bright light

I can't think of you without a high bright sound
like the rim of glass spun with music under
your finger- I can't think of you without a sweet
bright light that makes morning of my eyes.

Bright light that makes morning of my eyes
hollows out the reeds in your wrists-- your bones
are veins that hold honey, old bee-stings, honeycomb cells.
I can't think of you now without a wildflower-bright under
my bones-- my bones dance and lilt with the coloured light,
the tumbled-down laugh I get when I think of how
the old days are rusting in the long grass.

The old days are rusting in the long grass.
I am balanced on the fence, and when I waver you catch me.
And I can't think of the bones in your hand-- how they move under your skin,
how they are strong and bright and hold the light like September fields,
how they close like a sun-white crab to make me straight--
I can't think of the bones in your hand without a
hum as long and bright as the summer.

Hum as long and bright as the summer;
your voice pulses like a Greek seaside town,
the smell of sage; your tuneless happy drowns all sound.
I stand up straight inside myself; my sight goes double and you are

everywhere now. I squint at you like a girl
who's lost her glasses, laughing as I
feel around for them helplessly in the long grass.

Fillevox

Does it frighten you when I speak? Intricacy
in the shape of leaf-skeletons, the dry skin on
my lips, the pitch of my voice so high above
yours-- does it make you shiver to hear me?

My voice is sweet like a D.H. Lawrence fig,
it is round with the promise of my womb,
it is downswung like a child on a swing as I

make empty promises, laugh at you from
behind my hair. The calendar marks off days
the size of an eggcup; I fill them quickly with
the langour in my limbs, the way I can't make up
my mind. I talk to you in riddles: a peach, a pomegranate,
a meddler, a service tree.

And I am milk and you are cereal.
And I am bread; I am salt; I am
a paper you write on. We are
like all things that come in pairs--
we stir into each other at times like tea.
We query each other in furious stage-whispers.
Your hand looks knobby and awkward
next to mine.

Do you look down suddenly when you hear
my honey-mustard throating? What red-throated
hummingbirds know as they duck their needle-mouths
into the pitchers of flowers is what you still
have left to learn. There is not another like me
across five continents.

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.

Apparently Living

I wanted to think about you clearly, the way you
think clearly about a bottle of green glass
full of coins in your bedroom,
the way the light hits it in the morning
and your eyes blink with early.

I was apparently living then, my
head wrapped in silk because
I am a head of corn-- my pearly
gold is a treasure I put in your hands:
a harvest of happy, a rustling field.
We played music for hours then, my
teeth tingling from the harmonicas,
your fingers numb. I tumbled over a
bale of daydreams; your fingers played
with my hair-- I was apparently living then.

With Divers

This world is peopled with swimmers, their feet
splashing, attracting sharks, white lines where
their old swimsuits sat too snug, hugging orange
and neon pool toys to float with--

But this world is peppered with divers, and
diving bells, and descending into that
dark blue they cup their hands around
the faces of the fallen, uncommonly without fear.

My Skin and Freckles

Kenya, my sister, was always the
strong one. She dressed as a soldier for Halloween
with her hair in snappy black braids. I dressed as
an apple, floppy felt rompers in red.

A tiger chasing
a badger scribbled in crayon
on my homework.

A tiger sprawled
on a rock with arms
like noodles.

I hardly dare knock on your door;
my fingers tremble and I push my hands
into my hair, red floppy curls into my eyes;
I admire your snappy black eyes; I pour milk
over cereal and the colour reminds me of my
skin and freckles.

Navel Oranges, Neighbours

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.

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.

the first isabel

The first Isabel was dark, with more individual eyebrow hairs
than you could've thought possible, each thick as thread
woven into her skin. And she never plucked them either.
She had common phrases picked up from God knows where,
pretentious remarks that bounced gorgeously over the room,
demi-cliches that, somehow, you couldn't help
being comforted by.

The first Isabel introduced you to the second Isabel, who was
like a film negative of the first Isabel. You could swear she
still had her baby teeth, all blonde hair and elbows. You took her
walking in the public gardens, past cherry trees, black-and-white photographs,
boys eating cotton candy in knee shorts, popular fountains and
buskers with headbands. Later, though, you had to confess that
that was a waste of time-- the second Isabel had
almost nothing to say.

In October, when you met the third Isabel, several things made sense
suddenly, like the colour of leather, dog's leashes in the park, by
Lake Ontario on a day as gray as the water. The third Isabel had shoes
of brown leather, and she sat on a bench extracting a stone, and she
caught you staring and flashed you a smile just the shape and colour of
a slice of auburn apple, and ignored you again. "Goodbye,"
you said to yourself. "Goodbye, third and final Isabel."

Weimar: the Onion Market

for Omar

In the afternoon, time sifts over the street
like sugar, catching in your hair so red like foxes.
It settles on my collarbone, spilling down my dress
as I breath; spilling down my chest as I laugh.

It is not your face that enthralls me as we
wander through the market and weave baskets and notions;
it is your placement in relation to the world.
It is your voice, with the baby-needles of German threaded through it,
the way it rumbles like a friendly lion. It is
your quiet deference, your arms as you hold doors and
your shoulders as they turn to let people pass.
The air is full of cranberry-fragrance, nuts crumble
and fruits bruise underfoot. Speckled, the smells
of meat and music move jauntily through the crowd.
It is not your body I am drawn by (I am antiquated)
but where you take it; the sun spun off a historical spindle
pushes itself into your mouth, lemon-flavoured cotton.

Repertoire #2

another time, I won't
permit you to surprise me.
I have my own pair of feet,
and my hands are pretty and small
and white beside yours. China birds,
straw men fluffing over in fields, a
black eye tweaked in my direction; I
have come undone easily before, grown
untwined under a blanket of snow. I've been
chipped in a corner of this house
where the green paint of the front hall
slips orders to the dusty brown baseboards,
in a corner where the laundry detergent's smell
hunts me like a rabbit, imperfect here in this corner
where the spiny legs of the table hide me. Tomorrow
I won't let you surprise me anymore, daring and suspect.
Justice is a prickly cactus in the window,
getting brown, and dead (though just as harmful)
without care.

Poems About Austin

Mr. Morrocco reads me stories
after dark, switching voices with characters
while the evening ticks away like cofee
getting stale. He is a grandfather clock,
or sometimes pumpernickel bread. I am
a tiny frill of pink eyelet lace, like
a sea shrimp, six years old.

Outgrowing this fancy, I move to Montana.
In the summer, we barbeque hamburgers adultly,
wearing sundresses and white leather sandals,
scratching our names with our keys into
the national park picnic tables.
Reading poems about Austin.
Poems about Houston, China Grove,
poems about Chocolate Bayou.

Years ago, I used to think
my friend Mr. Tomato Sonaros
would be the one to collect me
after I finished school. Later
I found out he was imaginary, too.

Untitled

Cherry-tongued drake, currant bushes
shake as you weave through them.
My hair is currant bushes. Also, time is.

You weave through my hair all
orange and cedar, smelling of
spices, Oolong, mirade. If you turn tiny,
microscopic, you can catch on the barbs of the
individual hairs like everyday fingers on silk.

You weave through time like a sea-dragon.
You back, sides, are sleek and dark like weeds in lakes.
The colour of strong tea. The colour of muddy water.
The colour of cellophane amber. The colour of my eyes.
The windows of this house are cracked, every pane.
Slivers of cedar stain my skin.

Lonely in the City

It's not like
we'll be lonely in this city.
Not when you're so much like
the ham in a sandwich; not when
it rains milk every saturday, or,
if it's sunny, the sidewalks melt
like candy bars. It's not like we'll be
lonely.

(I shake my head whenever
someone mentions your names;
they confuse me. I tap my fingers
nervously on the seat of this bench).
I'm not so lonely-- I mean,
when you seem to be made of
french-fry looks darting across
diners from over your beard,
when you're so much like
humanity-coloured milkshakes or
mustard-headed streetside
hotdogs I hardly have time.

Tales of the Broken Social Scene: 7/4 Shoreline

After dusk, we dragged couches down to the beach.
The fire was smoky and the sand was wet. It was too cold, too late in the year
but we stayed out most of the night.

Our conversations were like accordions,
stretching, elongating, singing, folding into themselves, and
everything moved at half-speed. Late-night seagulls
flicked up against the cold red sunset.

Haina, fingers steepled against her little pointed face told us,
"If you try to steal the beat, the beat will steal you."
James sat on the sand, back against the couch, feet bare and white,
jeans damp, watching the tide and warning us, "It's coming; it's
coming in now." Ian Curtis told me quietly that it was time,
and he wanted to get away from lies that he lived, to love what he lost.
I counted stars, told stories.
Before we went home at dawn, I helped to
push the couches out to sea.

My Dear, On Sundays

I
expect I am learning too quickly.
My fingers arrange themselves like
chocolate flowers against the wood of the
door; my eyelashes are sweet and tiny, I
print playbills on the skin of my neck.

My dear, on Sundays I am
clean and new, tear-gold coins
bit between my teeth; I am
a dappled mare, guided
by the reins of theory held
in your knuckly hands.

You take me to visit a guru,
pushing my hair out of my eyes
and directing me to curtsey. He says
I am beyond hope,
and when you stride to the window,
he whispers to me,
“Are you sure of
why you're here, my child?”

I shake my head.
I am seldom sure.