Works

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The porcupines are bleeding.

The porcupines are bleeding, and
the cactuses are skewering their pups.

The porcupines are bleeding, and the cactuses
are skewering their pups, and the
scorpions are dizzy with venom.

The scorpions are dizzy with venom, except
that’s a myth. they’re dizzy from the fire
and the alcohol, spasming
as their insides unravel, dancing
for the pleasure of a sadist.

The sadists are laughing.

The sadists are laughing, and
nature is cackling with them.

The sadists are laughing, and nature
is cackling with them, and everyone
is lighting their friends on fire

and howling
because it tickles.

My sister gathers gemstones
the way I hoard my words.
She sits, I kneel, at her box of rocks,
and I test my stock against hers.

I pick up an amethyst — this
fistful of pixies
in a cystic crystal prison.

I’ve never met a purple so prismatic,
so cryptic, enigmatic.

She shows me clear quartz,
a hexagonal lattice of glass.

And the amethyst… is this, she says,
the same but stained with iron.

(It must be pixie blood:
see how it drips, and glitters.)

I see so much of myself in her.

I watch her study the stones
like an old museum curator,
a nine-year-old collector
and lover of the earth.

I see too much of myself in her.

She’s driven to this
out of something less innocent
than love. Out of a vicious insistence,
the blistering unanswered existence:

whether this world is magic
or just a victim to its tricks.

My heart skips through puddles when it hears you
tapping that old rhythm at my window.

I want to throw it open, pull you through,
(picture you, a silver needle, trailing a whisper of blue)
so you can fill my simple room
with your rainy-day perfume.

And I would make a candle out of you,
if only it could dim the lights the way you lightly do,
if only it would lift my chin
like only you can do.

I’m drawn to the window (fluttering
curtain that I am) — lovedrunk on the puddles
and their manic aerial dance, my eyes
are caught like raindrops on the pane,
entirely mesmerized — these scattered beads
that swell and sink

and streak like melting snails
whose shells, wet lenses, magnify trees
to each droplet-laden leaf —
and the earth remembers to breathe.

And there’s life on the porous concrete
when the worms and the slugs come
flooding the streets. There is jubilation
on every scale. Mushrooms hoist their moistened caps;
humans bloom in clusters of umbrellas.

Fuck umbrellas.

I want you unprotected.
Take my simple skin-bound body,
this body you make beautiful
with brushstroke waterfalls.
Take it, take it all.

Come closer than a lover,
then come closer still.
I want all my tender skin to prune
from so much time with you.

Your voice, thin whisper or unbridled outpour,
this volatile ballad is all I can hear.
In its rogue bellows come crackling fractals
thrashing through this atmosphere. I’m ecstatic
here beneath you, in this electric rhapsody we share.

So fill me with the lightning I see lighting up the sky.
Surge my every nerve and leave me
gasping where I lie.

I should have practiced drowning.

        My love, it was as though I froze
        from the outside in, and inside still
        tumbling, still mumbling,
        yes, something out of a book.

I should have practiced drowning.

        I would have known the bite of the hook
        in my cheek, a spitting wince I can’t describe,
        the unwelcomeness of gravity, the spinning
        of the world, my open eyes.

I should have practiced drowning.

        I promise you I would have learned
        to unfold myself in the deep,
        to smile as I let the water
        have its way with me.

        I would have learned
        the quiet posture of the dead,
        the face that reads like a poem
        full of mumbling.

I should have practiced drowning
        so I would know what to do,
        when there I saw you,
        there I saw you

        holding her like a harpoon.

I remember your hands like hard leather
remembers being wrenched from the carcass.

I remember your hair like straw
berries in the spring. Like silk
worms boiling alive, surrendering
their soft bodies to the sericulturist.

I remember your eyes like the soft underside of winter,
the frozen underbelly of the lake, like
clawing at the thick ice as the cold pulls me away.

You clutched me like some slothlike
creature, full of wrapping,
grappling arms, a snarl
of elbows all bent
on ascending me.

But sweetness, these
are mushrooms growing out of me.

I’ve undertaken the horizontal rotten
prayer.

I’m the hollow sort of log,
the kind that sinks a boot
like snow. I’m all spongey dust
and hungry bugs. A fungus, love,
is taking care of me. Sap

is for the neighbors;
I am for the earth.

You cannot have me, honey.
I am no home for loving in.
I am no tree for hugging.

three hushed
words
and a bleary window
looking in at me.

        it is not the bleak
        ness that bothers me.
        it is the coming of Christ
        mas, and the mistletoe.

it is the snowy slopes below:
Sunday morning
is tousled white duvets.

what have I left?

I have saved
these three hushed
words
which crushed me once…
crumpled in a drawer.
these are mine, these
and little more.

I try them on for warmth and freeze:
your paper hearts have faded and decayed
in the time since April mayed.

        three hushed
        worth
        less words remain,
        looking in at me.

what do they see?

the corkscrew rhapsody
of lavender
smoke, leaving me
in favor of the clouds.

it is not the bleakness.
perhaps it is the blackness
of the sky, some lingering
scent,

like three hushed
words… which kept you
crumpled in my drawer.

that song made wind sing
and it was only a child
playing with bells

plain-dead flowers fade
but she nurses each dry stalk
still more tenderly