Recitation

I cast about for something solid
to hold onto: to read a poem to
an audience of strangers. Stanzas
once crawled off my fingers like
many-coloured daddy-long-legs
now need only tumble off my chin
like chestnuts, like iris-eyed echoes.
Their fingers press innocently on the
salmony skin of the people who listen,
willowy and bent awkwardly in places
they were meant to be straight.

You've come up behind me so fast.
I can't find my feet. They stretch out
as pulp and panic, searching for the sand.
Salty and grey-eyed you tug at my hair.
I won't get over the bruises for weeks.
I laugh in a crowded hall, the cherry and
bold of a poem hot with lamplight smoothing
my skin like bread in an oven.

(You've come up behind me so fast.)

Front Porch With Flowers

I can't
get used to the fact of you, the
flesh-and-bloodness, the feel of you
rough and warm like the bark of trees.
I cannot get used to your imprint, the red
folds on my skin from sleeping against
the knowledge of you.

Brown as nutmeg in the sun, I've
lain end-to-end with the rest of humanity--
I can't get used to the feel of them,
the smoky smell from their matchstick souls.
The heat is a visible noise, bright and
bell-loud on my skin. This is
a freight train of light, an insect-thick
cloud of illustration; I cannot get used to
the thought of you heavy as a stone in my hand,
I cannot think through this haze of summer.
My eyes and fingers blossom red like lacy
hothouse flowers.

False Prairies

It takes a while to learn what it means, living in the country;
men walk by politely in an aura of sun-stale cigarettes. I
flirt with a boy who ends up dizzying me with old sweat
like discoloured tin. Some thunderous, black-eyed Raskolnikov
he makes, cuts on his fingers not cleaned, but dirtied. They heal
out of sheer necessity, with no time for pity. I bow, and wander off,
a Chinese silk-kite girl.
You keep your backyard wild-cucumbered over with junk. By
the bread-black ditches, you pace around with your witching
sticks, humming tonelessly. I read Kipling, overjoyed in a truck-bed at dusk.
The wild cucumbers burst delicately underfoot. Some sulfurous, hard-eyed Gilgamesh
he makes, shoulders back against the wind of this
false prairie.
I played my trick a day too early.
Peach-yellow and frail, light wafts through like onion skins,
you think of yourself in terms of stone-white bones.
The sun rackets off the hood of a car. The lines
come early in our foreheads here. Some fountainous,
cobalt-eyed Lear he makes against an egg-blue barn;
the fingers twitch and tug up dandelion leaves. I've got
the fingers of my one hand woven into this town down to the webs.
What my other hand is reaching for is anyon'e guess. Typhoid-bright,
the clouds go cotton, the spires of trees up against the sky are
more or less divine.