The Body

the breaththe treesthe bridge

the roadthe rain the sheen

the breaththe linethe skin

the vineyardthe fences the leg

the water the breath the shift

the hairthe wheels the shoulder

I back the car over a soft, large object;
hair appears on my chest in dreams.
The paperboy comes to collect
with a pit bull. Call Grandmother
and she says, Well you know
death is death and none other.

In the mornings we’ re in the dark;
even at the end of June
the zucchini keep on the sill.
Ring Grandmother for advice
and she says, O you know
I used to grow so many things.

We are descending again in parallel —
I cannot say together — as in another dream

you rushed through the first door
without me. It was late. Your name

was an elevator door resisting its rail,
its screech my only attempt to reach you.

Was it the hurt that filled the elevator
I entered with gurneys and gowned girls,

incubated hearts pumping for a home?
Floors flicker as they fall.

The girls’ chatter flaps shrill at light,
tangles in my hair and away

One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they've made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.

Oil on limbs,
maybe a rancid smell
as on the chapel’ s
oil-press here,
as on the rough pores
of the unturning stone.

Oil on hair
wreathed in rope
and maybe other scents
unknown to us
poor and rich
and statuettes offering
small breasts with their fingers.

Oil in the sun
the leaves shuddered
when the stranger stopped
and the silence weighed
between the knees.
The coins fell:
‘In the goddess’ s name I summon you...’

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 —

water
relives
reservoir

boat
bottom
draft
displaced

°

lineal
thought
backward
body

no one
knows
the brains
I am now

tree
an oar
origin

joints ruptured
soak in
deep ink

°

wallpaper
remnant
flower
float

chandelier

brief case
hundred words
logged

erode
my
Arabic

congestion
of resin

person

I got a letter from the government.
It said let there be night.
I went through your trash.
There was night, all right.
I consider how your light is spent.

I have butterflies a little bit.
I have some pills I take for it.
I’ ve been up since four the day before.
Agony’ s a cinch to sham.

Don’ t worry about the environment.
Let it kill us if  it can.
I give a tiny tinker’ s damn.
I put the ox behind the cart.
Consume away my snow-blind heart.

There is no escaping the storm of roses
crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall
of a dead fountain arch.
There is no escaping their uterine balls,
expanding as a reminder of the children I never had.
If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations,
the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps.
And there’ s no going back,
no indiscovery of Mars
or these red planets brooding before me,
light predators, sun-hatched
and bloodening like the fists of women
who have gone to war.