The sculptures in this gallery have been
carefully treated with a protective wax
so that visitors may touch them.
— exhibitions, the art institute
of chicago
Stone soldier, it's okay now.
I've removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.
I'm allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.
Nothing peels from you.
The neck
of the flask
pitch black-getting bored
jacked
also madness, insidious
intended ghost
(days late)
I cross green & white flowered seas
Valentines, May Day
Life in
unbridled
collapse, Let tuneful praise ascend
Not a single line
out of step with my band, aboard
the riverboat
when the sun
shown red
and especially dark upon my room
A cooler
head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor
asked his question and paused
for us to watch him pause and think
inside the pause, I almost answered
as if we were in a bar, just the two of us
and a balcony and spotlight. The two of us
and programs and makeup and a sofa
from the director’ s living room and the black/
womb/agora/séance of theater inviting us to feel
together alone. I recall I don’ t recall
the question but its scope on his face
I took back the night. Wrested it
from the Chinese, many of whom
were shorter than me.
Two billion outstretched Chinese
hands, give or take a few
thousand amputees.
A cheap knockoff, the night
proved to be — Nokla
not Nokia on the touchscreen.
Well, even Old Peng gotta eat,
Confucius say. Or maybe that
was Cassius Clay.
Today you find yourself guilty
as the rim you split
an egg against
You press charges
You spell out your name
like the letters are medals
for good conduct in a bad war
The night moves in with you
into your room
until even your sleep
is not your own
Through the window
the grass tells you
to give up
and you are trying
but on the other hand
things keep you:
the moon, the cars, cars
You undress yourself
more deeply down
like this is the way
to get to the future
We’ ve come back to the site of her
conception. She calls it why
and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.
It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —
to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.
I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.
The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.
But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe
As a boy he had trouble speaking,
past three before a real word preened
from his lips. And for the longest time,
malaprops haunted him. His older sister
did what she could to train the bitten seal
of his brain to twirl the red ball
on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother
tired of insisting he utter the names
of toys or foods — for every desire
was coded — and gave him whatever
he grunted and pointed to.
O, the man then a boy
thought, when I tower among them
I should invent my own speech
I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.
I’ d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding
the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,
though midway through
I’ d always tire,
and let night enter
like a silver needle,
sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,
but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose
when spring would arrive:
engineering an April
Had to come in out of the people,
they blew me about so.
Was told of the life taking place
elsewhere. Went to check on that,
flying late and low over the west.
Saw no house, no shade.
Sat down on the damp bank
on the far shore at the left
edge of the world, against which
the sea endlessly lapped.
So now there were two of us,
who beat the world by
day and caressed it by night
and the world didn’ t say
yea and she didn’ t say nay.
