Constance Travels to Colorado
There are twins.
One is often mad & in a forest.
Innocent, she bites her arms,
tears any flesh her teeth can reach.
They're tiny teeth, still soft.
The twins are two or three, but not yet four.
They have no other clothes.
The stiller one counts unfurled ferns.
Constance goes to the woods
to hold the babe—
tender of rare monsters.
It's imperative she not be hurt.
She's not young, or is, &
in the forest there are
so many trees to hide behind.
~*~
Hag/Bear
So sad about your hip sockets mother— the
nails, the creak, creak of our hideous assignment.
The bird feeders do draw out rats.
We leave them empty.
Various petunias in their wooden boxes
simmer with heat, specifically now,
their humid petals hang.
We did not kill ourselves this day—five times
(while you added flax to the granola).
The ceiling fans spin the light around.
Our husbands both went somewhere permanently.
Holy, holy, holy the afternoon is so hot you lay naked
but still alive,
cover your breasts
at the same time you stare at mine
slowly chewing your cuticles.
The man I want does not like, or just wont say…I won't repeat it.
Distance stops the skeleton in the mirror.
Naked too— a moth catches in the curtains.
Afraid again, I forget I got over it once before— a moment ago.
I'll try not to cut down all the trees
before you die—or immediately after.
And that short cotton shift dumb with dainty flowers you believe
is so risqué,
no, I did not buy it for you.
My love is so flawed I can’t even keep a dog, whereas
important people go to heaven—
or some general direction of up.
Which is where I've left the pomegranate seeds— the scarlet necklace.
~*~
After Birth
– Dr. John Steiner on Daniel Paul Schreber
When pressed,
(gore stamped and no angels)
the animal screams—
“ …the sun is a whore"..
Without her gaze you are not
there, your face—oblivious
immaculate sky.
Ask me for my love.
Recall inside my eyes
(Nimbus. Echo.),
the constant salt organ
of the real heaven, the someday dead,
so small, so dear—
their beautiful blue stone stillness
carved from winter,
the black moon, like
sixty miles of vertical water,
where you are
but you don’t know.
We come. The blind.
The wild. The hanged.
Breaking
the cord between us.
And no cure.
~*~
Claimed
And now, forever– a black rabbit like a smudge
or after- thought (pinkly, softly), twitching in high weeds.
And also now – the man with a ragged dog, leash bound
tightly near his thigh, then the broken formal old world rituals
of men and women who meet alone somewhere between day
and night. And now, always /as in forever –one dawn in a dirt alley
behind one common suburban grid, where discarded things
resolve to dust, seized by mulberry brambles, blackberry vines,
sun to rain. We all have secrets– the black rabbit, the man (his
hands), our fragile skittered shadows, my open eyes, this endless foraging.
~*~
Beauty Laughs
The rising cry of a small girl–its perfect shape.
The wheeling screams of gulls,
the glove of the sand, full held and holding.
There, the black haired girl in a bright red suit
running with her beauty.
The ocean– a bed of pastel wings.
And from the bottom slick spilling weeds,
what was inside is drawn out.
The pulse of a filament line tight with a catch.
The muscular cords of a man’s flawless arms
holding the line.
The beast dragged from the deep is a small gray shark.
A crowd comes. Salt-water runs
from the mouth, the erupted heart.
Beauty laughs.
The man throws the shark back in.
I run to the edge in time
to see it swirl back down.
~*~