Did you know I’ m in this hospital bed?
I’ m not. I’ m in the same light you stand in,
much the same way I’ m in the waist of your Carolina
watching from the screen across the bed
whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head.
We are all snow birds atop
the cherry blossoms of August.
Springtime in Washington D. C.
passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose
brushing her teeth over the bedpan.
Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges
can lead the zero with his only arms
to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon.
He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat,
bares himself, his hole, a vision
as framed by the marker that is
where
his body blew and left enclosure intact,
skeletal innards
enough to make moviegoers ask,
“Has anyone finished themselves yet?”
I haven’ t. I swim the lagoon, take note:
the babies are barely dirty,
their armpits smooth with silky soot
It is always the same:
she is standing over me
in the forest clearing,
a dab of blood on her cheek
from a rabbit or a deer.
I am aware of nothing
but my mutinous flesh,
and the traps of desire
sent to test it —
her bare arms, bare
shoulders, her loosened hair,
the hard, high breasts,
and under a belt
of knives and fish-lures,
her undressed wound.
Every night the same:
the slashed fetlock,
the buckling under;
I wake in her body
broken, like a gun.
Chewing slowly,
Only after I’ d eaten
My grandmother,
Mother,
Son-in-law,
Two brothers-in-law,
And father-in-law
(His big family included)
In that order,
And had for dessert
The town’ s inhabitants,
Did I find, says Kabir,
The beloved that I’ ve become
One with.
Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored with nakedness. Moments
before he was weighing your gallbladder,
and then he was staring at the empty space
where your lungs were. Even dead, we still
say you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no
mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician,
nothing that suggests that a woman loved
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
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
Unfastened avidly from each ivory button
of her spine, the voluntary muscles open
virtuosities of red: Cinnabar
the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal
born between fog and frost, so many little
deaths Buddhists refuse to wear
XII
once again I look out your window
and the world looks oddly different,
maybe the fields have blossomed,
or perhaps more stars have been born
delirious waves caress my feet,
something new, unknown,
sunsets whisper in my ear as well,
everywhere I find your odor, your shape
you are among old-growth pines,
in the fog along the coastal rocks,
around the most somber of afternoons
impossible to wipe away your job
from my eyes, from my sad mouth —
you are the universe made flesh
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
