Selected Poems

The Daughter Of Men

2009-11-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

'Come, let us choose us wives. . .’
-Enoch 6:2

He crawled out of her window
in the middle
of the night
and uncurled himself onto a narrow
white strip of windowsill.

After a while, a tug of breeze
came and lifted him
above the houses,
until he was floating, like a piece of dark, upturned root,
into the garden
of the distant sky.

She lay on her bed,
full of gift,
and watched his delicate blue feet
disappear across the threshold.

For a long time, the memory of him
glowed
between her thin legs. . .
with her mind’s eye, she saw
his wings and his golden teeth
burning across her body.

In the warm spot
just behind her uterus,
she let herself feel the pulse
of sperm
he had left for her.

Potent, like a bright green river fish,
it glided deep inside.

Whichever cell it touched
transformed,
for half a second,
into a kind of living eye.

And when it finally found its mate,
she felt it tremble
with recognition:

until a stillness came
and a long, rich,
even silence.

Outside
the house,
deer with ornate antlers passed through
the new snow,
feeding on the nettles which grew
beside the frozen marsh.

A muskrat clucked
and cleaned its fur.

. . .

And somewhere underground,
a puzzle,
bent and half-blind
with age,
began to turn and solve itself.

A Perfect Number

2009-11-11T01:00:00.000-08:00

In a brick oven
was where we finally
lay down.

I put my finger
in a pile of ashes
and drew an 8
in the hard place
between your
animal breasts.

‘A perfect number,’
you whispered,
though there was no need
to whisper.

Our master
came and went.
We heard
his footsteps
on the soft, suburban lawn,
gathering twigs
and pine brush
for the burn.

You pulled me towards you.
I felt your fingers,
shivering their tips
on the back of my thigh.

‘Why did we decide
to do this?’
you asked me,
‘and when?
and what for?’

I said, ‘It was our best idea
at the time.’

Through a crack between
layers of mortar,
we saw the master’s hands-
dark, steady hands-
remove a book of matches
from the mantle.

You trembled
and curled into me:
a naked, frightened
cocoon.

‘“To be consumed is to
transform,”’ I quoted
because we both knew
the saying
and it comforted us.

Then I watched your lips
turn to flakes
of paper
and be sucked into the chimney.
And white flames came
and ate your tongue.

And I sat in a pool
of melting
and saw my eyelids
boil away.

‘Marriage
is the kingdom of heaven,’
the master whispered.
Though there was no need
to whisper.

The Goat

2009-11-09T01:11:00.000-08:00

Gonaives, Haiti

You emblem of the night’s fertility,
you drunk, moonbitten thing,
you raw meat.

Do you know what you are?
Years ago, a woman
hid herself inside you,
seeking a full hold on
wildness, seeking
the Root.

Behind your milky, willful
eyes, she saw a place
that could keep her.

Now there’s something in you
like thunder’s that’s been
locked away,
some terrible sleep,
some unnameable, vaginal
emotion.

But you,
you bleat ridiculously, at nothing;
and let wasps swim in your thick,
half-human smell.

You lay down beside the road
and your eyes,
like slits of innocent teeth,
eat the opening flowers, the bloodflowers
and the falling rice.

So when we cut you open and
plunge the blades
of our hands
into your body,

it’s only to retrieve what you’ve hidden
inside that uniform
of stubborn ignorance:

Your sweating, starry organs,
and your ancient heart
made of blue ash and purpose.

Poem of The Mermaid and The Man

2009-11-08T23:20:00.000-08:00

I swam behind the barn
this morning
and watched the sunlight breaking
on your windowsill.
But when I knocked,
your brother told me
you had been gone
since late November.
“Out diving,” he mumbled
and closed the door.

I spent the rest
of the day floating
and spitting bubbles into the
sky.

Where would you go
in a year like this?–
the cold has made
the kelp so thick,
impassable.

And no one here seems to recall
your passing
or remember even one
of your hundred names.
When I ask the seals
if they’ve seen you,
they just bark
and close their eyes.

I get worried, you know–
our ocean is deep and it
never ends.

Tomorrow evening,
I’m heading out towards
Long Reef. . .

If I get there,
I’ll watch
for our rainbow–the one
that disappears
whenever
either one of us blinks.

And I’ll signal you somehow,
scoop yellow paint
onto the waves.

And I’ll laugh and I’ll wonder
about the child we once
started

in that huge cave,
deep inside this water.

Portrait of A 4 Year-Old And A Father

2009-11-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

Kingston, Jamaica

The little girl
with braids in clear
beads
and her father
above her,
eyes stained by cocaine
and rage.

We three sat together
under the steaming
palm trees,
playing with blades of grass
and listening
to the deepening violence
of rush hour.

All of a sudden,
he grabbed her ankle
and screamed:
her socks
were all wrong.

No part of her understood.

She climbed onto
his back
and kissed his neck
and laughed–
her tiny brown
throat trembling,
like a locust.
And her love was as deep
as his weird,
twisted anger:
much deeper.

The world came to life
underneath our bench:
maroon ants
and lichens,
moist roots, coming to life.
And he threw up storms
and cursed when he didn’t
need to.

The daughter looked through her father
with immense eyes–
eyes like jewels distilled from
the thoughts of very gentle animals.

She looked through him
and loved him completely,
like an assumption.

So when he turned around again,
I could see that he was
scared:

like a match who discovers
it’s just given birth to a forest fire.

The Snake Inside The Earth

2009-11-04T01:19:00.000-08:00

The snake has buried himself
inside the Earth.
His lungs are made of sycamore;
your hands and my feet
are his mind.

Whatever we touch,
he meditates.
Wherever we go,
he is the invisible actor
moving behind us.

In the city,
his skin is the color of steel.
Under the redwoods,
of dry mud.

I’m writing with a pencil
in a blue notebook.
From the tip of my index finger,
his tongue spurts out and
brushes against your neck.
A branch of water.

In the silence
of these strange weeks,
the activity we observe
is only the snake’s rising up.
Someday soon
his movement will break the planet open.

Genevieve In October

2009-11-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

Frenchman’s Cove, Jamaica

Even the name for her
is violence–
like an old knife
ripping out the tongue:
whore.

Something is piled in her
where it’s not supposed to be
and something left
uncovered.

Not long ago,
when she was very young,
an accident happened:
while she was still learning how to use it,
she opened the door
of her body–
but just a bit too wide.
And through that thin crack
came flocks of eagles and hawks
and owls:
all desperately hungry.

They chewed at her, inside.

But like a girl would,
she opened her cut-up heart
to them.
And soon became used to,
and soon after, needed,
that endless traffic
of talon
and blood-filled beak.

When I look at her now,
biting at her broken
fingernails
her red underwear all undone,
I see a trembling thing, half-born,
crazed.

But from beneath her misshapen eyes, another,
very wise being watches.
And that one remembers exactly
what it came here
to learn:
meekness,
humility through humiliation.

So when the shadow of a vulture
crosses that sacred,
suddenly moist line between outside
and in,
she smiles to herself,  secretly:

Isn’t she, after all,
one of those lucky few
who will inherit this unfathomable ball
of steam and laughter?

The Dust

2009-10-31T01:24:00.000-07:00

I’m not a Catholic
but I still love the story.
How, like a magician,
Christ wakes the nails from
the bed of his hands.
And bending over to untie
the ropes on his
ankles,
exposes his tender thighs and
loins
to the weeping public.

How he walks in the street
where Cain ran after he killed,
into the corner of the garden
where Solomon saw the black rams
and sang.
And he looks beyond his
gang of disciples,
into the desert.
And how he longs for
the sweetness and
immobility
of a cave,
like the one from which
he once stole Lazarus.

At the house
of his mother,
it’s very quiet.
It’s been three days
since death:
he’s chased away the last
of his disciples.
He will grow old here,
he decides:
alone & fertile.
He chants to himself.
The crows watch from the trees,
he paints comets
and lions in the pink dust.

Untitled

2009-10-29T01:32:00.000-07:00

Sweetness is the kernel of corn
that you call a butterfly
caught between the husks
of your rose and amber
thighs.

And night is the name
of the skin
you’re wrapped in:
I found the moon
they left in your left hand.

My love,
your body is like
a spaceship, your eyes
are satellites.

Last night,
when I opened the cabin door,
when I entered you,
did you hear it?

The song of roots,
the song of bare feet,
the song of the stars.

The stars,
calling us home.

Regeneration (I)

2009-06-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

I bring you moons
and new fruit
and I wash your feet
with sand.

How erect this planet,
how starving,
how lonely!

A terrible ball,
terrible and green and wild,
lonely,
exhausting infinity
with its screams.

A molten thumb
of sperm,
a cow’s bell in the night,
a signal.

Earth! A knife
driven into the heart
of space.

And when that infinity bleeds,
it bleeds women
and men,
drops of black quartz
lit up
by an invisible,
by an unimaginable sun.

Who drives us,
we cells on a stranger’s
globe?

Who do we call out to,
we monsters,
we tyrants made of hands
and little hearts?

The burning craters of the desert,
the memory of deep, uncanny water,
the roaring planets:

nothing answers.

But every moment unites
to a kind of ecstasy, to an overflowing:
and we spill
onto beaches
made of skin and pure time.