Watching Swimming Pool

Charlotte Rampling, once ravishing boyish bombshell, playing
Sarah Morton, crime detective novelist, nearly sixty.
A young writer shakes her hand with a cocky smirk,
“My mother loves your work.” His grin says it all. She seethes.

Her English publisher waning lover sends her to his French home to write.
His blond nubile daughter arrives unexpectedly.
Sarah watches, we watch, the girl bare breasted with still, hooded gaze
at the pool, or eating cereal, or writing in a journal, everything topless,
breasts bobbing over the mundane moments of living.
What she does when no one is watching. But the girl moves
as though she is being watched, as we learn to do, moving for men.

Later, Sarah listens, we listen, to the girl moaning with oafish older men.
Cut to bedroom: we watch her, not him, and she knows we are watching.
Charlotte plays reserved Sarah, but Charlotte has had her share of sex on film.
We know she knows this writhing for the best theatrical angle, yet, still,
Sarah reaches for earplugs. We see men notice her despite the girl, despite her years.
French cinema, you know. Tres complex.

We notice her. How can we not. She is Charlotte Rampling. Lying near the pool,
the camera pans her rigid angled length the way it panned the curvy smooth girl earlier.
We see Sarah’s veined sinewy feet, the boyish thin hips, the breasts flattened by gravity
in a modest swimming suit. Perhaps we are meant to be saddened by this juxtaposition,
the way age dries and robs the most beautiful women of water and luster. She steals it back
by writing, stiff faced, a rough wall, eyelids crumbling. The publisher avoids her calls.

These are the kept scenes, the ones we see, expect to see: an older woman,
leatherly, alone, stuck in her wordy mind robbing the lives of the young,
unable to land Franck, the interested sexy waiter, before he is killed by the girl.
She even helps the girl bury him. Oh, how we had hoped victory for her!
Let the old woman have the young man for once! We know what gives us worth.

We are surprised when she bares her old and surprisingly lovely breasts on the balcony
to the murder-suspecting gardener. As a ruse, a distraction, she seduces him:
short, unshaven, white whiskered, pear bellied, sweaty old man, to save
the young girl’s neck. She writes the girl’s story, becomes like a mother to her,
of course, and publishes the book behind her publisher lover’s back.
She has won, but it is the winning of a jealous crone getting back her own.
This is when she finally, truly smiles. The end.

But you know how DVD’s are. There is always more. What was cut. Click it.

Sarah wandering the French village alone, lean, self-contained, ordering at the café,
served by the sexy French Franck she barely notices. Clicking down stone streets
on stick legs in loose beige slacks, peering into dark rubbled windows,
touching rough walls of the fallen castle of de Sade, stiff limbed, tall,
upright, heavy lidded, self-bridled, always almost grinning. She is Sarah Morton,
writer, yet she is Charlotte. We know she is both, though it is cold
how she moves, selecting round fruits in the market and tubs of yogurt,
cool foods that need no cooking. And wine. So quiet. Days without words.

She eagerly plops perpendicular into a green slatted patio chair at a green slatted table,
straight backed, to type. Her mouth moves with her fluttering fingers. Later, cigarette
hanging from lips, curled into a cushioned, high backed, wooden legged chair,
scribbling quickly on typed manuscripts, revising. Her face registering peace,
sometimes laughter, tickled, obviously, with her own genius.
When the publisher asks on the phone what she is writing, she won’t say.
Alone, she belongs only to herself, breast-stroking
across the empty pool wearing a floppy hat, dry faced, slightly smiling.

Still the camera pans, but in these scenes, the gardener is not watching.
Neither is the sexy waiter or publisher. Only we are. We can see
Charlotte is happy being watched as Sarah not being watched. She moves that way,
in awkward womanly angles, the aesthetic of utility, moving from here to there.
And I am happy watching her unwatched and happy: the deleted scenes,
the ones that make us not-women in the world, objects only to ourselves,
the ones the director knows are lovely on a screen, but won’t sell.

2009/2011

Mourning Mojo

This morning I was going to paint
a red and yellow mindscape
but wake to a puppy’s hungry yips
and my old black dog on three legs
licking death’s huge ear. I hunch
to become her fourth leg and limp alongside.
My mind travels over her silken spine,
recently narrowed slow hips, deep
into unfathomable canine bones,
seeking some light or dark thing
over which to rest or wring my hands.
First she lies in the shallow hole she dug,
always digs, in the flower bed between violets
and lavender in early summer, serious
with dignity, facing foundation wall,
averting her gaze.  The lanky puppy sniffs
the patient face he normally playfully nips.
Wondering what he knows, I know.
Next, she is missing. Not behind the woodbox
or lilacs. I wonder did she translate to light.
I peer down the flight of basement stairs,
enter the unlikely place.  There, she fills
the farthest shadow, a leaning sphinx
looking at the crumbling wall. I crawl to her,
join my dark to hers, wait in her wet fur.

13 July 2011

strange garments

I was naked in sorrow.
You clothed me in vines
of honeysuckle. I fed
sweet orange trumpets
your name
with my own winter whisper
my most tenacious light.
The horns are wilting!
Evergreen clings
to my thin voice.
I rip root fingers
from my lips and throat.
Again I am naked.
I stand here
clutching stunning vines
while sorrow buds
a thousand ears
a thousand eyes.

2011

If you want silence

don’t seek a quiet place.
Let trains rattle and call
dogs          howl
the freeway hum          the rain
fall
in ticks
and taps
the movie mumble
through your
bedroom floor.
It is not necessary
to close
your doors.
Just listen to the lacy din
or each sound
in turn
the way you’d notice
a cloud          or           bird
drifting,
then shift
to the blue        behind.
Fall in.
Silence lives in the shape
around sound.

2011

off the grid

the only woman on earth
who to my face
in pencil
told me
you are a bad mother
met me in an unlikely place
with her husband
who has dedicated himself
to creating the life
for his family
I always wanted
to create
for
myself
and mine

off the grid

we all looked out
at the ocean
stood on a bridge
next to their red
biodiesel jeep
she didn’t apologize
but hugged me
asking
if I could care for
two of her five
children
while they
went on a date
she in her red mini skirt
having lost her mother’s belly
he uncharacteristically
buttoned up
crisp and clean

I did

the youngest escaped
while I gassed up
I caught her just before
the street
buckled her in twice
the oldest boy smiled
we headed down streets
too steep for life
the brakes were gone
not accelerating
not stopping either
I jumped the jeep
wrapped my huge arms
around it, held us
back
from tragedy
with my feet

it was all just a dream

except for the leaden
pronouncement
and my solar wind
powered longing
she still hates me
for the life I live
regardless
of fantastic feet
and a bridge
wielded by my psyche
to this woman in the waking
who is walking my dream

2011

prayer of the petunia

please,
wise
fingers,
pinch
off
the
brittle
bloom
where
my
new
bud
waits.
there
is
more
sweet
scent
to
give
you,
live
you.

2011

Practice Dissolution

You might be afraid.
Feel your body sink and still
Into bed and yellow light.
Your arms too heavy.
Toilet too far away.
The earth of your body
Dissolves into water. You kick
The bedside toilet, swing arms at those who
Can still walk, but you are really kicking
At death. Your mother unfolds

A large absorbent pad beneath you. No one
Says diaper because they love you and your pride.
Water begins its hiss into fire, trickling from you,
Evaporating from open lips and halflit eyes.
Mother begs you, please sip. You do
Because you love her, though you have given up
The comfort of water now, your eyes dull ice.
No one sees the blue light of your water shine but you.
Sister touches your feet, sees liquid
Pool in red constellations beneath skin,
Sinking toward your body’s lowest sky.

Heat seeps past limbs, cool slides in
Like night. Mother’s painbright eyes, sisters’
Whispers begin: it is happening just as the blue book says.
You listen to all this. Your liver a bonfire
For months is finally a coal bed, glowing,
Dimming, sending out sparks, fireflies
Only you can see as breath no longer feeds its flame.

Thin wind rakes your lungs’ groping fingers, plays
The strings of your throat, your last voice.
Silence fills where breath breaks, relaxed lungs
Collapse into green light brightening as the last
Gust huffs from your mouth, eyes shoot

Open to take in the blast of light, clear white.
While your mother, sisters, husband wail
Wordlessly clutching dead hands, pressing heads
Upon your body, stroking your still warm velvet crown,
Turn from them. Countless people, life’s rich personifications
Gather in the widening now and ask your true name.
Awareness opens spherically upon itself. You answer
Without words—what you are—and begin.

2011

The butter, the cool slick

and salt of us warming
becoming more

than two in the merge
warp chest, weft breast,

thighs braided bread
baking, yeast rising

multiplying heart
in heat. We tear

crust, expose white, dip
dripping oil and herbs from

lips. We become all
this, from breath

to bread. God eats us
with our own mouths.

2009/2011

Elegy Written after a Doyra Concert in a Church

Lowing o’er the lea,
the cow did not know

her skin would dance
us in its sound.

Would my skin
could be a drum

to make your
circles move.

Such better use
than windy ash

or box of
halted flesh.

Lover, when I pass
stretch me round

a slice of hollow
tree, string my space

with silver rings,
fly your fingers’

memory, percuss,
percuss, percuss me

2011

While It Happens

Don’t think about it while it happens,
that slippery moment
buckthorn dreams your spines and deep berry eyes
while a neighbor dog barks from your chest.

Notice, don’t think, the ever twirl.

Thyme breathes your nose,
your eight palms: cupped basil leaves
out reaching each other for sun.
Comfrey knits the bells of your tongue
to sweet kneed bees.

Church bells ring your eager skin a church,
calling all in. Heavy, your peony head arches
to earth, petals wilt on your flagstone feet,
your thin neck clutches a fist of fat leftover seeds

Don’t think metaphor, personification or make believe.

Don’t think.
This isn’t the work of similes
or even cosmic permeability.
Rest. Stop swinging
the lamps of your body.

2011