I AM

Tonight I read the Song of Solomon
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.

Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.

I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.

Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.

Sage and Snow

I kissed those lips once

extracted drop by drop

the holiest of liquids

o fluid love, o mountaintop!

Your fountainhead's dried up

softly ceasing, little stones
lighten in color, as your

body leaves their bones

Sage and snow, a stoic sylvan throne

tread lightly across the surface

undisturbed until you come

and weave frosted bowers upon the peak, upon the place

Where lonely I lived, o quiet grace!

O empty space!

[instrumental]

Come, sweet, soft

twining vines surround you

my heart is a fruit fallen off

of your limbs, of your limbs, of your warmest bough!

Bursting open, sapped and sticky, I am drowned

and the ants crawl in to my grieving skin

to pluck away my seedling hope

and to scatter my body in the wind

And wither tend you now?

I am the seed, I am the vagrant spore

Wind-tossed and wandering, hollow and soft

inchoate, separate from your barky moor

Rooted, you must be where you were before

but it seems you're as breeze-blown as I

For the earth, she has turned her face

clear around, left you inverse, dangling in the sky

She has left you, lonelier than I.

Anemone (revised)

Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--

but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.

Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.