Late October, and I am Still Twenty Five

Well, what can you do?
It was spring come and gone –
Late October, harvest moon turned once to snow,
Now grateful for sunlight.
In the golden afternoon,
I hacked Jerusalem artichoke with the same hands
I had used to hold the wakeup.
Pulled blighted basil from its brown twigs,
And spread leaves on the bed
To make ready the winter.
I made soup with those artichokes -
Thick with potato, onion, and Sibylle’s herbs.
I ate the soup,
And ate my phase by the salty mouthful.

Untitled (Revelation from the Last Seat of a Bus Bound from Pittsfield to New York City)

You, searching for zones of light through the trees,
It is June now.
You can surrender last winter’s ardor, and
Let the road race beneath you.
Remember you rode this way without fear in your heart,
Looking for the flat open plains of lakes,
The familiar emblems of geese,
Reading your book, dreaming stiffnecked –
All the while approaching the time,
The place for forgetting.

Belinda

I've never put anything but poetry up here, but I've been working on this for a while now and wanted to share it.

Belinda, by now fully drunk, stood on the balcony and lit a cigarette. The balcony was crusted with ice and snow – she could see a frozen parking lot below and could hear the harbor although she could not see it for the thick white fog that began fifty yards ahead and ended God only knew where.
Inside the hotel room, her daughter was cocooned in the scratchy covers watching cartoons and eating butterscotch pudding from a plastic cup. Although she certainly must have known that something was wrong, she was a game little person and seemed to see their flight from the house as a sort of holiday. She should have been grateful for her daughter’s pluck, but Belinda could only feel a watery numbness punctuated by flashes of rage so fierce she scared herself.
She stayed on the balcony until the last bitter dregs of her cigarette. When she went inside, she saw that her daughter had fallen asleep but had taken care to turn off the television. Belinda looked at her face all rosy at the cheeks, and heard the faint whistle that belied a cold she had only recently gotten over, and felt suddenly as though some sort of escape was imminent. Looking back out into the harbor through the flimsy sliding glass door, she saw that a slight shade of darkness had fallen, as though the fog was the beginning of the end of the world, an end that would be accomplished by nightfall.
Belinda watched her hands putting paint on her face. They trembled slightly – she remarked as if from a far distance that her hands shook when she was excited, and wondered if and why she felt that way. The face in the mirror was still beautiful, even young-looking, despite all the crying she had done at her mother’s house. She finished and appraised her work, her eyes weaving back and forth on their own image. She put on the aqua earrings, picked up her purse and left the room, locking it on the way out.
The hotel bar smelled of the thousands of lonely cigarettes that had been smoked there but its dutifully nautical décor looked better in the murky darkness of winter than it did in the tourist season. It was still close enough to Christmas for the little twinkling lights to be appropriate, but the truth was that they were never taken down, only turned off. There were only two people in the hotel bar, and they were both men. They eyed her as she sat down and ordered a glass of white wine, and she was almost bold enough to return their looks. From their clothes and demeanors, they didn’t seem to be from around there – both wore rumpled-looking suits and recently shined shoes. One had a grizzled look and could have been any age from fifty to seventy; the other was younger, lacking a chin but with a great beak of a nose. They were talking together and had only briefly stopped their conversation when Belinda came in. She sat quietly by herself, taking measured sips of white wine that just barely disguised the fact that she was on a drunk. There was nothing to do with her hands except smoke, and of course the two suited men took the opportunity to offer her a light.
“This here’s Wayne,” the grizzled man said, “and I’m Bill.”
Belinda unleashed her smile, which dazzled them as she knew it would, and extended her small hand. “Belinda,” she said. The men silently noted her wedding ring.
“That’s a mighty pretty name,” Wayne answered. “What are you doing in these parts?”
Belinda noted with a touch of panic that she had no story prepared beyond the truth, and the truth was not something she was ready to tell. “Moving,” she said. “I’m – We’re moving.” The men waited several seconds for more information and when none came graciously accepted the lie.
“Well, you could do plenty worse than this place,” Bill said, and laughed in an overfriendly, barking sort of way. His laugh ended abruptly in hacking; he spluttered and spat something into a handkerchief. “Coffin nails,” he said pleasantly, and smiled at Belinda as if nothing had happened.
“Can I refresh that?” Wayne asked, gesturing with his nonexistent chin toward her empty wine glass.
“Oh, I shouldn’t,” she automatically demurred, but he had already gestured to the bartender, a squat barnacle of a woman who was reading an outdated Reader’s Digest on a stool behind the register. The glass came back full and Belinda held it out before her.
“Cheers,” she said quietly, and they all clinked glasses without making eye contact.

Upstairs, Belinda’s daughter stirred under the comforter, coughing. She opened her eyes to the darkness, could not remember whether she was in Grandma’s old four-poster bed or in the bottom bunk of her old bedroom. She had dreamed of huge birds with round black eyes, eyes that could swallow people right up like pools of water.
“Mama?” she called, and hearing no response, cried softly into the lumpy pillow before lapsing back into sleep, into her dreams of being swallowed alive.

There had been a tacit agreement between the two of them, some vague nodding and meaningful eye contact that had taken place on one of Belinda’s trips to the bathroom. Wayne was the acknowledged victor, Bill out of the running as he was lately stricken with evermore dire bouts of coughing.
“Well, partners,” Bill said, laying his hands over his knees and exhaling into a standing position, “think it’s about time I turned in. All that driving, you know, wears on the eyes.” He winked at Belinda. “You all have a pleasant night, y’hear?”
Belinda and Wayne wished him a good night and then sat in the near darkness without saying anything. Belinda’s glass swam in her eyes, and she remembered the little girl upstairs as if she were on another planet, somewhere altogether outside of the realm of her concern. Suddenly she laid her hand on Wayne’s, found it warm and slightly moist.
Their eyes met, and she giggled in a way that crinkled the corners of her eyes like a girl’s.
“Sorry,” she said, but he had already closed her hand up between his own.
“Moving, huh? Where you moving from?”
Then her lie unspooled itself, easily omitting her daughter. She murmured about losing her job in Bangor after her boss had “thrown himself” at her.
“Hardly can blame a man, now, couldja,” he said at length. “You, uh, you said we?”
“We. Oh, yah.” She held out another cigarette like a little scepter, and Wayne lit it. His long nose threw a brief, birdlike shadow across his face. “Well, my broth- my brother’s helping me. He’s from there, but looking for another job himself.”
“What you say we, uh, retire?” he said then in a low voice. His whole face was pink and glistening in the twinkling lights, his eyes telegraphing beery desire. He reached for her face, closed his eyes and leaned his beaked nose closer to hers, an unplanted kiss puckering his lips.
Belinda’s scream startled the bartender into uttering a short caw. “WELL, IT’S CERTAIN’Y ABOUT TIME TO CLOSE, HERE,” she said hoarsely after composing herself. Eying Wayne and then Belinda, who had begun to cry softly, she turned and left. “BE SURE’N TURN OFF THEM LIGHTS,” she called over her shoulder, as if she were their mother.
Belinda’s crying turned into sobs, and Wayne tried vainly to wrap his arms around her. “There, there,” he whispered. “What’s all this about? Huh?” She just swung her head to and fro, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over again.

The little girl woke and, after some sleepy effort, read the red pointed digital numbers: 6:34. Darkness feathered off into faint light near the sliding glass door, and she threw the little metal lever that held it locked. It was freezing out on the balcony, and she was quickly cold through the pink nubbly fabric of her pyjamas. Fog still reigned, damp and unbidden all around her, and it was only after she heard the far-off voice of the foghorn did she feel a surge of fright and rush back into the hotel room.
“Mama? Mama?” she called.
“Close the door, baby,” Belinda said. She hugged her daughter’s body to her, feeling her little feet like icicles against her legs.

Untitled

The earth, and all the
Children will give their secrets up.
If you sing hard enough year in year out
Your love will give its secrets up.

Cut 'Em Off

Do you remember the morning before graduation?
The sun and the birds were just
Beginning their assault on your room,
And suddenly! a series of reports:
Drunken assholes, setting off fireworks
At five o’clock on a Thursday morning.
You, naturally, rose,
Threw back the old bedsheet you used as a curtain
And bellowed that you’d
"Come down there and cut ‘em off!"

My goodness, how I loved you then!
Laughing, both of us nude and stinking –
I of love, you of me –
Our aching heads,
Our mouths like ashtrays.

Neither of us could get back to sleep.
I padded bare-assed to the kitchen
And ran the water some minutes to the proper frigidity,
And you drank both glasses in hungry hungover gulps
And asked me to get you some more.

In my better mind, I look at your closed eyes,
Your ravaged toenails ranged like a mummy’s at the foot of the bed,
I look at the crown of your balding head (the same pate
I had grasped in all manners of passion),
And walk out the door without a kiss or backwards glance.

But that morning, it was all I could do to pour you another glass
And get back into bed laughing, while the room got warmer
And the fireworks sounded outside your window.

Rise, Young Ones

We lean toward the ground
On all occasions.
Our shoulders, our hips
Seek the earth.
We die by degrees,
Everyone of us.

But we get out of bed
Every morning,
We greet dawn after dawn.
We charge through our days
Each faster than the last,
While ever knowing that
Surest destination.

We lean,
But we spend
Endless gestures
In rising.

And so I say:
Rise, young ones.
Even when you are old,
Even when all you see
Is the slanting mouth your
Very own doom,
Rise, as long as you can.

How It's Done

I suppose mercifully
Some kind of frozen fear
Injects the heart, inoculates it
Against the truth of love.

Like childbirth, we must forget
Pain, and the ragged flesh
Surrounding such tender parts.

Time is a local anesthetic
Finally active in the wound.
It slows to freezing,
So nothing but unknowing
Shivers in the scar.

Still, that old sign subsides
Only to be awoken,
And the surfeit of desire
Will ask again for numbing.

Point A to B

As fearsome as it is
To realize while driving
What a thin metal skin
Separates you from the road,
The wind, and the oncoming exit
Of your own death –

This is how it is when you are born
And you find fragments of centuries have passed,
That you will become someone unrecognizable
To your own eyes.

And you travel from point A to B -
You go, and you go on.

Dear Distant Star

Dear distant star,
We have highways,
And lobster,
And Republicans.
We have ways of appeasing,
Ways of being appeased.
We have our sprawling seed
And no way of knowing
How deeply or truly
Our existence extends.

We worship entities
Hard felt,
Hardly known,
And we wonder,
Staring into your
Lonely sparkling eye,
If we are the only
Experiment unleashed
Upon a world
Unequipped
To survive our hunger;

We wonder through
Our days if and when
You will call,
Or if our inquiry
Is merely the reflection
Of a desire to be seen
And understood
And loved,
And we are still waiting.

Topography

Because I grew up
In the short hills of this world
I did not learn
Until I saw the mountains

That such an earnest array
Of altitudes was
Bound to happen,

Bound to bear me as
I traveled among them
To pinnacles that confounded
All I had known of gravity
As surely as they baffled me
With their utter probability.

The definite reaches I had once invoked
Under the vaulting sky
Were mocked to flinty bits
When I saw how far
I still stand from the heavens.

O April

O, April!
These new shapes you yield –
These new memories longing for old ones:
The silhouettes of trees in round windows,
Boughs white in bloom,
The long-sleeping branches coming to bear this stacked light.

How can anyone think
That they are the same body that walked
On an April the year before?

How can anyone mistake the sudden warmth of
Your breeze for anything
But the dream that they had in
The wombdark of winter,
Of the promises made to them?

We did nothing,
Nothing at all;
We simply waited in cold terraces
Sweetly freezing our bones –
All we did was to wait for your unfolding

And it is all we can do now
To quiet the greedy pulse that wants more warm
To feed its little fire –

So here we are, April.
Another birth perched on the bale of years,
Another open mouth
Clamoring, once again,
To be fed -

So, we are fed.

Not the Next Living Thing

A square of light
On bushes is
Mistaken for a deer
And then mistaken for nothing.

Mind goes blank
As a pane of milk.
I record muscles’ recourse –

Knife edge of alarm
And then
None at all.

So this,
I think with the unanimal brain,
This is what it was like,
Waiting out all the old years
For meat to come along

For the membrane to pale
And then, of a sudden,
Break.

The Afghan

The afghan that my mother made me
Is made of many other fingers’ doings, too;
Is made of fibers from all corners of the world
All in shades of grey,
Just like our name –

But none are dearer than the swatches
Of cream and mouse colored wool
Shorn from sheep that summered
Up the hill from my childhood home.

Nothing is sweeter than lying
Under the knots and twists
Of love’s work,

Than hearing the bleat
Of familiar sheep in the
Opening meadows of one’s dreams.

One Woman's Blues

I got that one man medicine blues
If one man ain’t there, I’ll find another that do
I got a feeling in my bones that I gotta find something new
I got that one man can’t heal mine
I’ll find another kind of blues.

I've got day on the horizon, think it’s about time I run
I’ll tell you goodbye tomorrow when I stand in another sun
What you’ve got will never hold me cause I might not ever come
I gotta pack up all my bags, babe,
Cause I’m not your only one.

I got that devil in my pocket but he ain’t no kinda fun
Devil sends me running to another mother’s son
I’ve had so many babies but I don’t quite think I’m done
I gotta heal myself with one man
Cause I got hurt by another one.

I got that one man medicine blues
If one man ain’t right, I’ll find another that'll do
I got a feeling in my bones that I gotta find something new
I got that one man can’t heal mine
I’ll find another kind of blues.

Poem to Snowy Afternoon

The lonely tethered along:
I wear my balloon face
And this city bears time and place,
A dumb Mother Hubbard hugging
Her children all to the brutal banks
Of her thighs.

I am foggy color and shape,
See myself incessant in windows
As a ghost imposed on the bright wares inside,
Ever turning the dishes of my spectral eyes aside.

I try to ply the street with this pale version,
But blood beats me to it:
No face in the glass is ever mine
As long as its double remains
Echoed in crude blooms of flesh and bone.

There are no frozen dancing
Pieces of the clouds that light
On my cheeks without dying.
I am still a sack of hair, woolen damp
Stuck with bits of sky,
Melting fervent words
Silent back into my brain.

Biological

I’m afraid it’s biological.
Because there is no way to explain
Why I shut the door before
Burying my greedy nose
In the collars of his clothes,

And why, when I smell his skull,
The urgent advice of my reptile brain
Is to pull his bad old body closer
And make babies.

The heart,
The heart is nothing.
Hack it out, you’re good
And dead.

It’s harder to sort cell by cell,
To quell every little fire
To tell every little pair of hands
To obey, to behave
And go about your business
As if you weren’t enslaved by them

As if you weren’t simply
The descendant of some mad impulse
Encoded by the same passions of
Every other fool that came before.

The Omnipresent Taxicab

(for JoAnna)

Human interaction is hard to undertake
When you are looking out the taxicab window

Onto lower Manhattan a-twinkle with rain

(When your heart is full
Of tender things which cannot be said

For fear perhaps of dislodging
The beads of new water

Bathing concrete and leaf and flesh all alike

Until the quality of being wet
Is just another miraculous commonality);

These are your thoughts
Riding in the omnipresent taxicab

Over the Williamsburg bridge;
And these are your feelings

Dying certain, miniature deaths
As they reach your face because,

Try as you might, you can scarcely undertake
To comment on the perfect, fragile map

Of a million shining lights with the instrument
Of your human mouth.

The Lake

I used to hang
My heart’s desire
From the sharp points
Of the stars I saw there,
Watched them twist and twitch
Until morning put them out

While you hungered for even higher levels,
Desired departure to some
Plane I could not pretend to understand.

So, I missed my mark.
Here I am in the same place
Now hamstrung by
Those little kicking feet.

I do not long,
Like you,
For lack of longing.
My desire dilates
Only to renew itself,
My dreams are
Deeply colored.

I wring my body
For the salt
Of sweat and tears
And consider it
My sacred work,

And I do not hesitate
To taste the poison
I make here
Between these two
Hungry breasts.

Reminder to Myself

oh how
could I have sighted
the first continent
of my love
and said boldly,
“this is the whole earth”?


truly, all I know
of any coast
is the worn ring
of a shell
resting its slight weight;


all I know of the voyage
is rapt surrender
to the blind muscle
of water that holds me
aloft once again.

Good Advice

You can make your own money,
You can make your own way.
You can make good men love you
You can make bad ones pay.
You can rest when you’re weary,
Make your bed when you wake.
You can make up your best face,
But you can’t make love stay.

The Shape of Your Name

the shape of your name,
its weight in my mouth

is less perhaps than that of
a coin
a thorn
or a kiss.

your name
was never mine to have,
but i'm not fool enough
to let it fall
from my famished lips.

He Was All a Man

Dirt under thumbnails
Whiskey on his breath
Eyes blue as smoke under the brim of his hat
Perfect slope of torso
From those wide ribs to
The long knots of his killing hips:

That was how he caught me
The first time, without true words,
And let me hold him in the bonds of my body.

Hold set shake and give him up
Hold set shake I gave him up

I gave away all that;
Still not enough man for me.

Lament

“…You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is

she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy.”

- Sappho

Whiskey and sex,
Wicked men, cigarettes.
Why I love what makes me cry:

There’s a little death in all of them
And a little of me that wants to die.

You Dare Regard Me

You dare regard me as if
I didn't spend my childhood

Adrift in the seas of
my own mind's rambling,

As if I never knew
my first and only self,

As if the selfsame loneliness
I feel now, without you,

Were as foreign to me
as another country.

My Mother's Drum

It was sometimes the smell
Of loamy tobacco
That rewarded me

When, on vacations and
The times your mother came,

I chased you down in your
Waved-away veil of smoke,

To see your jaw set under
A blaze of eyebrows,
Warning me away
From a moment of solitude.

Is this the gesture I seek to repeat,
Every time I sit with that blue pouch,
that twist of paper,

And spin my own contraband,
Thinking of flight?

Dream Seen from a Window

Like waking in the night
Lost in a familiar place,
I watched red curtains billow from inside your window
And looked across to faraway rooms,
Their walls paneled with undreamed forests.

There, walls invite the slender trunks of trees,
A secret green light into their corners;
There, limbs are flashing
In the darkness.

I wondered what that place could be, but never knew,
Never wanted to wake to know
The way I saw it half-hidden.

And I pleaded:
Don’t reveal yourself to me now.
Stay undivided, even if it’s a dream –
I’ll never want to know if I’m woken.