Clipped

All I ever wanted was someone who would never leave me. 

And there you are, again, polishing criticisms like daily koans,

like chestnuts on your sleeves. A gleaming eye wrapped in a shell.

There you are, blowing dust in my face, reminding me everything is shit. 

You are the inky layer of fascia dragging me to a crawl,

to supplication for matter made of light.

No one will ever stay with me the way you do.  You

and your sharp-edged truths I can’t seem to differentiate from lies.

You are loudest in silence, when the television is off and the meetings over,

and then all I want is to be left alone.  And there you are

offering me a final way out.

The Path Made Plain

From Finite (c) 2002

The poem that can be written

            is not the eternal poem—

the lover singled out

            not the eternal love.

The unspoken poem is the urge

            toward creation—

the lover but the originator

            of ten-thousand lovers.

Unfettered to the poem—

            unattached to the lover—

one senses manifestations of divinity.

The hidden—the unhidden

            co-mingling in darkness,

                        in spirit’s fog and storms.

The pathway is plain in the flesh.

                        *

I will not name my lover.

Naming binds him to motive threads of air,

            binds him through tongue and ear.

If I do not name him, still, he is bound

            by the O through this snake    

                        of cunt to belly to throat.

Pleasure confirms mortality.

I write knowing ink will fade,

            paper wither and dust.

I love, not possessing the lover.

            Tasks never reach completion.

This is the path.

                        *

If I form this poem into the shape of the lover

            too much is unsaid:

the lover a deformed caricature:

            arms missing, a leg, the nose too long,

                        the penis, though admired, too small.

This lover, this genesis of all lovers

            cannot be paper bound.

He is too vital to read the same way twice.

In the insistence of poetry we become loveless.

                        *

I do not regret the pleasure

            the repetitive pleasures

                        the plateaus the building

toward higher pleasure I do not regret

            the pleasure that the lover

                        who is not the eternal lover

            stoked like tiny flames

the lover that engorged my belly

the lover that satiated me

until I was without language

                        and swam deep in my underbelly.

The lover who defines and defies mortality

            through pleasure.

This first lover             of ten thousand lovers,

the lover who is not the embodiment of eternal love

I do not regret his malicious words,

nor do I regret that this lover leaves.

                        *

Yet,

If a valley of water

            is the spring of the earth         

                        and is likened to the Mother of all Creation

and if the Mother of all Creation

            is mirrored in the face of all women

                        and if all women bearing children

            call their cunts holy, what then, lover?

You do me dis-service

            when you depart

                        and leave my cunt untouched.

Halos

From Finite (c) 2002

The hallway light slants halos into my room

illuminating his body, arched like a monochrome rainbow—

his chin—his tongue—situated like home

deep in my cunt.

One of us blurted “oh god oh”

like we meant “thank-you”

or maybe it was more like “don’t leave me lonely”.

I think I spoke, but I am never sure,

the way my memory shifts details—

the way his tongue connects the four year old

with the wise crone,

until I am so centered it is unbearable—

some part of me wanting

to push him off this crescendo

into the abyss he’ll soon leave me in.

I tug aside his shirt.

It is one of so many layers left on

to confirm that these are combat maneuvers:

stealth, capture, retreat.

 I do remember, I said, “you are beautiful”

because I wanted words to hold onto

and beauty is less transitory than love.

The halo lit a droplet of sperm oozing from his hood

down onto the quilt, like dew on a web

or like gathering rain on the car window:

That rain that wells on the neon-spiked glass,

tumbling numinous paths

to nowhere.

Strip Search

From Finite (c) 2002

I shave my snatch

stripping it down

like one strips paint and varnish built up for years

on a solid Queen Anne end table.  A steady hand

is needed around the curves of legs and lips

to keep from nicking the surface.

I am taking it back to its original intentions.

It’s initial encounters

with language and touch.

Cross-legged in front of the mirror

the lips open like a perianth.

I understand in this moment why

a field of flowers is called a church.

This posture imitates offering

and church vocabulary falls in place

as originating from the cunt.

The two-horned red devil

is the two-horned fallopian tubes mytholized by priests.

The fish-shaped labia revised as ichthys,

Jesus Christ, Son of God.

Unshaved or shaved, at the crux of my thighs

sits Medusa, the terrible Gorgon

turning men into stone.

The male god is an angry thief.

Let the Israelis pray in Jerusalem,

Catholics can keep Rome. 

It is lovers who worship at Hera’s alter,

womb, the great fish

of the abyss.  At this aqueduct

for my pleasure.  My cunt.

Last Love Letter to my Husband

From Finite (c) 2002

Husband, perhaps you are not author of that “black dog”

that, so lugubriously leans in my chest, but suspiciously

you are always around when that dog visits.

You roll up color to store away like used Christmas wrap

until everything is gray.  I hear you on the phone

guaranteeing our parties will fall on rainy days, the few guests

turned away.  I know you are the one who threw out

my lucky rabbits foot, the one who made all my favorite dresses

too small, who shattered our lovers’ pledges like wedding china

hurled against the wall.

Let me tell you, you are no longer a man.  You are disappointment.

You are the tenacious membrane to be wrest

from the pomegranate before one can savor the fruit.

You are the inexplicable chill bone deep

underneath sun-burnt shoulders, the chill

leading to fevers and feverish nightmares.

You are every plan that went awry,

every diminished dream, every lonely night.

You are forced piano lessons, the consistent switch to my psyche

and I am afraid that we may just outlast one more winter.

The older we get the more this black dog growls

and snuffles my crotch.  I am tired

of the impending emergencies of every day, tired

of the nightmares I sweat out hemmed in your embrace.

I am tired of the cigarette butts, the beer

bottles and pull-tabs clogging our drainpipes,

flooding the foundation, ruining lathe and plaster,

the way everything we constructed

now lays ruined by our lack of foresight,

by our smug, youthful confidence in forever after.

Let me tell you I have come to believe in trephening love—

in letting the black butterflies

out of my heart—in putting that black dog

out the back door—in getting myself out.

I have come to believe in a quick death

even if it is a death not well thought out.

Too well I understand the grief of dying drawn out for years.

I believe that forensics will eventually show

how it is that you killed us one small slight at a time.