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.