Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone
else’ s symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins
and inside needles’ eyes,
cellular revelry,
hopping
of microscopic
turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt
long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.
Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate
and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure
I really think its getting to be that time,
she says, cleaning up the dust and grime
that lingers beneath the kitchen table,
while cigarette smoke, shapeless and unstable,
pipes from her mouth like steam from snow,
so in her nightgown at night she seems half doe,
half woman, deep-eyed, mood subjunctive,
saying but, and if, and what I wouldn’ t give,
while the road nearby, through the window,
flickers with the credits of the late late show,
dine on disco balls and starfish,
our jowls crashing
like cymbals,
while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball
left eye and squints his right
to line up his shot
on the world’ s smallest pool table.
Mother has a camera for a head;
it flashes uncontrollably
though she claims to have run
out of film a hundred years ago,
when father’ s penis,
Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique
chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug
my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another
room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet
of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’ d want to say if given chance;
but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust
Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams?
Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head
with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through?
Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts?
Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep:
Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear?
Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket?
The Poet:
Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine —
where’ s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?
The Octopus:
Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches
All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl
who loved her scabs, the blood shields
her head gave up, her face a sun of blank
amazement. She drew. This means love:
a circle with a line through it. More work:
a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed
through fields. Ice river, the pages
If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.
Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.
Here, then — thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank
of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves
lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.
