After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.
Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play
turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.
Women asleep. Carlight,
east red and west white.
Women, and men made of them,
and lambs in their droves, and power lines east
to the women-made men and women of men,
when a man is a sum
of what women he knows, and I
blurred my vision till I
saw a woman and lambs in the streets,
west red and white east,
and I wanted to eat. Women and men,
don’ t fear me, I am
a hand come to wake her. Red
in the west says
woman is man is woman is man.
Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks
(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
& c.) and built
a bricolage:
So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’ t describe.
And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
Pushed prow southerly into the golden wind:
hurt the eyes: gold pelted water: so looked less far away:
plovers huddling on the tide's last piece of shore:
Rise up in brightness: clap wings::
I told myself I'll go where eagles go: if to brimstone:
my wake a narrow river back
to its source in cedar: and when sunlight embers
the shore's soft fleece will be before me.
At dusk, the grandmother sits alone
in the light of the long pale pool and speaks
to the frog who is waiting
by the electric gate of the clubhouse.
It will be all right, she says, leaning out
from her chair. Her voice
is churning, and old, and wet
with advice. Her newly red hair
purples under the bug light. It will be
all right, she says, again, and again
the sky rolls in and out on its journey
across the peninsula, rattling the palms.
Today I heard a rich and hungry boy verbatim quote
all last night’ s infomercials — an anorectic son
who bought with Daddy’ s Amex black card
the Bowflex machine and Abdomenizer,
plus a steak knife that doth slice
the inner skin of his starving arms.
Poor broken child of Eve myself,
to me, the flightless fly,
the listing, blistered, scalded.
I am the rod to their lightning.
Mine is the earhole their stories pierce.
At my altar the blouse is torn open
and the buttons sailed across
The present tense
is the body’ s past tense
here; hence
the ghost sludge of hands
on the now gray strip
of towel hanging limp
from the jammed dispenser;
hence the mirror
squinting through grime
at grime, and the worn-
to-a-sliver of soiled soap
on the soiled sink.
The streaked bowl,
Did you ever have a family?
Dark
dining room,
bright kitchen,
white steam
from the big pot my mother’ s stirring
reaching in wavy tendrils to her face,
around her face, all the way around
What never comes when called.
What hides when held.
Guest
most at home where least
expected. Vagrant
balm of Gilead.
What, soon as here,
becomes
the body’ s native ground and,
