Two
Where did it start? In a city of gardens & muck.
When I held someone close, in watery light.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
Red-orange light on my legs. Oh, wow—
that blink-blink of bright, that flip of the pulse.
Where did it start? In the garden, the muck
where insects jumped in starry arcs. My body
took shape, then. A greenhouse I entered alone.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
I wore so many clothes. Cotton, cotton, wool.
I burned in my skin like a stone. How exactly?
Where did it start? There, in the muck
no one saw how we blazed into poppies.
Light raked through our bellies like combs.
We drank & I bled all the way home.
Now, I blister up from bed. My love
is a silver cry in the light. O animal life—
in a city of gardens & muck, you can start
to itch. You jostle & fight, scrambling
for years up the hill of your life. You ask
Where does anything start? In muck. In a garden.
You drink the drinks & bleed. You’re foam.
After Mark Strand
I fill my plate with rain. I fill my belly.
I fill a T-shirt with shells & count them on the floor.
At night, I drink juice from a moon-colored mug.
I feed the lamp & wrap my hair in a scarf.
What good am I doing? The ocean whines from bed.
I take my pills. I bury watermelon seeds.
The pills & the seeds move past each other in the dark.
Who blesses them?
When I slither up from sleep,
my regrets are shreds of pulp in my mouth.
It’s true that I love & that I do not love.
I fill myself with my regrets & begin to speak.
Journal, mixtape, leather coat.
Silk scarf painted with caducei.
Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.
Ticket stub: Autobus 25.
Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.
Journal, mixtape, leather coat.
Perseid shower, bear paw charm.
Lunapark, broom flowers, ferryboat.
Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.
Birthstone anklet, white Peugeot.
Pastasciutta, freckled arms.
Perseid shower, bear paw charm.
Campfire, windsurf, sudden wine.
Thumb ring, tank top, lucky coin.
Olive orchard, sunflower farm.
Pastasciutta, freckled arms.
Yogurt with apricots. Coca-Lite.
Campfire, sudden wine, windsurf.
Olive orchard, sunflower farm.
Laundry, terrace, Sting concert.
Feather earrings, volcano hike.
Yogurt, apricots, Coca-Lite.
Green-yellow sunset. Fever sleep.
Terrace. Laundry. Sting. Sting.
No chance you’re pregnant the English doctor asked. No chance you repeated slowly, then added No chance. That was the summer all Tuscan girls wore green cargo pants & orange camisoles. It looked one way, shopping at Esselunga, & another in the piazza with your tumbler full of strawberry liqueur & the first blue stars catapulting over the Arno. The doctor resembled a townhouse, his hair peaked narrowly in the middle. Your fingers, in their closed fists, made a subtle heat exclusive to your experience. You took the green-yellow pills, thinly coated with sweetness & punched into a paper card. Weeks later, you let your companion take you into the woods by the beach. In his family’s summer house, you broke some old chairs to feed the fire, & the stem of your body unspooled in every room. Then you slipped your long feet into the green sandals you hadn’t realized were python leather until the scales had already kinked & dulled. You will never have another pair like that. Not real python.
Every night, I go back to your house
behind the abandoned caserma, where once
I wept in my clothes on the street.
Your same window with its rolling blinds.
Same diesel smell. Same birds on the roof.
Every night, I go back to your house.
I almost dissolved when you sank
your verbs in white ink: imperfect, subjunctive.
I wept in my clothes on the street
where olive trees turned their foil palms.
It was summer. I stood in my smithereens.
Every night, I go back to your house
climbing your melted marble steps. My age
is a seed-pearl under my tongue. Was I wrong
to weep in my clothes on the street?
Your lamps are still. Your mother is home.
I’ll never be so lonely again, or young enough
to weep in my clothes on the street.
Every night, I go back to your house.
Why Don’t You Wear a Black Crepe Glove Embroidered in Gold, Like the Hand That Bore a Falcon?
You are describing how the transparent oval of my face seems to hang before you in the seconds before sleep. I peel off my gloves to eat from your paper cone of burning chestnuts even though they taste like bugs to me. You buy the chestnuts because you want me to enjoy this trip but then never to come back, not to your bedroom where I left my footprint in lotion on the hardwood, not to sit with you before your mother’s scant bowls of pastina in brodo. We pass the newsstand next to the bakery next to the bus stop by the restaurant that used to be an orphanage. You’re still talking about my phantom face, about the white light which, you say, surges into a beautiful tree-shape on top of my head. The clarity of this light magnetized your soul, or perhaps your soul already contained the exact spinning glob of sweetness that matched my own. It would be wrong to say precisely, it would be wrong to remember in any particular fashion. Our futures float by in their clear bulbs of breath, & I tell you the story again.
You don’t share
your scones with me anymore
even though you said
I’d have all your buon
sostegno per sempre.
I don’t care
for your bakery smug.
I’m crying you out.
My tears are cold cubes
springing off my face
like cartoons.
Hey.
You’re a punch
in the head. Nobody
will tell you so
but me.
Let Me Tell You People Something
The women in my country, they are going into the yard with pots & spoons to bang at crows. Always, this. Because crows will eat every fruit from the trees, & then? Nothing left. So the women bang, they yell in a big voice every morning. But crow is not afraid of woman, it will come back tomorrow. Crow is like, you bring pot & spoon? I do not care. You know, do not care? Tomorrow, maybe, you leave this city. You take just one small box or one small case, fly to another house, put your box on the floor & ask: this box, who is it? Who lives in my house? You are forgetting all the time. I have seen you, wearing the name of your city on the T-shirts. Every name more huge, lying across the chest like a creature. Always, you complain in your small clothes. You complain when the rain is not stopping, but also: no rain. This complaining you do? Is just the ghost of the house you leave for another house. You don’t remember. But. In my country, we take the young asparagus in March when it walks on the hills. Asparagus is like the persons we have loved, standing in the house of our parents. I am living here for many years now, but I do not forget my mother in the yard. My sister with her spoon. I do not weep in your way of ghosts. That’s all.
The country is not what it was. I miss the arc of
green fireworks in spring & the moral
bellies of lake trout rolled in flour. This universe is
so dry, star-sharp. Each day, my arms grow long but
never reach the freedom shore. The line of it bends
like a fern in rain. Birds chatter towards justice
towards justice towards justice towards justice—
Their beaks click together like dolls. I study the arc of
my own slithering chin as it bends
along the waterway of my phone. The moral
is a glass canoe lodged in a long but
finite block of news. I say: This universe is
not worth my heard-earned glitter. This universe is
not what I dreamed. Wings careen in the blue, towards justice
but I watch from the dirt, my feet burning. I long, but
I can’t measure my longing, can’t trace the arc of
my tears as they depart from my head. Now the moral
autobus kneels like a camel at the curb. It bends
& I climb into the sinking dark. I climb. It bends.
This forced union is not what I’ve loved. What’s a universe?
A tingle up my leg. The stars. Once, I dreamed a moral
constellation of strawberry seeds, arranged towards justice.
But I don’t know how to read stars, the arc of
federal dust that governs me. My body is long, but
not quite free. I go along, I get along, but
I’m not quite free. My sweet, harmless body, it bends
so you can’t identify my color, just the arc of
my spine, which could be anyone’s, in the cool universes
of love. So let my body move towards justice
& away from countries. Let it curl up like the moral
fortune still inside the cookie, the moral
border dissolving in cold milk. Won’t be long.
Will everything we know collapse towards justice?
Bodies, berries, beaks, barns—will all of it bend
& wash under the moon? It feels like this universe is
someone else’s calculus, the arc of
a moonbeam in the moral firmament. It bends
& the light is long, but dimming. Such universes.
Here, I draw the arc of two words: just is.
My exes shall rise up from their Mazdas
& adorn themselves in denim.
I’ll take their hands & we’ll wander
among the silver asparagus.
Though all are present, it seems to each
that I’m walking with him only.
One brings me five white roses again
petals curling in soft paper.
Another comes with a mixtape & drawings:
heart, suitcase, shape of his country.
We’ll sit at the stone table & eat
from the same jar of strawberries & mint.
Each will tell about his wife. The golden hikes
they take after lunch with their dogs.
I’ll show them my books & the healed mark
over my ribcage.
We’ll enter the cottage where our babies sleep
forever in their small beds.
I’ll hum to them in many voices until just
one brightness occurs.
Then I’ll go alone to the curve of the lake
to see what will jump for me.
When the arms of the larkspur dial open
it’s only natural to want to dissolve. In the glinting haze
you have nothing to do but keep moving
inward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tall
as knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.
When the arms of the larkspur dial open
draw your wedding ring in mulch. Don’t stand
around too long. Since all parts of the larkspur are toxic
you have nothing to do. Keep moving
with patience over the hooks & buttons of sun.
July is an alkaloid tongue, sunk in botanical Latin.
But when the arms of the larkspur dial open
you can learn to climb. All the way up
to the silent blue beak at the top of your thought.
There’s nothing to do but keep moving
hand over hand. Time widens, just like your body
sealed shut in the light. An inner world hums
as the arms of the larkspur dial open.
There’s nothing for you here. Move on.
By dead gal or stove bones
by rainbow or red bird
red bird or cracked spine
by silk wrap or jaw jaw
by cold bodice, blush wing
tick tick or sunk ship
by tipped arrow, glass bite
by weird catch or take that
by chopped mountain, slick house
boatneck or gloss hog
striped awning, gold lawn
by what’s that or so much
without me or full prof
full prof or nunchucks
blood orange, brain gob
time kill or toy star
by black doll or briar thorn
beg beg or gewgaw
by sweetmeat, or gunlock
or old maid or dreadnought
by weakness or whitecap
or grief-bacon, worksong
by fieldwork or field mix
slagged field or steel kilt
by bone-bruise or kneesock
I get my gift.