toothpaste/coffee house

crazy child; your mother
hardly knows what to think
with your ghandi impersonations
in the bathroom mirror
and I'll be your girl for that.

in the churn house where the butter
is turned to charcoal, butterwork bricks,
and grapevine barrels awash with wine,
crazy child my friend craig
you build a tower and a turret
take me to a restaurant that burns
oil lamps, green and purple, red and friendly,
friendly fires. take me to the barn
in the side room where the
jams and pickles are stored and
tell me a story, only a story, an
innocent story of children in the straw
on the floor,
take me to a coffee house and
sing a song of chocolate brittle and
dark peanuts
I'll be your girl then.

mama's bag-of-needles circus

Do you know it was your
wicker knees that first fascinated me?
I watched you across a gathering of mutual
friends and a meal whose smell reminded me
of flour weevils, sweet potatoes, and an Indian grandmother.
I've kept that a secret through some
heavy temptations; even through you
telling me you were first enthralled with how
I looked like a lady at a masquerade ball,
in purple, and how I
smelled like black pepper.
Little and loverish, while the cedar-split fences
tilted and decayed, we grew smaller and more into each other
until we were truly unhealthy and had to be
bathed in lukewarm salt-water for months to be cured.

We live in a world of high standards, my dear,
set up along the classroom windowsills like
pots of paints and pots of clay and pots of
old rubber. And pots of pills.
And in the pots of pills, there are severe little
round grandfathers like the one who
widowed me
for liking his grape-wine eyes once,
and I've been grateful to my mother ever since
that I never had to see you old.
I imagine you're still that boy I knew at twenty,
feeding me Ritz crackers on the
back stairs while I
pluck with wondering fingers
at the black maze of your beard.

Sometimes in winter
my grandchildren ask me to tell them our story,
and I always begin, “There once was a boy
called Edmund Clapham,” so that if they eventually
think to look for you, they'll find only some stranger.
And when the house is lonely at night, I imagine
that Edmund Clapham is a magician my grandchildren
will find who will send me back in time. I'll be twenty
with my rope-braid of auburn down my back
wearing that lemon-green dress I used to have that
made you think of walking spring.

Foolish fantasies, but I'm almost seventy now,
and I have to bathe my feet in salt-water most nights,
excuse me.

who i am is

miloš strolled past the docked boats, winking at me over his shoulder like a white, spotted terrier with one ear missing. i waved at him and went back into the bookstore so as not to watch him disappearing around the corner. cobblestones and old men on native bicycles- red ones- clattered around me, the traffic and physical narrative of the town. the red roofs and sparrows scavenging around cast-iron chairs; i was not alone and i was not unhappy. but there was one yellow flower whose name i couldn't pronounce that miloš had conjured for me and i was cross at him for leaving me.

when i was walking on the bridge, earlier that day, he had seen me from across the square, and shouted "dive!" to indicate he was calling. i laughed at him, and climbed up on the railing as if to obey, so that he got nervous and ran over to me and pulled me down.

we spent the morning walking, stopping whenever we pleased, and talking. well, that is, he talked mostly, of things that mattered to him, and i listened in scraps. "and you will know it is right because the colours and the smells will be like cinema or funeral," he said, moving his hands like swingsets in the air, obliterating gestures. his face creased into a smile when he saw i wasn't listening. "this might not make sense to you, but it is really important." he erased my worries with hurried motions of his hands. the buttons of his mud-brown cardigan sat low on his chest, over a cherry-coloured shirt, and there were little pills of wool all over his back. his voice blended in with the sound and fury of the street around us and i examined the stubbly hairs drawing two points down the back of his neck, the fraying at the back of his jeans, our shadows moving carelessly down the sidewalk.

a bit later, when i was listening again: "mastering these motions, however, takes years of practice." he twisted his hands through the air, my own amateur magician, pulling little silver kuna from under my hair, a bouquet of yellow flowers which disappeared into a flutter of confetti. "oh," i said, "but those were so pretty." "yes," he said. "but nice things disappear too. like this morning." and he said, "i have to go now." and i didn't mind too much, but then he said, "ne nestati; volim te," and disappeared like a magic flower without translating.

if he comes back i will not be so quick to be saved from the bridge.

eliot fish-stars

On the beach, with the cold grain sand
moonwet on our shins and shift soft under
our feet, Eliot-- dreaming of something frozen,
something pale-- fish-stars, layered flesh
all pink on the grey sand.

The revolution heroes died last night, all of them
up to their necks in fist-deep mud while the sky
drizzled bullets, tea leaves, machiavellian principles
and they died, they died, they died.

Oh Lurching People! by the sea you drag
moral shackles and immoral wounds, flayed open
where the salt water stings. But by the sea I wait
with Eliot, for a crowd of jellyfish-coloured souls,
Marco Polo and E.B. White.

romaine babushka

frills of green leaves, I believe that I've seen you
creams, cheeses, and teeth breathing in eighteen days ago
down in the market all orange and gold. I believe that I've
seen you. do you remember? I wait and waver
washing walls and woodwork with my wonderland eyes
and you meet me here, orange creams and cheeses
oh, do you remember? your eyes are agate and I
cannot be sure.

I am a multicoloured gypsy skull,
wrapped like a gift in a paper shawl,
swinging fingers where you walk my way.
ringing like minima until you go away
I am a silk-green Indian cat
swaying away when you come past.
myriad mirage I miss you I stack up
inside of myself, matroshka mushroom
and mandarins, music and sitars--
love is a lychee, a lyric, a lunar explosion
desire is dancing, dharma, deciduous doorways and
cedar tea! my mouth breathes, your chest breathes
cedar tea with the deep sweet in your ears and teeth.
my mother is over the leeks and zucchini
my father is talking out by the far water
my heart is an apple all sweet and pink flesh
desire is dancing all cedar and tea. shells and bracelets
twinkle in the market, sprinkle my feet with sand and
sparkle and all my skin shivers, delivered and given
all wrapped in Indian fabric for you.

the view from my balcony is stalls and
lantern-shades and the view from my balcony
is you.

blush-yellow

Sixteen years old and up to her teeth in blush-yellow romance;
the tyranny has got ahold of her and we can only apologize.
I know how it goes, when I was sixteen and in love myself,
he could have said, 'obey me,' and I would have obeyed, not
knowing the that food of romance is disobedience. Not knowing
that the food of tyranny is circles of pink grapefruit time.

My eyes are heroic in their attempts not to coexist with yours
and you can only make our apologies to her for our
deliriously bad example; you can only hang your head when I
flirt my fingers through their air and the strings of orange confetti
to where you wait quietly in a chair to where I stand asthmatically
in the center of the floor. Chestfall after chestfall our heartbeats,
arrhythmic and scared, echo down the sun aslant in the front halls
of our bodies.

Seeth and chain braids of salmon-ribbon into ties for me; tie them
around my rib cage and trail them from my ankles and wrists. Tell her
we apologize for our failure to communicate with each other and tell her
the food of love is dark and well-polished like a life-red apple and not
blush-yellow like this pecan fruit. Let us pray for tall friends to hide behind.

Intermission/Medical Impossibilities

I will only speak to you with other's words, from now
until this exile is over. I'm always sending myself into exile,
tying up my wrists and curling up in a straw-filled crate
with a destination stamped on it
in perhaps a green dress that dances when I walk.

What Denomination are you, and of what Political Persuasion?
and my only answer is a sort of lost sound like what the wind
says when there are no people on the sideroad, only a bit of paper.
So they try once more, with What is your Occupation and your--
but I interrupt: Stop! Stop! Don't you see I have none?
And I break eggs and cinnamon and a cup of sugar
into a bowl and the crust rises golden and crisp for me and
you to sleep on until we arrive at wherever it is I've sent us.

ginger december

If you look at me sideways in the still green light
and if the pulse in my arms quickens, what then?
I know you to be several states away, smiling through
the snowstorms as I braid lemongrass riboon
and brush sweetbutter and sage on winter bread.

You're far away; if I see you watch me with ginger eyes,
I still won't dare to be in love with them, your
december-letter eyes. The snow is tinted with
green, pricking at my bare neck, keeping you away.

And I start letters to you in reply: "Dear Seth," and
I crumple it, throw it away; "Dear Seth," and I crumple it,
start over. And before long, I'm coiled in my answers
to questions you didn't ask, juicing limes for ink
and feeling the cold windows are
disagreeable.

The clock stings like flies in a citron garden;
I have several rib cages, and pinpoints of light on my neck
and from my shins to just above my knees. Unexpected
urgency beads in my eyes, a garden of green onions,
dill, and your skinny ankles and
by the 1974-light of several lamps, against the
nettley afghan my mother knit. I twist it in the ginger-green
ribbon the colour of your eyes, wish you well
over the telephone.

All This Talk Of Time

Where my mouth should be is a velvet
poppy, full-skirted and rich; mute and
inanimate. The lights bob across the room
in the shape of men and women. there is
a golden gauze across my eyes.

Memories of evenings skate over me,
tiny ice-blades over scarred dance-floors
and escaped cushions (They were heaped on
the couch all around me, but their silk bodies
now rest on the grit and floor-polish).

Empirical evidence of my guilt, cream
and bitter ankle-lace pool on the hall table,
where the mirror is cracked from an Oriental
goblet. There is weird Obsidian music pulling
against my shoulder, ruffling the flower that rests
where my mouth should be.