A well-swept hardwood floor;
a tasteful carpet laid outside the door,
and books dusted, arranged by color.
Pans scoured; bone-white dishes dried;
no empty frames, clocks set, the curtains tied.
Your snowdrift heart losing its blackened white,
tooth by angry tooth.
No longer king
of mumbling clouds lowering in dull loops,
you fumble at tousled socks and mill
about and listen: the streetlight rattle of sleeping pills.
I told worse lies along the way:
the warm loops of her walk
moved noncommittal crows to wide-eyed song,
the rooflines straightened into joyous queues,
black cats would dress themselves with ribbons long
as misremembered rain. The truth?
I never sighed when stars would crowd
into the wild seclusion of her back.
The fictions scrutinized, reports are circulated:
Item. The earth goes round the sun.
Item. Black cats lick their paws.
Item. Houses slump their shoulders under snow,
their shutters closed; the crows perch and stare.
A thousand fish behind
your ribs,
among the tangled arteries,
tracing the maze of veins, waxing
the spine with spiny dorsal fins,
swim small, but widening
loops and flirt
the thin meniscus of your skin
into a sarabande of waves;
the muscled tongue-like torsos then
dissolve into a crowd
of mud
and branches spindling up from depths
where light has never spread its toes,
below the wince of rain and heave
of lungs, below the austere steps
of jesus bugs that dot the sky
of fish who beg the warping roof
to know the meaning of their dreams.
Published in the Oregonian January 8, 2000.
As grass and stones
press into skin
the pattern of a birdless sky,
her eyes stare mute and deaf as moons
while standing over him. He breathes
and cups his tender genitals.
She turns to waiting Sychaeus.
The dawn begins to
climb, and thighs
untense and feet regain their blood.
Arms brace his rising form, now calmed;
he prays for any symmetry,
for wings to clash their feathered palms
that sound a shared geometry.
Augustine asks, but does not ask, his God:
Who made for us the scriptural firmament
of your authority, but you, our God?
For sky is stretched above us like a skin,
the furless vellum of a hallowed scroll-
or corium of ink-stained codices,
torn from oily carcasses, upon the day
of wrath Isaiah prophesied: the slain
unburied and unblessed on blank, wide fields;
the stench of rot and buzz of dirty flies;
snow crowned mountains cauterized with blood,
as beasts begin to take the injured land
and reign in wildness, cancerous and frail ...
The smell of figs and chamomile. My tea,
your voice, and heaven crowded now in earthen jars.