poesiealbum

The all-night convenience store's empty and no one is behind the counter. You open and shut the glass door a few times causing a bell to go off, but no one appears. You only came to but a pack of cigarettes, maybe a copy of yesterday's newspaper -- finally you take one and leave thirty-five cents in its place. It is freezing, but it is a good thing to step outside again: you can feel less alone in the night, with lights on here and there between the dark buildings and trees. Your own among them, somewhere. There must be thousands of people in this city who are dying to welcome you into their small bolted rooms, to sit you down and tell you what has happened to their lives. And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!

I woke up and chid my honest fingers, - The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.

I hide myself within my flower, That, fading from your vase, You, unsuspecting, feel for me Almost a loneliness.

What fortitude the soul contains, That it can so endure The accent of a coming foot, The opening of a door!

I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars, - Only to fail again!

It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain.

Angels’ breathless ballot Lingers to record thee; Imps in eager caucus Raffle for my soul.

Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your suprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but against you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said. Permit me the present tense.

I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and as you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed- seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go. 

You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye 

The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretence that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slab of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meanings are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mother was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. 

Your lungs fill & spread themselves, wings of pink blood, and your bones empty themselves and become hollow. When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon and your heart is light too & huge, beating with pure joy, pure helium. The sun’s white winds blow through you, there’s nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love. It’s only in dreams you can do this. Waking, your heart is a shaken fist, a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in; the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight down on the think pink rind of your skull. It’s always the moment just before gunshot. You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Living backwards means only I must suffer everything twice. Those picnics were already loss: with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway. 

What good did it do me to know how far along you would come with me and when you would return? By yourself, to a life you call daily. 

You did not consider me a soul but a landscape, not even one I recognize as mine, but foreign and rich in curios: an egg of blue marble, a dried pod, a clay goddess you picked up at a stall somewhere among the dun and dust-green hills and the bronze-hot sun and the odd shadows, 

not knowing what would be protection, or even the need for it then. 

I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway shattered, and the glass and the blood, from an intersection that has happened already, though I can’t say when. Simply that it will happen. 

What could I tell you now that would keep you safe or warn you? What good would it do? Live and be happy. 

I would rather cut myself loose from time, shave off my hair and stand at a crossroads with a wooden bowl, throwing myself on the dubious mercy of the present, which is innocent and forgetful and hits the eye bare 

and without words and without even love than do this mourning over.