because we grow up and down

A woman
dreamed
of no one
needing her
breasts or
words or
wetness and
the dream drove
beneath her,
a blind root
feeding
the fruit
she gave.

another love song

That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all.
I drop the shawl.  Turn
from the window, my water
eyes to yours, and speak, tell you
what you missed, my arms,
downed, lamplit, reaching around,
palms cradling the bald velvet
of your head. I will roll
my silence toward your dark
question, a shining ball.
I am Lady Lazarus, come back
from the dead to tell you:
there are no words at all
in the mermaid song
you’ve strummed in me,
how you give me fins
in a black sea, become
shore to my drowning.
Come, walk near the waves.
I will roll your trousers,
kiss your legs, save you.

With love to Eliot and Plath

the yogis have a word for it

In me where I sit,
where you started
that spinning
and the spinning
wound around
my spine like a staircase
past unhinged belly door,
around forgetful  heart,
past empty throne
of my teeming
honeycomb head,
the door found its swing
and fast, let you in, my heart
became a ticking metronome
for your songs,
the drones found
their rightful queen,
and now the whole
place drips honey.

When you asked if I have met the man in Glűck’s “In the Café”

I don’t think I have met this man,
but often I have been this man, and it scares me,
how I forget the dreams in which I’ve lived,
and the pain my forgetting brings those I have loved.

I read Glűck the way I eat food that makes me feel bad.
I love her, the no-nonsense of her, the sad stark word of her,
but she bloats me with shadows and trapped moths.

I approach her poems the way I watch a horror movie,
rarely, invisible hands ready to dart over mouth, eyes, or heart,
whatever is vulnerable, but they don’t move.
I just witness her ripping, or ripped.

Something in her work poisons me, but I go back to it.
I nibbled only a few of her poems earlier today,
and they corroded me somehow by dinner,
tears stopping in my throat over the browning ground turkey.

Last year, before he left, when I learned she was once poet laureate,
I bought her compilation: The First Four Books of Poems.
I remember one night, he, having read some of this book, was quiet
in the La-Z-boy, slow moving through rooms, to think I might feel about him
the way she wrote about her husband, repulsed by the crush of his body.

I think I love her, because in her poems lives are lived that I don’t want to live,
that I feel seeded in me, that I don’t want to water or show spring.
Some, before ever reading them, I have groomed and watched
wilt and consume the smaller, tender shoots of me.

I want to stop reading the way she writes me, but I can’t. Not completely.

Today, searching for her online, inadvertently
running into her late 30s face—our age!—
and the images of her now in her late 60s,
my stomach was raked by what savoring sorrow has done to her skin,
my eyes a bright sting, fearing this might happen to mine.

So, there it is. Me on Glűck.  Glűck in me.

I love her because she terrifies,
eats the hopeless, ropey insides of my fallen soldiers, a Morrigan.
Her black beak sets hope free.

Gold

I wanted to be unfettered by life’s syllabi.
Do this, do that, now this for this until this time.

The truth is summer unmoors me
like a nameless ship, a shapeless is.

I wanted to be a free yogini, nothing
but stretching, breathing, sitting in
a silent crown all day, every day.

The truth is I pretend I am already
enlightened and choose lovemaking
over waking, and wake anyway.

I wanted to be the lonely woman writer
saying what other women don’t have time to say.

The truth is I hardly have time to say it,
and I’m rarely alone, even when I can be.

I wanted to tell every man
no from now on. No.

The truth is, a man saved me,
my everywhere ever his yes.

I wanted to leave this flat whispering place
for mountains and anonymity.

The truth is when I stay I learn a secret alchemy.
Lead is what writes me.

controlled burn

1
I was a bed of orange
coals bursting tiny
blue flames.

You walked across.
I couldn’t burn you.
You couldn’t pour water.

2
Your eyes bowls begging
for the simple rice of me.
There was nothing to spoon
but soot and smoke.

3
I rose, black
smolder, hard
shoulders. You kneaded
me loose, cool hands
unraveling fire knots
of memory. Still I burned,
though you untied
me from me.

4
You towered
beside me, pine
cradling abandoned
fire circled in stones
between your roots.

I stayed in the ring,
licked the air, crackled
for dead growth.
The wind blew.

When what you
thought was you
fell into me, we
made light from what
was no longer needed,
and shook off
fire and wood.