Two Women, Confluence

Two women, confluence
Of unplanned red, hungry,
Eat the same veggie wrap,

Laugh garlic in pedicabs
Along ribbons of sidewalk
Where night has eaten

Half the moon and
Skyscrapers break the rest
Into four shining cloves.

Red whirling women remind
Whole rooms of their feet.
Dancing men confess

In practiced accents, stolen
Beat, they even taste
The garlic in the air.

2013

Aequorea Victoria

Our memory—
Skin water skin

—Translating me:
Wind throat sea hips

Suspended bloom
Of jelly fish.

2013

Where Does It Come From, Stay and Go?

Go find your mind,
the men tell the boys.

The boys search for days, weeks, months—
return with a fist-sized stone, the tale
of a bird, point to the heart.

With kind eyes, the men say,
Go look again. The boys do.

One has to earn the losing
of one’s own mind.

It is not like here where we read it first
in books and lie with certainty:
The mind is nowhere.

Here, it takes years
to lose these words.

2013

The Fourth

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
~T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Today I am the morning man
Who shovels through my snowy walk.
That night, the woman shadow-shoveled
In the warm-crushed rowing dark:

Two hunched thinkers, lovers, clutched
At light’s raked progress over flesh
While two shame-shades slipped from
The scene, dry hands in cold pockets.

Myriad distant darkstars, earthshine
Scratched up by the waxing moon
Begged to be that dim streetlight,
Watching what bright shadows do.

2013

Throwing Desire

Knead it.
Put your body behind it.
Spiral wedging makes a flower.
Keep the air out or it will blow when the heat
comes. Smooth out the petals. Make a cone. Throw it down.
You must center it on the wheel or it will wobble.
Don’t fight it with your hands alone. Brace
your arms on your legs. Apply pressure
until it centers. Learning centering
takes weeks,
months.
Keep it slick. Water
reduces friction. Don’t add too much
or it’ll be weak later. Push it, spinning fast,
and it rises. Your hands tell it what shape to be.
Begin coning. Bring it up. Bring it down. A hill becomes
a mountain, then a hill, then a mountain. Find the center.
Press down to where the bottom of the inner vessel
should be. How wide do you want
your base? Centrifugal force
is your friend
in these first steps. Let
the wheel spin fast in the early
stages. As it gets taller and thinner, reduce
the speed or it will fly. A lot of throwing is being
able to hold still. Hold it where you want it to be, let the spin
do the work. Cupping the form, push the sides up into
a cylinder shape. The further the top lip opens
and spreads, the harder it is to rein it in.
Sometimes you have a shape in mind
before you even start. This
is not necessary. First
thing you learn is
the cylinder.
It is easy to stretch it out
but hard to bring it back in. Avoid
thin spots. How far something can stretch
is called its plasticity. Again, don’t let your mouth
get too wide and thin. Shaping from the outside is a lot
less effective than shaping from within. Reach in.
Your fingers rise inside. The pot grows taller.
The spirals mesmerize. It’s more about
how you apply pressure than being
really strong. You can clean
rough edges with tools.
Some people
like the coarse lines
made by fingers. It looks human.
First it becomes leather hard. Then bone
dry. Depending on where you live, it can happen
overnight. Tool what is leather dry to smooth the surface.
If it’s bone dry, you’re done. You can only fire
or recycle it. When it’s ready to come off
its back, it comes off on its own.
When the water evaporates,
it unsticks. Light the kiln.
Once fired, it’ll last
1000 years, hold
anything.

2013
with thanks to Joe Marler, potter

Thoroughfare

First her face presses through.
A gentle thump, warm chest punch.
Next the exit wound.

Head born, she begins.
No longer seeing what is packed dark,
what is organ within him.

Her shoulders force the hole.
Hands bore through his back
like a flock of geese.

It is when her heart
beats inside his
that he loses footing.

Down on his knee
she drops him, swiffs
through like arrow wind.

Hands clutch at the invisible
egg of her, but there is no shape
to gather in passing.

Her waist, thighs, small toes—
all sharp lines—depart his spine.
The final cuts let no blood.

Perhaps the lines are Ls
starting to say leave or love,
but no sounds follow.

Her word is incomplete,
vagrant, vague. Who can sustain
the sound of endless L?

It makes a warm cave
of the mouth
we can’t live in, but brave.

His breath is meant—
her breath is meant—
to run out.

2013

The Annunciation and, Thereafter, Word

It doesn’t matter which.

When a bodied—
When a disembodied—
Poet spills an old or instant

Whispered poem
Warm into your ear,
You thaw, swoon.

Don’t take it personally.
You do. Words adore a deep ear,
Swim there. Swell.

You swell. Like love.
Like an infected splinter.
Like broken bone.

Like a virgin—beholden
To no one—in the beak
Of muscled Tao.

(The greatest love: indifferent.)

Like a whore—beholden
To all—in the belly
Of Dzogchen.

(Everything is nectar.)

Like a man’s member,
Dreaming.
Dreaming outside you.

(Everything is nectar.)

No, let us return to center,
The oldest metaphor assigned
To those with wombs.

Arms and legs turn large
Inside. Turn, making room.

The child slides out
With salmon eyes,
A tiny red mouth,

White wings,
Black webbed feet,
All else human.

Slippery, name her.
Kiss and clean her. Nurse.

Learn her wishes.
Teach her sounds.

This way-faced purse
Of milk will outlive you,
Feed fishy, wingy similes
To multitudes.

Pray they never
Nail her down.

2013

Reading Outside

Four Os on the brick wall
inside the silver name
COTTONWOOD HALL
are the mouths of my heart
blowing proud hookah rings.
One follows the other toward you.

The core of each throat-made name: ah.
Say it.

A rosebush still clings
to four winter-burnt leaves,
an old season when people
passed blooms unseeing.
We are no burnt leaves
or dead retina citizens.

Long past that Saturn dance.
Our ruined masks.

Past scattered
twigs thrown off like runes
by longwinded, hardworking winters
through which two cottonwoods
held up weak afternoons
each February forgetting Imbolc.

Today, a perch of Tintoretto light.
No savior saint falling out of sky.

Their woody fingertips glow cone bright,
throw shadows toward me like
a Rorschach blot, wet,
just unfolded, branches mirroring
a thick-trunked calligraphy of roots
spelling joy in all your tongues.

I have but one. Almost two.
Tied up in pas de deux.

Remote white stacks
of the great sugar factory
puff out the hope of beets,
the history of everything sweet.
The faded church sign
across the street says nothing.

There I graffiti joy’s new name.
Who can read it?

2013

Tides

The dark tide swells, then slowly subsides,
Hauls off a million eyes into the deep.
How have you made of me a thirsty shore?
Your dark tide swells, then wisely subsides.
My mouth, a quarter moon, rises for more
To spill and share with you a sip of sea.
Our dark tide swells, then slowly subsides.
We move our million eyes inside the deep.

2013

Geshe-la Speaks of Sky Burial

[T]here are six realms of existence in which all deluded beings exist…. Although the realms appear to be distinct and solid, as our world seems to us, they are actually dreamy and insubstantial. They interpenetrate one another and we are connected to each.”
~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

To find a human corpse while walking is good luck,
he smiled. I laughed, recalling morbid photos of
a tundra where a shriveled face and arms were sucked
quite clean and red by vultures’ final act of love.

I didn’t ask him, Why good luck? It just made sense,
despite the fact that here such luck would make a man
grow pale and cry, or call the law. We don’t dispense
our bones this way. We box them for the promised land.

One friend surmised the luck is in the end of life’s
great suffering. But I say luck is witnessing
that body as myself. No longer someone’s wife
or child or love—a dissipating fleshy dream.

With any luck what’s left of me will be this eye.
Bequeath me to the buzzards. Bury me in sky.

2013
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen,
Padma Thornlyre and Julie Cummings