the yogis have a word for it

In me where I sit,
where you started
that spinning
and the spinning
wound around
my spine like a staircase
past unhinged belly door,
around forgetful  heart,
past empty throne
of my teeming
honeycomb head,
the door found its swing
and fast, let you in, my heart
became a ticking metronome
for your songs,
the drones found
their rightful queen,
and now the whole
place drips honey.

Speaking in tongues

Speak tangles of god and ungodly
Gibberish I won’t understand
And I will watch the creases and
Plains of your face form delicate shapes,
Minute electrical arrangements
Only muscled lips can make.
What hidden impulse of lip and tongue
On teeth sculpt the sound of please.
Even the navel strains to speak, subtly
Sinks, pushing air to rub against the throat

And somehow, in concert, these liminal ministrations,
These libidinal deliberations become speech,
Become an orchestra of fleshed breath,
Striking every pose to mean, to mean.
I mean, even my hands love the work of tongues,
Fish for unmouthed words in skin and bellymind, drag
Them out with purple pen to feed you looping
Lines that travel from my eyes to lettered keys
Into metallic neural net, cables underground,
Superhighway air to ferry brain sound. How
Many ways does the tongue translate its need
Into matter all to connect you to me.

the evolution of literacy

we are making
the evolutionary shift
to sitting
hours a day, hunched
over keyboards and books
like vultures
pasty skinned
backs forgetting the shape
of straight,
shoulders in attitude of stone

remember our ancient
grandmother, shifting from all
fours to feet? they ached like this.
still, she walked
and reached into trees.
our bodies resist change,
but cannot resist it,
the need to write and read
and learn to knead
each other’s necks.

When you asked if I have met the man in Glűck’s “In the Café”

I don’t think I have met this man,
but often I have been this man, and it scares me,
how I forget the dreams in which I’ve lived,
and the pain my forgetting brings those I have loved.

I read Glűck the way I eat food that makes me feel bad.
I love her, the no-nonsense of her, the sad stark word of her,
but she bloats me with shadows and trapped moths.

I approach her poems the way I watch a horror movie,
rarely, invisible hands ready to dart over mouth, eyes, or heart,
whatever is vulnerable, but they don’t move.
I just witness her ripping, or ripped.

Something in her work poisons me, but I go back to it.
I nibbled only a few of her poems earlier today,
and they corroded me somehow by dinner,
tears stopping in my throat over the browning ground turkey.

Last year, before he left, when I learned she was once poet laureate,
I bought her compilation: The First Four Books of Poems.
I remember one night, he, having read some of this book, was quiet
in the La-Z-boy, slow moving through rooms, to think I might feel about him
the way she wrote about her husband, repulsed by the crush of his body.

I think I love her, because in her poems lives are lived that I don’t want to live,
that I feel seeded in me, that I don’t want to water or show spring.
Some, before ever reading them, I have groomed and watched
wilt and consume the smaller, tender shoots of me.

I want to stop reading the way she writes me, but I can’t. Not completely.

Today, searching for her online, inadvertently
running into her late 30s face—our age!—
and the images of her now in her late 60s,
my stomach was raked by what savoring sorrow has done to her skin,
my eyes a bright sting, fearing this might happen to mine.

So, there it is. Me on Glűck.  Glűck in me.

I love her because she terrifies,
eats the hopeless, ropey insides of my fallen soldiers, a Morrigan.
Her black beak sets hope free.

Gold

I wanted to be unfettered by life’s syllabi.
Do this, do that, now this for this until this time.

The truth is summer unmoors me
like a nameless ship, a shapeless is.

I wanted to be a free yogini, nothing
but stretching, breathing, sitting in
a silent crown all day, every day.

The truth is I pretend I am already
enlightened and choose lovemaking
over waking, and wake anyway.

I wanted to be the lonely woman writer
saying what other women don’t have time to say.

The truth is I hardly have time to say it,
and I’m rarely alone, even when I can be.

I wanted to tell every man
no from now on. No.

The truth is, a man saved me,
my everywhere ever his yes.

I wanted to leave this flat whispering place
for mountains and anonymity.

The truth is when I stay I learn a secret alchemy.
Lead is what writes me.

We want

We want to arrive somewhere safe,
a place where what and who we need are near.
We want to know we will go on being loved,
that there is music behind our fragile living
to which death is not the only one dancing.
We want to shake the guitar of living into vibrato
to live like a lover with eyes closed into music,
lips parted loose, unselfconsciously sound.
We want to be touched with gentle purpose,
like wind in yellow grasses. Dance, drop seeds.
We must continue dying, drying out to do so,
become green again and again, find love in pollen,
make love yellow legged in sunflowers.
We want not to suffer separation, and
our wanting makes our suffering worse.
So we save seeds and pollen in jars,
sing to them: we want love to be this easy.

controlled burn

1
I was a bed of orange
coals bursting tiny
blue flames.

You walked across.
I couldn’t burn you.
You couldn’t pour water.

2
Your eyes bowls begging
for the simple rice of me.
There was nothing to spoon
but soot and smoke.

3
I rose, black
smolder, hard
shoulders. You kneaded
me loose, cool hands
unraveling fire knots
of memory. Still I burned,
though you untied
me from me.

4
You towered
beside me, pine
cradling abandoned
fire circled in stones
between your roots.

I stayed in the ring,
licked the air, crackled
for dead growth.
The wind blew.

When what you
thought was you
fell into me, we
made light from what
was no longer needed,
and shook off
fire and wood.

Receiving Wind

Nothing
could have prepared
me for the beauty
of ten thousand winds
moving through
your face. No
words can chase
the running
musculature
of your electricity,
or the flash that flies
the parentheses
of your slightest grin
to mine, or the pride
of your chin.

And how
your eyes from tender
wide to hunger
thin disarm, unfurl me.
Here, take my arms,
make them
four. I would open
every door
for you at once
just to watch
your face walk
through, beyond
and always, always
to me, wind
receiving wind.

Because my son announces Narnia trees! on his seventh winter solstice

Driving across Nebraska
we are witnessed

by a stand, no, a hundred mile strand,
of wizened iced trees.

From every tip, ominously fragile,
sag shining branched veins of glassed light.

I start to slough my skin,
drop muscles, organs, bones like leaves

reveal my nerves and veins,
stand up solid in the sun,

reaching, sagging,
a branched thing, silent and clear.

featured in A Prairie Journal (Winter 2008)

hymn of three cherries and an apricot

you brought a bowl

of orchard cherries

so black red, so well read,

I blush just remembering how

they crushed and

fled their skins inside my mouth.

for the road I saved three,

and a perfect apricot sun

wrapped in a paper napkin,

but not for me. they sat

in the passenger seat, patiently,

a sweet lopsided quartet,

leaning with me around miles

of mountain curves.

the apricot went first.

(oh yes, I dared my teeth)

velvet cleavage, tart bursting

cousin of peach.

(the cherries, singing, start

to preach: O pit,

a wrinkled prayer!)

I meant to save them

for my kids, I really did.

but none were spared.

one by one, over a day

in two cars and a dim morning

kitchen, I hmmmnned them in,

and in and in.

featured on Center for Integrated Arts website, March 2009