Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
stands open where you keep it shelved
in the bathroom. Morning and evening
I see you comb its seawrack tangle of shell,
stone, wood, glass, metal, bone, seed
for the bracelet, earring, necklace, brooch
or ring you need. Here's brass from Nepal,
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Green almonds in their shells:
she knifes them open one at a time and
hands him a slick teardrop, cool white
tasting cool white. Nothing
It’ s the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things — this fact of glass — and can only go on
Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be
indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata
for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock
shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes
and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all
is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.
