It was the night when she first peered at stars.
No, it was the curse of being chosen
by men, goddesses and heroes frozen
at the fury of passion trapped in bars.
It was being called Marvel Girl instead
of her preference: something that hinted
at prowess, adulthood, aura scented
with cinders and quasars, avid and red.
It was killing those who stood in her path
and being killed by those who loved her best.
It was never time to explain her wrath
to Charles or Scott, finches in a square nest,
both too Apollonian for a death
sublime, torrid rebirth, an empty chest.
Poetry
A Trick of the Light
This aberration, sun refracted through
illogical beads of falling rain, up north
they give a pretty name—sunshower—
as if a freak could thus become a flower.
Our Alabama exegesis says
the devil must be beating his wife, enraged
that God created such a beautiful day.
And who is she? Not Persephone—
no, a woman like us, more like to eat
blackberries than pomegranate seeds,
a woman who shops at Wal-Mart (yes, in hell),
a woman with crooked teeth and blond hair
parted brown, who cheers for Auburn though
her parents couldn’t afford to send her there,
a woman who loves her man even when
he reels on her, who screams apologies
for whatever she must have done, anything
to make him stop, a woman who tells the cops
(of course, there are many cops in hell)
that it was a mistake, the neighbors heard
the TV turned up loud, she doesn’t need
their help or shelter, won’t be pressing charges,
and the golden light of heaven burns down
and sparkles through her tears, and the devil swears
it’ll never happen again, and he buys her a present,
a pretty ribbon in seven colors to wear
around her neck, his promise, his solemn bond.
Subject Making
with a metaphysic touch I question I
like a brush
in motion to stroke a backdrop
for a cup lip to a lipped face
to measure I as other for the other
handless but with wind
I perform Midwestern grasslands
and whistle eastern rafters
for southern deserts
in the northern pines and mountains
on a trip to the store for tomatoes
I assemble I incompletely
to fit into a tee shirt
and mimic voices in a night’s beach fog
Tragic
From Gk. tragos, “goat” + oide, “song”
Like melodious goats: or Leporello listing off a cavalcade
of conquests, or masquerading as
Don Giovanni. Donning goatskins—like Brünnhilde—
breastplates, and Viking caps—
sipping from wineskins, singing in highest keys
of kinfolk, of forefathers, lesser gods, and our own glorious
deeds abroad.
And the all-caps and shift-keys for
runes of warning. And the emojis for Venetian masks.
And the straw-fields for straw-men avatars. And also, for erection
of straw houses meant to ward off big-bad things.
And we have no regrets—forgetful
as we are of our fears—eating our sandwiches over keyboards like
‘Earls of Card Games’—of Rivers, of Flops. We grow
extra-long mutton chops.
We wear monocles and other affectations. We huff and puff and
no one calls our bluff.
Like school girls or boys we sing: who’s afraid of—
who’s afraid of—And no one will say:
they are
afraid. Of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Or a faun. Or say a satyr with a golden fleece on. But the gold
is a satire and the Minotaur is
daddy issues. No one wants to give up
the goat. And how we get each other’s
goats. Say: I love you—but. Oy vey,
oide. Meaning: ‘what the hell, you goat’. And the Azazel being
the devil’s goat. A neckline—something to tie our loose nooses from,
smack squarely on the ass and watch run away as fast as
falsetto sirens.
The Sirens aren’t goats, after all, but like goats they’ll devour
what’s put in front of them. A steamer ship full of butterscotch candies or
a full grown man. I heard of a goat once who could wolf down
tin cans—adding a bit of
tintinnabulation and synesthesia to the tincture of its
bleating songs—the color, now, of Semillon—sweet, and rotted with botrytis.
Decoration Lights
THIS AREA IS shades, mangroves hovering out of themselves. Tilt-a-world undersides of palms with that voodoo skullshine. A default transparency. Stock shot: green on green. Run-through (rehearsal). VistaVision blue. As from house to house the roofs begin, push the sky back. 60’s formica counter one continuous line coming around and closing itself; any cut surface can terminate. Tiny flecks, someone’s dream. Inside reading the story of the deluge. What comes before it, what comes after it. Meaning reinforces a tempo that in turn reinforces meaning. Somebody came and somebody went. There’s never only just this. Dozens of breezes mark the town. How the sun divides itself into smaller and smaller units going down the horizon. Drop one’s eyes. Fairytale wolves starting a pace under the red light. Getting lit by these small lights, flashing it back at it. Decoration lights made up out of what was written in the pages no one would know how to save if they tried. Certain types of restlessness when dimensions cross. This road that circles back to other surroundings you see now from the road but don’t recognize later. As if we could roll, roll the film in reverse. Spontaneous cases of past-life recall occur the world over. You watch the wolves watch you. Someone calling your name as you get closer. You are the water given back to here.
Dear Suki: Number Forty-One
Dear Suki: Great Smoky Mountains,
then the temperature started to drop,
dropping still as the earth felled away
from its repose and I, tipped the edge
of dark’s aerosol, rattling the weight
of contraltos of some distant rumbling
brook. This was when the ice-low wind
greased into me a theater of shadows
over dense cap moss, plucking spare
the marionette strings that had grown
pliant from my fingertips. Eyes tacked
to the crescent of gypsy fowls clawing
at the onion-skinned sky with manic
beaks, scaly-blacked and flagging with
acid storm of gangrene death. Casting
flights of a thousand microbes skyward
the host of snow fireflies, my legs flew
through mercury construct of Carolina
silverbells, arboreal as a scent traveled
ever so tangentially only to be smote by
my heart dripping red—drip, drip, drip.
In the Peaceable Kingdom
Refill the black oil sunflower seeds
for cardinals, titmice, wrens. Replace
the suet cake for downy woodpeckers,
flickers, grackles that will eat it down
to the wire cage in less than a day.
Throw apple cores and kale stems
off the porch, onto the crust of snow.
Coyotes yip the moon across the sky.
Come morning, lines of split-hooved tracks
spell out how deer tore up the earth for more.
When bread grows leprous leopard spots,
tear it, scatter chunks below the tube
of glittery nyjer seed. See, then, pawprints,
soft as blotted lipstick, marking the snow—
it’s hunting birds, I’ve set a trap—
but no, the skinny cat has snatched a hunk
of moldy bread and locks his yellow eyes
on mine before he streaks away. The world
is starving, everything that lives is a mouth,
and I cannot afford to be their god.
Tree
Old English treo, treow, from Proto-Germanic *treuwaz-, from PIE *deru-
Being ‘firm’ and ‘solid’. And ‘steadfast’. Being also
bigger than life. And ageless, like a god,
whose shoulders are exceedingly broad
and good for heaving. Or stands defiant on a mountain top,
upholding, some say the world, or
the heavens, lugged like luggage upon its back.
Moreover, good for ornamental purposes, as in a garden.
Or The Garden: good for knowledge
of all kinds, but specifically of good and evil.
Or tucked away in the middle silence of a wood, writing in
concentric circles of rings ringing rings around
the first day of its stillness—the perfect silent
center of its singularity, which in time
will encompass the forest, stretch forever beyond
the reach of the woodsman’s axe.
§
Spreading its tendrils. Its roots like
*deru-, the deepest root, which brings us
treu, ‘truth’. The Bodhi tree.
The Dryads. Or Daphne disappearing.
No one remembers.
The ancient, hardwood forests
harvested of their
old-growth gods. Or the signs
of their autumn. Yellow leaves,
ochre with golden edges for flames.
Or any signs at all. Or the scrawl
of words into sidewalks,
or onto stone tablets. Or carved by
naked druidesses into the trunks of trees.
We need the lumber. We’re told. We need
the room—this stand
of trees stands in the way.
Imagine the empty glade
uncluttered without its
tyrannical choking canopies.
And the allotted
tall fescue plots. We must
level and grade,
irrigate, seed and over-seed, pluck
the dandelions out,
mow and bag the clippings.
§
Seedlings upon seedlings of trees that mock
the mower, mock the lawn care expert—march ever onward
like the march of forager ants
carrying more seeds on their backs—seeking to put down
roots. Seeking a grain of
truth to swallow. Once the ancient Mayan cities were
swallowed up because someone stopped
mowing the lawn—stopped listening
to Kukulkan. Who was fond of saying:
Rev up those mowers, boys. Kick up the din. There’s always
another forest on the way. Saplings to be kept at bay.
Teeming, true as: *treuwaz-. Can’t see the forest for—the Silence.
X
A shattering silence. And then the crude language
of machines. Lying on the table I am flat as the table.
I am lying. The body was born to obscure, to commit
by its being the sin of omission. What blue floats inside
of it, an interior of sky as unseen as the seen. When
the doctor says turn, I turn. My body follows.
The doctor is a technician. His language is calm metal
coiled as tightly as the coils that thrum through their work
above myself. Into my self. When Röntgen discovered the x-ray
he saw it first as a shimmer around his wife and her body. Then
inside his wife. She was her body and her body was
as visible as any hand. And then her hand became
a curled white cumulus of bone lit against the grisaille
of silver salts on a glass plate. I have seen, she said, my own
death. It gathered in the spaces and not-spaces inside
of her, then on the film that revealed her self to herself
as light, which was no longer a metaphor. Which is what we use
to see. There is an I inside every I. There is a shadow, a sea.
Birthing the room
Open bellows
bloom birch beams. Pump
cottonwood stain, spin linen
slips, varnish raffia. Mill
walnut planks, cedar shiplap.
Shake the soffit, prime the doors.
Sheath the windows in pewter
nimbus & wool skein. Hone
the lace white, blow mercury
lamp, glass beaker. Wire holes,
trim bulbs. Polish nickel knobs,
pulls poised. Silent
oiled bronze levers—keyed,
bolted. Eyebrows at the back
gable, seal the flat-felled seam.
Friday Night
and I am half-scuffed with grief
a red diamond on a red ground
drop of condensation from the brandy glass
my mother would give me for a sore throat
have you heard of Raoul Dufy and is it said like Duffey?
and I haven’t heard of The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 in too long, like, 18 years. No one’s spoken of it in 18 years
Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, though. Someone’s told me about them, someone said, “They look like half-plums or men’s butts in bed.”
and then the grief was like a yardstick sutured to my spine with baling twine
or like a truss to my resolve, which splintered in a million moon-sherds
and about my grief, someone said, “A child could have done it.”
Someone said it was like a bean rubbed so the skin sloughed off in the bowl
Someone said, “Your grief is Rousseau’s lion looking over me as I sleep.”
Someone said, “The Four Elements looked better with older cars behind it.”
Someone said, “I see now why this book was free.”
and how I feel about Philip Johnson is
he designed the worst and best buildings in town
and how I feel about this brandy is
it’s the color of a soaked bean and my throat is half-soaked in it
and the other half feels like a red, broken stick
and all I want to do is sit in the grass at St. Thomas and bitch about its buildings
because that’s what Philip Johnson would want me to do
because I think we both regret how much we’ve made glass
The God of Vestiges (Cauda Draconis)
Of leftover things. Of the place the bus used
to stop on the corner, here, before the express
route and how, dry or no, we would step out
into a puddle, the exhaust doing fog karaoke
around our ankles. Of the sensation of taking
a bath before my legs grew too long, before I
grew some silly dignity that wouldn’t let my skin
feel bubbles. Of Trinidadian roti on my tongue,
the warm potato smash, spices decorating my lips, you
using a knife because you’d need to be a snake
to open your mouth that wide. Of my jump shot
and my herky-jerky crossover. Of those early days
of independence, before the civilizing force
of hampers, when clothes lived in trash bags, when
antennae TV still could be had with the right
hanger. Of case studies. Of late night
paper sessions. Of cheap diner coffee
and long-term retail. Of 4 a.m. eyes,
wide before sleep. Of sleep.
Of the weight your head left
on my neck, how if I turn
it just so, I hear your breathing.
Of your breathing. Of these pocks on the ground.
Of the querent and the quesited. Of augury, impatient
divinations, the tail of the dragon.
Euclidean
Last week a pair of oversexed tree frogs oozed
a huge jelly ball of eggs on a branch of the young pine
too tall for eventual tadpoles to find the nearby pond
I thought but the pregnant pine bends a bit each day
with the weight of its foster frogs droning
until by now it compasses a line intersecting
the circumference of the water waiting to break.
Letter to My Mother from the Shuswap
At the lake, the water is
still. It doesn’t retreat as we do. Here,
I learned how to bury the dead
within myself. You scattered my father
at my feet as the sun bowed
its head. The sky, still. I remember
your hands closed around the boy
he was, skin once browned
in the summer sun as he played
with us near shore. You moved
around me then, low prayers
plating your mouth. His name, said
like he was accident, not
the accident we all are. You taught me
how temporary water levels are
as you moved within me, Chanel No. 5
lingering after you passed. O how I want
to be less tired of wanting
what’s lost. In water, nothing returns.
But you gave me a name
before I knew I needed one. A girl,
fraying with the intentional motion
of bodies—, the water moving us
further from ourselves.
The Moon Prophecy
For years, our Moon spins away
from us in inches, as if to slip
out of orbit, unnoticed. We
can’t have that— who would
we blame for our midnight
cravings and bloody rags?
So the white coats in their labs
create the longest hook
reaching from Earth to Moon.
They splice new materials.
Pxumonia: soft lavender but sturdy
cousin of rubber that bends
through dust and gas. Konilium:
dark-matter metal that endures
flurries of debris and exhales eternally
as space itself. The puncture
we intend to be minimal, but Moon
cracks more, the closer it’s pulled.
On the open ocean, Moon’s
cracked carcass floats. Humpbacks
bump knobby heads on wet lunar
shells. The whales’ gusts of mist,
muffled to a hiss. Moon shards
burrow into blowholes and blubber.
The crash churns out tsunamis
across continents. Some humans
stop drinking and join Sun cults.
Others drink more to max out
the truncated, dizzy spin of days.
Silver light missing, corals sway
in limbo—their mass spawns
postponed. Discouraged, doodlebugs
dig shallow graves for their dwindling
prey, while deer teeter through forests
where nothing falls
on firs like tinsel.
Pluck
If you should make
a bitter wine from my yard-
tear pieces of fuzzy green neck.
Pluck only the hair husk
and gather sun-cracked lace leaf
because
cat piss has drowned
the mint.
Our feet
are swollen
like puff pastries
but at least the yarrow
pulp steeping in rum
beneath piles of bikinis
will coo them quiet tonight.
As 5pm
streaks molten rust
across your nape,
you suck Halls lozenges
for aromatherapy.
As if sweat-crushed
tomato vine
wasn’t a tincture
you’d inhale from your
own damp fingers.
As if wafts of
earthen worm spit
and freshly
baptized rosemary
make your nose bleed for
drugstore eucalyptus.
I lap melted popsicle juice
from palms that dug
demon root until blistered
and soggy
and watch you perform
what your sister
taught you
in the overgrown
weeds
of your old
schoolyard:
1. to pop
the babies’ heads
off
and then 2. drink
their sour milk
until 3. dry heaving
makes you feel like
a dog inhaling
old marrow.
Tonight
when I bury my
tongue in your mouth
your teeth will still
be buzzing.
Pensacola
All year, vacation houses goose their skirts
up housewife legs, their stilts a tiptoed recoil
from the ocean edging toward them like disgrace.
These homes, though January lonesome, aren’t
about to let their garters down. Waves cowlick
the sand into a beach scarp, muss the shore;
gulls clump in water like white blood cells choke
a virus. In a coffee shop beside
the marina, locals mourn the loss of one
more fort, the road now disappearing, ghosting
their history, a barrier spit sizzing
to silence. The barista shares his sermon
notes with the regulars who skipped last night’s
service, the scraps that smack of parables
with unintended consequence. These out-
of-season men who kneel to Gulf and God
make mold of myth. The salt-clean air bows up
against their church’s stained-glass windows, then,
with mainland guilt, they still sit, pray, and rise.
I leave them for the shore again, sit blank
on sandy bas reliefs of wind erosion.
❧
Erode me. Be the bellows and the ballast
and the hull of me, and take me somewhere else,
not land-locked, burb-docked Birmingham, not home,
not industry and smoke, not brick and steel,
not the sweltering side of the color wheel.
A plane writes nothing in the sky, but I
still try to piece together letters in
the exhaust trail—noughts and crosses, dotted i’s.
A lighthouse vertigo blips every twenty
seconds through me, those miner’s-daughter veins
engorged with some hereditary need
to crawl and excavate. Since here I have
no past to enter, nothing I can ruin,
power’s stripped down to air and simple prayers,
a silence blanched like the cross stuck in these dunes—
another foreign object in curetted
land. I’m another set of empty hands
refusing water as the seabirds whirr
on scissor legs, their chaos testament
to motion, their lockstep some defense of rest.
THE LOBSTERS IN LAS VEGAS
A plague of crickets or an endless game of Yahtzee. Neon rainstorms and rat-pack martinis. Tin-foil hats and moon landings. She knows the game: you pays your money and you takes your choice. Enchiladas at Binion’s or veal Marsala at the Sands, a trapeze act overhead or Elvis at the wedding chapel, find the way to San Jose or just walk on by. The sun blooms like a nuclear blast. Someone draws up a plan for Paris. When the old hotels implode, such elegant debris, so many skeletons and shot glasses. The concrete billowing and glittering. For years a sky full of Liberace. For years a cart of dim sum rolling past. She sits beside the dancing fountain and says: it’s all a ghost town now. Heat shimmers as the Eiffel Tower leans in. She finds lobsters in a faux waterfall, in aquamarine pools of vodka, huddled on linen tablecloths waving feelers. Could anything be more alien to this world? She selects a queen from New Zealand and wonders about Trini Lopez, thinks about Caliban with his Sony Trinitron, feels exiled and washed up, like Paul Anka in a mezzanine lounge bar, singing to the drunks. She says Hunter Thompson was right, pulls meat out of the claw and dunks it in butter, flicks the brilliant shell with a fingernail, listens to it ring.
A Reading from the Book of Jubilees
Begin with a brackish union. Then breathe space into salt. Then peel away the shin.
Or start with a page of steam, an origami moon, a mirror stained into memory, a lonely guitar in a small, slight sleep.
Or open with the parable of the drunken master who drinks only from broken teacups, or the hermit who lives in the horsehead clouds, or the anchorite who sleeps in ryegrass on the banks of the river.
Or rise in the pre-dawn rustle, the church bells ringing along the line of the bay, the trance of hollowness that drives a town from sleep to the beach before sunrise. And there, an expanse of carcasses in the shallowness, a found flounder gurgling in your mother’s hand, your father rinsing the mouth of a tiny catfish, water choking other water into peace.
Overhear someone say, “I’ll never join an orgy which would have me as a member.” Overhear someone respond to consolation by insisting that loss affects everyone in equal proportion.
Or remember the dream of asphyxiation, when you held the groundfish denser than your wrist, as if holding a tumor and whispering, “What secrets do you hold?” as when your brother took you to the sea and whispered a song into your feet.
Or begin with the rotting heat of morning, when among the carrion, a type of day break, the seagulls’ caterwaul, the beach disappearing under the weight of its own sand.
Double Memory with Train
Once, my mother cradled my head to her chest
& told me how she spread loose change
on the tracks that cut so close beside her house,
the good dishes shook when trains bellowed in.
She’d crush her belly to the yellow throats
of onion grass & tuck her chin as weight
& wheels smeared her pennies palm-flat.
I think even then she knew
how absence freights the memory:
her father’s chair empty at dinner,
his stethoscope always poised
over someone else’s heart.
In the memory I make for her, she leaps
from rail to rail, pockets clattering
with beaten copper. He waits for her
in the kitchen, hands open
to collect her bounty of ruin.