Cover the Lamp with Its Own Light

Though I am well,

and deep, and fall asleep well,

I am not the wisher that I am.

I think that just thinking about

lighting the way and lighting

a match are the same thing,

is the same thing as doing either.

With both hands the same thing

and that thing is me. But it’s

all the time, every day. But no.

It’s not for me to say.

It’s not heatlight’s way to have

me in heatlight’s way saying

no light today or heat will pay.

When golden oak leaves, real

gold, real leaf, flaked thickly

all over my wonderful dull self

with a gleam like fresh paper

what did the old boulder say,

in a waste of words?

“Some kind of freak lives next door,

a fish-striped alien

on an earplug binge who simply

will not acknowledge she’s being

called home.” Home! Home!

But nobody’s called me, nobody’s

home. There isn’t even a phone.

Perhaps I’ll start working alone,

on two separate films,

enrobed in a copycat

body, a leaping projection,

for isn’t that what we do?

Leap. A larger footprint

than creature. An aluminum

filling doubling as a bulletproof

vest that’s been tested

as a way out through the window.

The window of curved mirror,

of salt, the window of it all,

the latched feeling,

to quit patching the baby,

for example (did you know

there was a baby? You’d think

he’d be mentioned by now,

but the things I choose not to say

might keep you wondering to the end

of the page, the fat page, the fat

unmentionable this and that),

onto the habit of the baby.

Where is the quilt? The boulder-

edged quilt. The one used for Earth

Day. The stained, strange,

fleshlike quilt, fortress, green-feared,

many-colored dress.

It was my costume,

it was my stained-red pink thing

all last year. It was my rag doll

concubine shrink honey

girlfriend hag that I had to have

at home or I wouldn’t go home.

If my wish is anything more

than a graft, a draft,

a cover, ten thousand lovers

in the space of one, then I will take

all three: these wishes: baby,

body, poem. Or body, hobby,

bone. And make them as true

as a genie can make them come.

True as a field in lamplight,

as a stone believing it’s all alone.

With my wishes I can kill them

twice, and still get them back:

maybe, body, prone.

Unbelievable that it is still today.

How much more of it is left?

How much more of tomorrow?

I am not greedy. I ask because

I hope for less than I have coming.

I am not more than I hoped

to be in my prayers

in my girlhood, in my bonfire.

Not in my ungodly unuttered

then-ness. If that old boulder

ever lived a day with any burden

but itself then I will lift its hard-

meat to a place of honor.

Super-polished on the very top

of the world’s biggest root.

I am not ungrateful. I will face

the stranger’s face in any light

from any lamp or lucky gold

three-wish thing. I will not

wish for two things and then use

the third wish for three more.

I won’t take more than I have,

and I don’t have to want

what I already have from before.

It’s too quiet and sorry to want,

and the place of wanting is too sore

to stuff it with hard rock,

hard luck, or it’s too far back

to even see the stuff anymore.

I’m open. I’m old. I just want

the wishing to go back home

or to send me back, in its place,

to where the giving is given out.