Three Poems

Brenda Shaughnessy

BREASTED LANDSCAPE

If not so cloaked with the desire

to be the ravishing little transparency,

I’d have seen the autumn for what

it is: just scrambled math and nipples.

The occasional warm hand sandwich.

Red leaves are bendy scabs of wine,

married to the ground and still looking.

Parasites give their bodies to keep

others’ clean. I’d linger further

with you over yellow fat and never

be that berry-stained girl we take

turns being.

But now huge on the bed, the sheet

one quivery flake of steam,

your sleep beats me utterly underneath.

There is no light under the moss

under us. Your feet are the most

curiously private cathedral

whores science can prove, taking you

swiftly, primly

to the next curve of exile.

Can’t have you there.

Where trees knot up permanently

at each of their stomachaches

and if cried at, won’t listen,

not exploding with the human gas

of losing-again, that blown glass liquid.

A side-feeling rips me, everything

is you. Hello belly smell, where’s

the steriler air?

I’ve lost you in the choking dark,

but I brought you there.

OKINAWA, KISSED FROM WIVES

The flies drink the soup and so do you,

heat-hazy with protein luck. You slurp it

down like blood and the noise shows

your pleasure. Then you walk big feet

through your sweat to a blistering bath.

Yes, heat cools you. But you don’t congeal;

you can put nose to flower, and squeeze water

from genitalia mushrooms. Spellbound by

the steep hill of smoke spilling out of you.

Or the reverse, as you also dropped

your shoe in a hulking pot of noodles.

An island is a permanence inside

an evaporating. The trees have one branch

and four trunks, like elephants.

Each step expect to drop through to a city

of caved babies with rough feet, uncles drinking

saki from cups of air kissed from wives.

You saw a stick before it walked away.

You watched the rain dry just before it fell.

Burned the branch as feverish as shrine

incense and swallowed yourself amazed

at how silently your soft mouth slips

around delicate intestines in a birthday dish.

A TORN PATCH NEAR NIGHT

I will not forgive you, but I will grow in your house

sweet as corn

choked with minerals. As belladonna is fevershaped

by the oil of dusk.

Satisfied in a goosey sprinkling of light

like carnival coins,

I’m your boxed peacock and you, my slim plague,

hold the handle. I can still

tell you to steal the last gold

from the raven-pulled sky.

So I can be flattered

in the gloom of your orchestra,

playing with such glistening

on the torn patch

scorch-edging out toward night.

Shiny listening burnt in

your transparent

stretch of bodyclock.

ticking and switching. Your eye-pockets,

your breast

the shape of a stain after dark.

I haven’t quickened

have you? Yet nowhere fast is closer and sooner.

I see it with no starlight.

And your skin, a map of mushroom

shade crumbling

in the crisis fur. I can read

it even in this blackforest

where the water is thick enough to hold me

without another chance.

Where nurse shark tremble in the nighthole,

with the blindness we had, too.