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

Swallowed

A man and woman walk from room to room for art.
Her books stand on their toes to greet him, open
In his thoughtful palms, spark de Beauvoir, Sartre.

So much room. They fill it, take on the shape
Of ceilings curved edgeless into walls,
The vaulted sloping stair. He stops to frame

Her in his gaze before the yellow earth
And red blaze of a large painting. She slips shy
Into dark eyes, the white gap of words.

A bedroom swallows poems and clothes.
Persona finally flesh, he mines her ragged song.
Trembling verbs are always last to go.

Contrast somersaults and dials wanton,
Plunging through itself the vigor
Of a hungry woman turning a giant swan.

Gods make secret salts on a lost, stone beach
And scry. Pleasure crumples faces into crashing brine,
Slides froth on tides of shapeless poetry.

Sucking every sea-crossed tragedy from the other’s lips,
They swallow the waste of history, and the sweetest
Peacock poison fans iridescent from matched hips.

2013

In The Nervous Breakdown

The Nervous Breakdown recently featured my poem, "Waking into Sleep, Take Your Waking Slow," as well as a self-interview.

The above links are now defunct (as of late 2024), so I’m glad I recently republished the interview here on Wordweeds. You can read it here.

Strange Matter

The song sung in the inch
of ion breath between our lips—
a plasma sea whose waves
are not contained

by small dark cars
or hand-smudged walls,
the widest desert plain.
We do not sink

to lowest places.
Gravity is no master here.
What shape can hold
our spreading body?

Fashion hands
of words and paint
and still our gyres ooze.
Strange outstretched sun,

fine filaments,
these magnet arms
conduct the infinite.
We let it move.

2013

Moiré

Unmoored as you depart, my waves
Whirl out a pulsing mesh, patterned

On your groove, your angled form, hips
A turning beacon for your hands

Wringing me. I eddy and swirl
Sweet for your return. Juiced curves

Your honeyed gaze has wrought draw flies.
One looms and dives on what we’ve caught

With our own bare hands, not hers.
Despite professed noble intent

And invitation’s compliment,
Her quick net was only ever full

Of giant holes the shape of your eyes,
Your mouth my rushing current.

2013

Puja Tilaka

I ask this conflagration
to reduce me.
How long must I burn
with flowers?
Wind dashes my hands
across parking lots
and streets; hips settle
on lawns and rooftops
a fine grey ash,
and still I wish
to smear my mouth
upon your brow.

2012

Night Walk with Strings

Cause what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is.
~Conor Oberst, “Lua”

A bare cornfield in Illinois takes your footprints.
Walking toward the unlit woods, seeds
fall in with the family of names you drop. Only a radio
tower’s three red lights witness your strange fruit.
Say one name three times and be surprised
when the train woos. Don’t ask why.

Just walk stinging to the edge of the field. Run
for heat. It takes what seems a long time. Think eyes.
The grassy edge drops low. The woods are only a string
of trees along a road. A sprawling tree creaks.
Straddle a white fallen log. Call ahhhh.
Call and call until the moon shines sharp wind.

No mountains, you don’t know which direction
you face. Relative to what. The direction is want.
For long moments, there are no names.
Tall waving weeds are not people walking
or weeds. You are not a person but a wind,
low sky, cold and creak. No one knows.

When you are done with nothing, a fox
doesn’t run by. Visit the soft moon through
the talking tree. Think of sitting in tall grass,
of what this might do to you. Don’t sit.
Climb back up to the field and walk with the wind
behind. Moving toward light goes faster.

Think better of doing magic for what you want.
Don’t plant the clean orange panties you found
tangled in the fray of your clean orange scarf
when you first stepped out the door, tired of walls
and warmth. Nothing will grow from them
in this field under the moon. One never knows

which you is casting the spell. Better to let
the huge field walk across you. Fallow. Love’s pale
stalks and cobs plowed under. Crunch with cold.
Bite with wind. Spread rich space over earth. Wait.
Gloveless, pull out a pocket-sized notebook and write
careless rows in the light of a nearby neighborhood.

Nearer and nearer your mother’s home, notice
your scarf soaked with breath. Touch your water.
Sing your song of want. Dance drunk with cold,
clumsy with clods. Sink into crusted, soft furrows.
Find the old wagon wheel leaning on the oak
where you first left the manicured yards.

Trespass, breach the stand of grabby trees
where Shadow’s name is engraved on a river
rock. Pay respect to every dog you’ve ever lost.
Hold on to your hat. Walk the paved road back
to the house with burning thighs, a fist of panties
in your pocket, smelling of Christmas night.

2012