✯ → ✩

1.

To be committed, i.e. to have already ‘marked out’ the zones on the body for scalpel, cleaver, needle barb --

To be a daughter, i.e. to have sold ‘in advance’ the enveloping folds of the cerebrum and its surrounding,

gently pulsating modules, and their work  that unlocks the heart’s stuttered beat --

As in a cheap ring one admires at the county fair, that transparent aping of richesse, beloved not for its proximity to class but its charming failure of mimesis, which itself tells a story --

2.  When did I know I was an object?  Perhaps -- when -- and then -- and that --

What did I think I was going to do? First -- then -- and after that -- Why did I think it was going to work? Well first -- and then -- and because -- and anyway --

3. 

Ph. Tony Vaccaro  “Leonard Cohen on the lot of a Nashville used car dealership.”(1968)

of color, light & steam -- hyperion beam -- what final accident have we here that like two long separated lovers

The big cold began with Ross. Pale turquoise eyes, the perfect day. Feeling sick and going out anyway. The big cold.

Walking the Panhandle. When was the last time…? You miss. You are committed. It is ok. There is no end to it all.

I feel committed to Wyatt this time, know the mistakes I made, broke his trust. Now Farhan says this is the time life jostles you, shudders you off the track. As when a friend went to a sermon and heard, /You do not want to change the world. You do not truly care for people./ And felt, shuddering, the ghostly burden of that.

The Big Cold for me is what, seeing myself again. As broken. —Not irreparable, no, not merely that, but something indeterminate: a beer on tap. Which every week changes according to the brewer. And the brewer is who? The brewer is God. Don Blanding explains to please experience the Joy by saying Joy! Joy! Joy! I say it every time and feel my face lights up! Despite the hardness in the heart and chest! Joy at that too, dancing with it, dancing around it as around a black fire.

Because he said I ought to I am drinking a lot today. I dream of landing in a bakery, ending up in a bakery. Brian wants me to look at his resume and I have to be good to him because of that. And then yet. And then mostly. And then no, no, no! Need to sit down but must reassure him of that.

I stepped onto the porch and became an angel, was reborn. Wings swept up underneath me. If getting older means getting older means. Missing Paris, the broad awning of days slipping ever westward like a ship in a Ghibli film. It is okay the notes interior. The interiorization of a film.

Did I had I met him then? Broad, firm the shoulders, the scent irresisting, the water cold and then hot, the water /hard,/ i.e. full of minerals, chalky in the mouth but hard on the spirit? As Jesus might have felt drinking from the desert, i.e. /quenched./ Something both of the body and earth but not of the body of science.

There was a rose inside myself that hesitated to bloom. And of that hesitation, made a dance so influencing others saw it, hesitated too. /What gorgeous hesitation,/ they said. Of she not acting not moving, merely staying. Decay passing her once, twice on the racetrack. Getting older by the day.

Wanting, it seems, is not enough to create. One wants but the body wants also: wants its own story’s ending. Wants something so deliberate it makes it its own. Using only simple words now. The words unrelenting. The wrong words. Words. Cheap words.

Words as at a market when nothing is free. Words as only the words that others do not read. Must read Clarice Lispector no time. No time to be, to exist. Texting him to ask if ok. Looking for the wrong signs of love. Trying to love him the way she wants to be loved but gaining no energy back. There is no love he can rece-eive?

We each seek from nature what human life cannot provide — Sunlight, daylight, the tides of ray and night; Pleasure, pasture, and a place to rest at night.

What life cannot grant us, the forest dimmer grants us still: Moonlight, eventide and the twill of a bird singing; Phophorous, greenlight and the mage’s bright warbled calling;

Still, I often sit alone and wait for your alight. Beyond the window-shade, as though you were the nighttime calling. As though the sun and earth a-round were merely hoarser steps Between the footfalls that to me are signals of your breath.

For D. Shabbir

The Voynich Manuscript was a gynecology manual. Every day this rickety lady walks the lawn, the starlings

Casting shadows magnified mysteria. My vulva Sleeps, a concrete pillow filled with woodchips.

Is there a god who watches. What about one Who stitches? Face-up the statuettes.

Relief that skirts are down: universal. My mother uses the word “Grandma”

To indicate her own mother — because of me. O Danish, what delirious century

Has swallowed us now? The fire blue and Delicious, your Jeep as black

As onyx in your mind. Losing toes We walk a Dead Sea of pearls.

I wish a gold wire would spangle you, Your wrist a marriage of quiet and superb,