Rain Rain Go Away
Rain rain go away,
Come again another day.
Rakestreet
Would you believe it, I got lost again
And all roads led to Rakestreet. Which was which,
The short road or the long? A girl of ten
Behind her counter, drew me a thumbnail sketch
Rattlesnakes Hammered on the Wall
Seven of them pinned in blood by
long, shiny tails, three of them still
alive and writhing against the wood,
their heaviness whipping the wall
as they try to break free,
rattles beating in unison,
hisses slowly dying in silence,
the other four hanging stiff
like ropes to another life,
patterns of torn skin dripping
with power and loss, the wonder
of who might have done this
turning in shock as all seven
suddenly come alive when
I get closer, pink mouths
trembling with white fangs,
Reaching Yellow River
“It isn’ t a game for girls,”
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.
“For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren’ t even funny.
That’ s how come he won.
It took a long time
to reach this Yellow River.
I’ m not yet thirty,
Read These
The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’ s foliage into bloom
where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love
before at last taking himself away. His head away. His
recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine
themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more
than instruments of his creation. Pawns.
Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us
studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.
Reading
Breakfast, and I’ m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey.
I’ m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio —
life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages
of a book remind me of Tucson
and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home.
There was a sofa in front of my one window
where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings
stirred in the trees with their admonishments.
Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum
i.
In a courtyard, in these stacks of chairs
before the empty stage — near are
we Lord, near and graspable. Lord,
accept these humble offerings:
stacks of biscuits wrapped in cellophane,
stacks of bone in glass: thighbone,
spine. Stacks of white saucers, porcelain
circles into which stacks of lip-worn
Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon’s
No one else with a book, the slick
weeklies gossip amongst
themselves on the side
tables as the ticker rolls the Dow
Jones down down down under
a profile of the marathon
bombers (the older, a boxer). Jove
argues for the removal of a race
of peoples that do not please
him: What is past
remedy calls for the surgeon’ s
knife. They will take a hunk of my
cheek (cancer) & though I can’ t
see during the procedure, I imagine
the site as an apricot, bitten.
This is a survival mechanism —
Reading Saint John of the Cross
How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?
Where the only breathers
breathing are constructed
from some new electricity
and the flowers are made
indestructible, and messages
from the dead arrive like calm
white birds with a gift?
One more night of spiritual
ice and we might all become
birds, green birds frozen
on a black winter branch.
There is a drumming in the shadows
under leaves: a million eight-eyed
spiders on the march.
Reading the Bible Backwards
All around the altar, huge lianas
curled, unfurled the dark green
of their leaves to complement the red
of blood spilled there — a kind of Christmas
decoration, overhung with heavy vines
and over them, the stars.
When the angels came, messengers like birds
but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung
over the scene with smoldering swords,
splashing the world when they beat