"
• Bones piled up like coal, animal bones shaped like golf balls, school pencils, fingers & noses. Oh my Nazi, with your S.S. sky-blue eye --
• So far the continents stay on the map but there is always a new method.
• We have not touched these skulls since a Friday in Arusha where skulls lay humbly beside the Land Rover, flies still sucking on eye pits, all in a row, head by head, beside the ivory that cost more than your life. The wildebeest skull, the eland skull, the Grant's skull, the Thomson's skull, the impala skull & the hartebeest skull, on & on to New York along with the skins of zebras and leopards.
• And tonight our skins, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

"For My Lover, Returning to his Wife"

• Fireworks in the dull middle of February & as real as a cast-iron pot
• I have been momentary. A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor. My hair rising like smoke from the car window. Littleneck clams out of season. She is more than that. She is your have to have, has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
• She is solid. As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.

"It Is a Spring Afternoon"

• Everything here is yellow & green. Listen to its throat, its earthskin
• The scarecrow has plucked out his two eyes like diamonds & walked into the village.
• a young girl has laid down her winter clothes & has casually placed herself upon a tree limb that hangs over a pool in the river. She has poured out onto the limb, low above the houses of the fishes as they swim in & out of her reflection and up & down the stairs of her legs. Her body carries clouds all the way home. She is overlooking her watery face in the river where blind men come to bathe at midday.
• Two lovers combine beneath her. The face of the child wrinkles in the water & is gone forever. The woman is all that can be seen in her animal loveliness. Her cherished & obstinate skin lies deeply under the watery tree. Everything is altogether possible & the blind men can also see.

"Just Once"

• Just once I knew what life was for. In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood; walked there along the Charles River, watched the lights copying themselves, all neoned & strobe-hearted, opening their mouths as wide as opera singers; counted the stars, my little campaigners, my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love on the night green side of it & cried my heart to the eastbound cars & cried my heart to the westbound cars & took my truth across a small humped bridge & hurried my truth, the charm of it, home & hoarded these constants into morning only to find them gone.

"You All Know the Story of the Other Woman"

• Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord & flashes on his brassy lamp.
• She knows flesh, that skin balloon, the unbound limbs, the boards, the roof, the removable roof. She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, when it is over he places her, like a phone, back on the hook.

"The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator"

• I horrify those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
• I break out of my body this way, an annoying miracle.
• a piano at her fingertips, shame on her lips & a flute's speech.
• She took you the way a woman takes a bargain dress off the rack & I broke the way a stone breaks.
• The boys & girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.

"The Papa & Mama Dance"

• Oh brother, Mr. Gunman, why were you weeping, inventing curses for your sister's pink, pink ear?
• Taking aim & then, as usual, being sincere, saying something dangerous, something egg-spotted like I love you, ignoring the room where we danced, ignoring the gin that could get us honestly potted, and crying Mama, Mama, Mama, that old romance:
• Remember the yellow leaves that October Day when we married the tree hut & I wouldn't go away? Now I sit here burying the attic & all of your loveliness.
• If I jump on the sofa you just sit in the corner & then you just bang on the door. YOU WON'T REMEMBER! Yes, Mr. Gunman, that's it! Isn't the attic familiar? Doesn't the season trample your mind? War, you say. War, you reason. Please Mr. Gunman, dance once more

"Us"

• while snow fell outside the door in diagonal darts. While a 10-inch snow came down like stars in small calcium fragments, we were in our own bodies (in that room that will bury us) and you were in my body (that room that will outlive us)
• Oh then I stood up in my gold skin & I beat down the psalms and I beat down the clothes & you undid the bridle and you undid the reins & I undid the buttons, the bones, the confusions, the New england postcards, the January 10 o'clock night, and we rose up like wheat, acre after acre of gold, and we harvested, we harvested.

"Mr. Mine"

• Notice how he has numbered the blue veins in my breast. Moreover there are 10 freckles. Now he goes left. Now he goes right. He is building a city, a city of flesh.
• Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city. From the glory of boards he has built me up. From the wonder of concrete he has molded me. He has given me 600 street signs. The time I was dancing he built a museum. He built 10 blocks when I moved on the bed. He constructed an overpass when I left. I gave him flowers & he built an airport. For traffic lights he handed out red & green lollipops. Yet in my heart I am children go slow.

"Song for a Lady"

• we coupled, so sane & insane. We lay like spoons while the sinister rain dropped like flies on our lips & our glad eyes and our small hips.
• "The room is so cold with rain," you said.
• You are a national product & power. Oh my swan, my drudge, my dear wooly rose, even a notary would notarize our bed as you knead me & I rise like bread.

"18 Days Without You"

• waiting for slow death in the hateful December snow
• Mother's death came in the spotlight & mother slamming the door when I need her
• But in my dream you were a weird stone man who sleepwalked in, whose features did not change, your mouth sewn like a seam, without legs & a caved-in waist, my old puritan. You were all muslin, a faded cream & I put you in 6 rooms to rearrange your doors & your thread popped and spoke, ripping out an uncovered scream from which I awoke.
• Dreaming gives one such bad luck & I had ordered this.
• how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two
• the identical river called Mine and we enter together. No one's alone.
• I must bend for you. See me arch. I'm turned on.
• My eyes are lawn-colored, my hair brunette.
• rigorous but somehow kind?
• I am laid out like paper on your cabin kitchen shelf.
• I like to be underlined.
• Draw me like a child.
• I'm your disease.
• and I will be soft wood and you the nail and we will make fiery ovens for Jack Sprat and you will hurl yourself into my tiny jail and we will take supper together & that will be that.

"Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs"

• cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper
• rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
• She is unsoiled. She is white as a bonefish.
• Beauty is a simple passion, but oh my friends, in the end, you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
• Pride pumped in her like poison.
• Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter, and I will salt it and eat it... The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white fingers.
• At each turn there were 20 doorways and at each stood a hungry wolf, his tongue lolling out like a worm.
• The birds called out lewdly, talking like pink parrots, and the snakes hung down in loops, each a noose for her sweet white neck.
• She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy.
• She was as full of life as soda pop.
• And so she danced until she was dead, a subterranean figure, her tongue flicking in & out like a gas jet.
• Meanwhile
  
  held court, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut and sometimes referring to her mirror as women do.

"Rapunzel"

• The mentor & the student feed off each other.
• The sea bangs into my cloister for the young politicians are dying, are dying so hold me, my young dear, hold me
• The yellow rose will turn to cinder & New York City will fall in before we are done so hold me, my young dear, hold me
• Let me hold your heart like a flower lest it bloom & collapse. Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up & listen in and scoop out the dark. Give me your nether lips all puffy with their art & I will give you angel fire in return.
• We are two clouds glistening in the bottle glass.
• We are the good ones.
• Once there was a witch's garden more beautiful than Eve's with carrots growing like little fish, with many tomatoes rich as frogs, onions as ingrown as hearts, the squash singing like a dolphin & one patch given over wholly to magic --
• Rapunzel's hair fell to the ground like a rainbow. It was as yellow as a dandelion & as strong as a dog leash. Hand over hand she shinnied up the hair like a sailor & there in the stone-cold room, as cold as a museum, Mother Gothel cried
• They lay together upon the yellowy threads, swimming through them like minnows through kelp & they sang out benedictions like the Pope.
• As blind as Oedipus he wandered for years.
• The world, some say, is made up of couples. A rose must have a stem.
• As for Mother Gothel, her heart shrank to the size of pin, never again to say: Hold me, my young dear, hold me, and only as she dreamt of the yellow hair did moonlight sift into her mouth.

"One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes"

• the somehow deficient, the somehow maimed, are thought to have a special pipeline to the mystical, the faint smell of the occult, a large ear on the God horn
• They turn a radish into a ruby.
• A three-legged kitten is carried by the scruff of the neck into a blind cellar hole.
• Nature takes care of nature.
• Love grew around her like crabgrass.
• [her mother] wore her martyrdom like a string of pearls.
• The hunchback carrying his hump like a bag of onions... Oh how we treasure their scenic value.
• Their mother love only One-Eye & Three. She loved them because they were God's lie. And she liked to poke at the unusual holes in their faces. Two-Eyes was as ordinary as an old man with a big belly & she despised her.
• 
  cried, her cheeks as wet as a trout.
• 
  sand to her as softly as milk & soon she fell fast asleep.
• a great tree with leaves of silver glittering like a tinfoil & apples made of fourteen carat gold
• You with your two eyes, what can you do?
• The knight married her and she wore gowns as lovely as kisses & ate goose liver and peaches whenever she wished.
• wearing their special eyes, one the Cyclops, one the pawnshop.
• Two-Eyes was kind to them & took them in because they were needy. They were to become her children, her charmed cripples, her hybrids

"The Frog Prince"

• But frogs come out of the sky like rain
• My guilts are what we catalogue
• Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
• The moon will not have him. The sun wants to shut off like a light bulb.
• Mr. Poison is at my bed. He wants my sausage. He wants my bread.
• Frog has boil disease & a belly full of parasites. He says: kiss me. Kiss me.
• It was ordained. Just as the fates deal out the plague with a tarot card. Just as the Supreme Being drills holes in our skulls to let the Boston Symphony through.
• my moon, my butter calf, my yellow moth, my Hindu hare
• and now it is gone & I am lost forever
• His eyes bulged like two peas & his body was trussed into place
• I have left the skunk cabbage & the eels to live with you.
• I have been lost in a river of shut doors, he said, and I have made my way over the wet stones to live with you.
• and he had the well boarded over so that never again would she lose her ball, that moon, that Krishna hair, that blind poppy, that innocent globe, that madonna womb.

"Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)"

• Consider a girl who keeps slipping off, arms limp as old carrots, into the hypnotist's trance, into a spirit world
• as inward as a snail, learning to talk again
• She's on a voyage. She is swimming further & further back, up like a salmon, struggling into her mother's pocketbook
• That kind of voyage, rank as honeysuckle.
• The 13th fairy, her fingers as long & thin as straws, her eyes burnt by cigarettes, her uterus an empty teacup
• He fastened the moon up with a safety pin to give her perpetual light.
• The trees turned into metal & the dog became china. They all lay in a trance, each a catatonic stuck in the time machine. Even the frogs were zombies.
• except for the fear--the fear of sleep.
• Briar Rose was an insomniac... She could not nap or lie in sleep
• and a faltering crone at my place, her eyes burnt by cigarettes as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.
• I must not sleep for while asleep I'm ninety & think I'm dying.
• Death rattles in my throat like a marble. I wear tubes like earrings. I lie as still as a bar of iron.
• I was forced backward. I was forced forward. I was passed hand to hand like a bowl of fruit. Each night I am nailed into place & forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison.
• It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkenly bent over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -- this life after death?

"Mother & Daughter"

• I reach out toward it but my fingers turn to cankers & I am motherwarm and used, just as your childhood is used.
• I give you my booty, my spoils, my Mother & Co. and my ailments.
• Linda, you are leaving your old body now. You've picked my pocket clean & you've racked up all my poker chips and left me empty and, as the river between us narrows, you do calisthenics, that womanly leggy semaphore.

"Dreaming the Breasts"

• Mother, strange goddess face above my milk home, that delicate asylum, I ate you up.
• What you gave I remember in a dream: the freckled arms binding me, the laugh somewhere over my woolly hat, the blood fingers tying my shoe
• I put bees in my mouth to keep from eating & yet it did no good.
• I have put a padlock on you, Mother, so that your great bells, those dear white ponies, can go galloping, galloping, wherever you are.

"The Silence"

• whiter than chicken bones bleaching in the moonlight, pure garbage, and just as silent.
• and white plants growing like obscene virgins, pushing out their rubbery tongues but saying nothing.
• My hair is the one dark. It has been burnt in the white fire & is just a char.
• I am filling the room with the words from my pen. Words leak out of it like a miscarriage... Yet there is silence. Always silence. Like an enormous baby mouth.
• The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes & the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.

"The Death of the Fathers"

• Oysters we ate, sweet blue babies, 12 eyes looked up at me, running with lemon & Tabasco.
• It was a soft medicine that came from the sea into my mouth, moist and plump. I swallowed.
• the death of childhood there at the Union Oyster House for I was 15 & eating oysters and the child was defeated. The woman won.
• Then we moved like the sea in a jar, slower and slower.
• And you waltzed me like a lazy Susan and we were dear, very dear.
• Now that you are laid out, useless as a blind dog, now that you no longer lurk, the song rings in my head. Pure oxygen was the champagne we drank & clicked our glasses, one to one.
• Mother was a belle and danced with 20 men. You danced with me never saying a word. Instead the serpent spoke as you held me close. The serpent, that mocker, woke up & pressed against me like a great god and we bent together like two lonely swans.
• I lie in the back with an orange life jacket on. I in the dare seat.
• The waves are boulders that we ride upon.
• Here in the green room the dead are very close.
• the thick crimpy wool that used to buzz me on the neck, is dead. Yes, my busting rosy Santa, ringing your bronze cowbell. You with real soot on your nose & snow (taken from the refrigerator some years) on your big shoulder. The room was like Florida.
• The year I ceased to believe in you is the year you were drunk. My boozy read man, your voice all slithery like soap, you were a long way from Saint Nick with Daddy's cocktail smell.
• Then I tied up your pillows in the five A.M. Christ morning & I adjusted the beard, all yellow with age, and applied rouge to your cheeks and Chalk White to your eyebrows We were conspirators, secret actors, and I kissed you because I was tall enough. But that is over. The era closes & large children hang their stockings and build a black memorial to you.
• And you, you fade out of sight like a lost signalman wagging his lantern for the train that comes no more.

"Angels of the Love Affair"

• Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs? Once in a madhouse they came like specks of cinnamon as I lay in a chloral cave of drugs, as old as a dog, as quiet as a skeleton. Little bits of dried blood. One hundred marks upon the sheet. One hundred kisses in the dark.
• I have known a crib. I have known the tuck-in of a child but inside my hair waits the night I was defiled.
• do you know paralysis, that ether house where your arms & legs are cement? You are still as a yardstick. You have a doll's kiss. The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident. I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke. A little solo act -- that lady with the brain that broke.
• In this fashion I have become a tree. I have become a vase that you can pick up or drop at will, inanimate at last... Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill.
• But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye where I stand in stone shoes as the world's bicycle goes by.
• In this hole your mother is crying out each day. Your father is eating cake & digging her grave. In this hole your baby is strangling. Your mouth is clay. Your eyes are made of glass. They break. You are not brave. You are alone like a dog in a kennel.
• Your voice is out there. Your voice is strange. There are no prayers here. Here there is no change.
• do you know raspberries, those rubies that sat in the green of my grandfather's garden? ...Let me crawl through the patch. Let me be ten. Let me pick those sweet kisses, thief that I was, as the sea on my left slapped its applause.
• Nonetheless I came sneaking across the salt lawn in bare feet & jumping jack pajamas in the spongy dawn.
• do you know solitaire? Fifty-two reds & blacks and only myself to blame.
• My blood buzzes like a hornet's nest.
• Once I was a couple. I was my own king & queen with chese and bread and rose on the rocks of Rockport. Once I sunbathed in the buff, all brown & lean, watching the toy sloops go by, holding court
• Once I was young & bold and left hundreds of unmatched people out in the cold.

"Jesus Suckles"

• I'm a jelly-baby & you're my wife. You're a rock & I the fringy algae. You're a lily & I'm the bee that gets inside. I close my eyes & suck you in like a fire. I grow, I grow. I'm fattening out. I'm a kid in a rowboat & you're the sea, the salt, you're every fish of importance.
• No. No. All lies. I am small & you hold me. You give me milk & we are the same & I am glad.
• No. No. All lies. I am a truck. I run everything. I own you.

"Jesus Dies"

• Who do you gather, my townsmen? There is no news here. I am not a trapeze artist. I am busy with My dying.
• I want to kiss God on His nose & watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique.
• I want heaven to descend & sit on My dinner plate and so do you. I want God to put his steaming arms around me & so do you. Because we need. Because we are sore creatures.

"Jesus Unborn"

• she would like to doze fitfully like a dog. She would like to be flattened out like the sea
• Nine clocks spring open & smash themselves against the sun. The calendars of the world burn if you touch them. All this will be remembered.

"Dreams"

• I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter & laid between the mayonnaise & the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator... The milk bottle hissed like a snake. The tomatoes vomited up their stomachs. The caviar turned to lava. The pimentos kissed like cupids. I moved like a lobster, slower & slower. The air was tiny. The air would not do.
• I remember the sickbed smell of the sawdust floor, the pink eyes, the pink tongues & the teeth, those nails.
• At first I was lapped, rough as sandpaper. I became very clean. Then my arm was missing. I was coming apart. They loved me until I was gone.

"Madonna"

• My mother died unrocked, unrocked. Weeks at her deathbed seeing her thrust herself against the metal bars, thrashing like a fish on the hook & me low at her high stage, letting the priestess dance alone.
• Her belly was big with another child, cancer's baby, big as a football.

"Baby"

• Outside, the world is a chilly army. Outside, the sea is brought to its knees. Outside, Pakistan is swallowed in a mouthful.
• You are my stone child with still eyes like marbles. There is a death baby for each of us. We own him. His smell is our smell. Beware. Beware. There is a tenderness. There is a love.
• I will look up at Max and say: It is time. Hand me the death baby & there will be that final rocking.

"The Fury of Cocks"

• She is the house. He is the steeple. When they fuck they are God. When they break away they are God. When they snore they are God. In the morning they butter the toast. They don't say much. They are still God.

"The Fury of Sunrises"

• and the birds in their chains going mad with throat noises, the birds in their tracks yelling into their cheeks like clowns
• more God, more God everywhere, lighter, lighter, more world everywhere, sheets bent back for people, the strange heads of love & breakfast, that sacrament, lighter, yellower, like the yolk of eggs
• the flies gathering at the windowpane, the dog inside whining for food, and the day commencing, not to die, not to die, as in the last day breaking, a final day digesting itself, lighter, lighter, the endless colors, the same old trees stepping toward me, the rock unpacking its crevices, breakfast like a dream & the whole day to live through, steadfast, deep, interior.