Forty

I am the handmaid with many blessings, always apron, always aproning. I am stirring the pot of hot amaranth mush and folding hand made afghans at the feet of different beds.

I have seen many ready, and in the ready place I have seen many put down their boats.

The now dead who I think of as dimples in tangerines are abrasions and must be swallowing somewhere, must be undoing the buttons of their pants in freed legless form.

...I would.

I have watched forty people die and with each blowing I wondered if it was supposed to get easier, or harder, or sweeter

or if the inside of their inside was just outside now.

The terrible dead who I think of as Moorish warriors wearing metal hides heed rolling trumpets and sonnets for their long lost heart parts. They hop pad to park, crossing the pain ridge of Elysium, standing jagged in the Hemlock undoing themselves to lie in mossy tithes,

because I would.

Dorothy tried to fly out the window.

Hand floating on top of the top shelf she dove crooned to Beloved for he was waiting outside.

I saw her sawing him.

Above the garden, stirring the chickens whom didn't know they were the Chapel;

vowing never candled so much to Pasty Cline.

Butterscotch hard candy unwrappers, unpeeling,

her skin stayed so delicate til the end.

I carried her,

limp unused womb back to sunlight linens,

she wore pearls in her prom pictures and by thirty she had laid down in the dull walled asylum too sterile to beat her sanity back.

I smoothed the wrinkles of her last lace nightgown.

I filled her room with yellow hydrangeas because she is just east of Wichita, Kansas

though sunflowers are the state flower

I know she must have liked the color.

I asked her to wait and she held on for eight days aspirating until my hand returned,

floating on top of hers she heaved to the sandy shore

and I swear I saw him waiting.

People look like angels,

always.

People grow old into their halos.

"Are you my angel?" they say

as I turn them to side,

over on crooked shoulder,

they must not mind the latex barrier between

them

and I

and I wish I didn't have to wear them.

The tragedy of medicine is the canal. The crosshairs of the polyeuthathanes wall.

Goodness-wall opens it legs and arms in one motion, whereas the good mother touches,

even

shoots up the sweat of her sick child.

The good mother is the carrion. The good mother is the blood.

Crying medicine talks only to sickness.

It says "Sit up to swallow."

The tragedy of medicine is its lack of melody. Nurses assault men with applesauce.

With vinyl gloves. With hoyers.

White dresses. White shoes. White socks. White shoelaces. White hair.

The white mothers are chalk mothers with spotted lozenges.

The men are dissolving disk shapes in plastic coated mouths.

Her face is a container, blonde lid for the container.

Slowly sit up and swallow.

Crush tab.

Harmful if swallowed.

Hospice nurses are frozen, designed to dissolve.

Her procedure supervisor is a request for help

echoed

a request for help

echoed

for the ingestion carrion bottle.

She gives people expiration dates at their cranking

like a batch of eggs on a streamline conveyor belt.

I hate her. She stuffs their mouths and denies a man his right to pain.

Juanita was my first. I was very young then.

Sleeping in the night-church I heard her whisper

"Mama?

Papa?

Mama?

Uncle Ern?

...Goddammit."

Her anger was a stiffness.

She'd swing out and I hated when she spilled her coffee.

"Ernest!" she'd shout, rolling.

"Ernest you double crosser. I'm all alone.

Oh shit."

Exiled, I was scrawling something perfectly black,

and I knew the fallible symbol her goneness had took.

I once shot a horse in the head but it wasn't the same.

It was screaming like Picasso, pierced-post kabob horse on fence.

Her appaloosa dapples twinkled and throbbed into little

tributary rivers into the Milky Way.

The mare's name was Moony, which now is funny thinking of all of the blood

that squirted.

I gave her a ritual gunshot and didn't even think to say goodbye.

I saw you, Edward, MIT engineer, wondering about the right tool for the job. Pious father,

working the grime of an Ohio rubber factory, reading your six straw-haired children Chaucer and Milton. "Where are they now?" You ask with bullshit nostrils. "How do we leave here? What car do we take?" His fingers methodically undoing a seatbelt. I took-hands coaxed him on a cot, in a dream, into the blinding hallway, rolling together, me, Virgil, I lead him but to Paradise because he was Christian, because at his funeral we read from a palm leaf. Only one foot in and he woke up screaming, only I couldn't shoot him this time.

Hildegarde Octavia has overshot one hundred, transversed St. Louis to Mongolia, rolling hills, undoing folklore, bored she no longer watercolors for her daughters because they too are tired watercolors. She is grayer every morning. Outward the fog is more like a veil that starts to show itself. She is grayer in the twilight. Still without glasses she reads a novel about Lyell, a cowboy who chaparral prays. I gave her a book about angels with influenza in the World War, she loved it. I gave her a book about unicorns and she told me it was a lie. At night I blanket her down, watching as the red writings in God's red pen scrawl further across her back. If I could translate them I know they will help me answer her when she weeps, "Has Jesus forgotten me?" No, I say. All breasts and belly. Arthur was my husband, he tall and strong and has been gone. How long? I think I am one hundred and one. She weaves like a pent up horse, restless, woman-sailor stranded at sea. How do I die? I don't know the ethics of my answer. You can stop eating. She breaks wide, I'll be going to hell, I like devil's food. I am at the bardo window, I am the lookout. With great gratitude I pulse, a river into the ocean: you must let go of the boat. I am service, but this sailing vessel, with its legs and chest and shoulders does hold abundance, does not serve you anymore. Folding back into the afghan she crocheted, I wish her goodnight: until sunrise.

Hiss.

Soothsayer, poet, poet-
seer women, old with wrought iron hands.
Mother woman composed of oven biscuits
paisley print tapered dress.
Dancer woman with sheer skin trinkets
jangle woman dancer, sin eater
she beats her legs together, wasps wings
her body hums harmonic Dharma,
electronic meditation woman
with cool summer breasts, she is grassy woman of soot,
a holy woman hands of salt cohesive and granular
the pathway to her mouth was curse-encoded
with mulberry beads, emerald gems, stones, sand tabletops for weekend sacrifice.
Who is she, banchee woman that screams, belts her prayers in the night.
She is pregnant bellied Shiva, corpses of powder, skull washing bowls
and crystalline begging pot to boil water
and piss.
Opaque pot.
Body permanent.
Body dead.
Body of bone and piss.
Body of uterus rotting.
Body of sacred mouth.
Flowing river body of sadness she laps onto catwalks
and all husbands throw trinkets at her.
Ecstatic worshipping woman, bones thirsty relics,
lapping divine river, Eldorado river
golden immortal fortune, she is stark and naked.
All of the husbands bless her with their sadness.
She is healer woman,
someday to pass away and baptize their wrongs,
forgotten dying woman, martyr,
they croon for her, men with tired stockings.
They reach and coil with their beaten army limbs, with their fierce grip
and leathery palms. They reach inside of her gentile calf,
arterial bleeding.
She sways into them;
she is meditating woman
revived from the piles of suicide ashes.
She is pearly Isis with cripple crow wings.
Beneath a red light, beneath a black light.
She is crying light woman!
She is Navajo woman, panting in the winter,
selling priceless jade, curse-encoded.
She is oracle woman, eyes of lotus,
hysterical, missing, melted shut.
Seer woman of peace but sees the wars of their ancestors,
their jugular brothers. She fortells the raping of her village,
the mothers.
Slinking back behind the beaded curtains
she is jungle woman, hair down, hair back, hair on his neck,
slithering Kundalini woman.
Red snake from the garden of language.
She tells him the story of banishment,
and he will teach it on the boughs of willows, on the blackboards.
Disguised, oh her body of magic. She was a serpent.

Water Mountain

Celestial snake, beamed and blind boa
curled. Sleeping.
Patience. Pants. Patience.
Holding to your unfurrowed, softly round
brow. Planetary shaped,
like Jupiter
like seeds.

Bags piled in the backseat canvas.
Places to compile. Places to unwind.
Unwound and unbalanced heart.
What is balance but emptiness?
What is emptiness but love?
Unbound balanced heart, hither-oh,
I come to you, between two night trees.
We laugh, the two laugh at the one.
And I recollect this sickness
that encumbers my belly like a pack of heavy timber

of fire, for your chaotic step,
after I break for you my drum.
We are a night walk
up a mountain
and exchange a furlong submarine.
Patience. Pants. Submerged
and forlorn
you are my fawn. Patience. For the sun.
I weave into your night garden.
With night blossoms
and night bed.
I am breath, waiting
heavy, unbalanced
for night-cut-peaches
and night-cut-sun.
Broadcasting, undersea, screaming transistor,
telepathic dolphins
sing a clear song of despair
of their water-wombs
shut out from the light.

Negative Space

Who I am now
Who am I now
talking about the man who once talked.
And in speaking spoke with
great gratitude.
Who am
Who aren't is who am I now.
Who I am will not be
the incantation spoken
nor the reverberation in his throat.
Who is the melody of energy
that is the asphyxiation of
you and me.
Who is the puzzle of bodies
transfixed on questions of ontology.
Who is speaking spoke with
arms of legs of signifier's closed eyes.
Who is the melody body.
Transfixed with ontology
who is speaking spoke
with reverberation in his throat.
Who is the soothsayer, the soothsayer who I am.
Namer of all incantations.
Who is a pear.

Drift.

Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).
Deeply, deeply
we transition
ice barriers, an iceberg
deeply, deeply
the body drifts, we go.
(a body at rest beaming bright white lights
of the forever nothing we all already are, or
have always become).
Upon arriving we saddle
and grind until one or the other
is made uncomfortable.
The corners of the room are contrived
and pink.
The more intimately I look
for them the less apparent they are.
Our hands of two, wash away
into the air, formless
I use them to hold things
though we both know
they aren't there.
Really there is only one of us
and we are headless.
Lampshade, lampshade
the lighting doesn't flicker
or vary
in the land of eternal dusk.
You are my twilight lover,
my one and only, my intertwined synapse.
Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).
Doorway, doorway
we have floated through
another doorway
another time that looks like real time
(but it is always real time once you acknowledge
the perpetual dreamstate of all of mankind).
My spirit body enters this room
to heal my spirit organs
which look like real organs
and are real organs
now that I acknowledge the perpetual suffering
of all of mankind.
I am in the cathedral of all dreamers
and here, a man
long and winding
takes me up a grand crystal staircase
into a hallway
that everyone has been to before.
I have no hands because
they are falling apart.
Permission to be lucid:
(ok, go).

3-31-2011

A map of fish cages, my childhood is circular
fragments framed by the drape of
the land on this side, the sea on that side.

I was so young then; you were still a hellion,
unfolding like a lobster trap at the base of a lake

and I was a channel.
My fingernails spreadso
from my mouth, wide,
the images in my throat crawl out.
Clean calf,
I disappeared into the eyelashes
of the fade of the world, with little black hooves
and loyal white legs.

I remember when you were inside me then,
the darkness was silk that became a prayer in my blood,
cancer parted me like fevered sludge.
Horizontal in my river, poured your narrow banner,
your lower landscape,
your quick-bleating sod
and your ruined squall.
I gave you permission to kneel godless.
In your cemetery,
your wrists of agony
were caught fish in the bramble.

Looking back, the sweet hum of your nudges
was a jawbone,
thick-fingered and gray shaped.
I hissed at you,
and you, in low voices
asked to be hoisted and banished.
You, lifted by grizzly machinery,
were rusty as the joint of a decaying tooth.

Creation Stories

Man was born in streams of milk
from Earth's whimpers in the night.
The Sky, twinkling archway with cigarette.
Father, dangled his pipe.

God shattered his fist.
Shut in the boughs of grace, furnaces
smoked God out.
Furies of our intersections
muddled God's laughter
and shrieks of our shame flags
flew like an oven,
or a Resurrection
of gut-sacks.
God, throbbing, squeezed the soil
and from Earth's wounds, Man slipped out.

His Mother cooed: "Man was born thirsty."
Man raged into her volcano breasts,
and they were minnows who slithered
upstream.
The Sky saw Man as a bastard
whose delicate eyes would jerk open
when suffocated or
whose body would drift
when washed too clean.
God loved the human rubbish until sundown.
Sky became twilight and
He gave man palms to beg with.