I brave your name in the mornings,
jumping into the primers and the windowsills
with my own unwarranted point of view.
This house has secret passageways, luxurious
and earthy behind curtains of myrrh-dark silk,
and my eyelashes are corn-tassels.
In the summer, weevils and raccoons tussled
in the cornfields, and your skin melted in the sun.
In the barn, your wrist where it was not tanned
slipped from it's flannel cocoon like a cob of corn
from leaves. Or perhaps you were peeled free,
dancing with the dust where the barnwood
cracked and betrayed your ankles.
And now, we drink orange juice in the morning,
laughing as we mutilate the tree in the backyard.
Our eyes spin together like records, wreckers with our
untanned wrists braced against the juicer.
The neighbours peer in at our impertinent talk,
and flowers called weeds crinkle up at the
edges of the steps: lady's thumb, violets, butter-and-eggs,
lazily laughing at the neighbours with us,
waiting in the shade for navel oranges to fall.
Navel Oranges, Neighbours
Myself and the Queen of Sheba
Yogurt in your tongue tips off the edge
of the teeth, sweet like the sun here.
Hknuhau Beach sun-blind. Wave to Jocelyn and Celia
in the sea, to Shadda on the rocks sunning himself.
This is a list of things I have liked:
Myself, the Queen of Sheba,
Torino tomatoes dried in the sun.
The eye of a fish I once saw dead on the beach,
intact and glaring at everyone who passed.
This is a list of things that pleased me,
whether for their sweetness like
sugar around the rim of a glass,
or their tang like a mouth made of orange
inside it, bobbing and floating,
or like the drink itself because it quenched
or refreshed me.
You are inside me, bobbing and floating,
intact but only in this instance dancing
with your albatross lips creased and folded
from a hundred laughs. Only in this instance do I
dictate and nuance this correctly, shaking the lights
to replenish the electricity, shaking my hair
on and off the nape of my neck. Inkwells
all over the country sidle up to me,
bobbing and floating with
the Queen of Sheba.
wasps & elephants
Black sweater, yellow shirt, black dress, grey tights--
I unwrap myself carefully to my skin, fold each thing
up on the chair at the end of my bed. My skin, my skin is
an elephant's skin, dark in the river where the mud slips off.
Crease after crease people and persuasions, pinecones and
pomegranates collect in my skin, buckle around my hips,
weevil into my shoulders, trickle golden off my mouth.
Cobras crawl in through the drains on this side of my world,
and on that they shiver in glass boxes. All around them, we
stand and stare with guns. In the dark I shiver from the residue;
under my covers I pluck at my wrists with fingers rich as caviar.
Crease after crease my elephant's skin fills with the lather of love
and the labour of wrongdoing, delicate steps in sandals of antimatter
and antimatter posed in delicate sandals on the steps-- it only
slides away when
I sleep.
Tylenol Face
Our shoes are circuses,
teetering and teething on our feet
gold and red. The lions and sheep
cluster in trios, quartets, and I hum,
slide my shoulders like the bow of a
viola. Oh, David, where is your
sling, stone slaying me between the eyes?
Your Tylenol face appalls me.
He stands at the edge of the shimmery crowd,
nervous like the edge of a wave, and in his hands,
he cradles a pomegranate. I wink a quick look
at his face, the Guatemalan dark skin, bee-sting hair,
cloudy eyes. David's eyes are cloudy, cloudy with
theology, cynicism awkwardly applied, archaeology.
Cygnet swans huddle scornfully behind him but
don't dare disturb.
The blankets and sheets are bride-white. I sleep with your face
dissolving in my mouth.