"Dark Nipple of the Figs"

[ “Dark Nipple of the Figs” ]

The things we said, or chose not to; the way it happens
when the mind divides, makes an eye flinch. I know
as a door opens to a darker room you'll find it is
a warm September evening. Sometimes we kissed
graceful appetizing female forms in our mind.
we heard my mother's voice, We played frightening games
such as love, and vague. We were lonely and hungry and ordinary.
What is a gust of wind but the act of embrace?
What makes the dream the way it is, subtly aural
and finely positioned like your mouth: and I am still
in bed, the drywall is my skin, your crumpled words
are a perturbed skeletal pattern adorned with molars
darned and huddled in, I suppose, for a process
in the time of history we never made specific.
Sometimes we heard the children crying in hunger in our mind.
We occupied ourselves with sufferings. A body strolling away
from you at some distance, once, twice, or many times
into the expanse of the heavens; your thigh,
dripping rosewater, insect wings and shadowed woods
with a feeling of deep sadness that we had not fulfilled
our senses. Your head and face in particular. My hand
on your waist. When the temperature drops to the bottom
like the dandelion seeds of your breasts
*It was pleasant to imagine* I could see the queen of all
flowers already half-erased. And you are sitting
at my kitchen table, tugging the spilled rice.
How can I tell you now, my heart curls in sorrow
like autumn leaves. And yet later, holding your shoulder,
how could I say "your kiss tastes of blood, or wellwater
flecked with rust?*" The next day I will love my life.
* * * * *


*Title and one line from an Untitled poem by Araki Yasusada

what it means to utter a word

[ what it means to utter a word. ]

Then nothing. A swallow of love passes through my chest.
Such steely recognition must be a damaged body.
Add romantic. Add bailing out. And then
add the troubling bits, forever.
I think about this sometimes,
how, among the pieces, you don't want to know.
This is the genuine self, but generally I do without.
Beneath the house, a threat. Who’s family secret
threatens the subframe? Grill of floorboards.
A ramshackle house. How many worlds in this
blink of an eye? My heart hangs out of its pocket,
appears to dwell in the air, only only only only
its weeping is not still. I miss your mashed potatoes.
I drop from your handkerchief of sky, lost wren.
Then the sound of dishes being broke. So farewell,
or is that it's a pleasure to meet you. And that's all,
says Desire, to soften my resistance. Someone's in
the kitchen breaking dishes. Each final scream.
The dream bread falls through the dream;
the how about I cannot live without you.
In its destructive path how hyacinths.
Your hair smells of petunias and chipped glass.
You have to do everything now yourself.
After you start up again in those get-on-with-it
stilettos, those daisies and violets and hyacinths.
And those roses. You ask yourself.
* * * * *

Sometimes birth, sometimes not.

[ Sometimes birth, sometimes not. ]

the self is...wine and honey mixed, now a horse, now a bed of flowers...

I am beginning my seventh month of pregnancy when my boyfriend calls to tell me I have died in my sleep. Inside me, the air, as well as the ocean, goes from warm to hot. My eyes become violent and beautiful. My thighs are moved easily to pity. My lip's a quiver. The voice has destroyed the layer of the future; I get the message. I burst out laughing. That’s what that feeling did, it made me shiver; it made me dead.

Take dawn. Take today. Take miles of red lilies breathtakingly tall. Were this my window-view I would end with an image of absence. I would end with my eyes on the ceiling, draped in a white bedspread. I would kiss your hand,

sordidly. I am at the cinema, observing the secret spleen of time itself and; the plot is contained in its intervals, the plot is the most intimate and disinterested, so full of silence, I experience the mortality of thought. I fling back the covers. The question hovers, the curtain drops. The baby, kicks.

I am beginning my seventh month of pregnancy, in sorrow, when my boyfriend calls to tell me he has died in his sleep. Were I to call him, I would begin with nascency, I would begin with concept, I would begin. Redemption as it comes, suddenly, or not at all. I sit on the couch and take his hand. My collection of glass fingerbowls becomes more expensive. I open my mouth and I can remember, suddenly, how I came to believe in God. Dismantled.

I turn back into an ordinary person.

The self is beginning its seventh month of pregnancy when I begin my seventh month of pregnancy. After a few unusual moments of silence, it is obvious; no one has died in his or her sleep. I burst out laughing, uncontrollably. I embellish taxonomy with my laughter. I had not spoken to the self in several years so we’d forgotten the sound of desire. Thus my breast. My hair grows long and is pecan-colored, threatening its hold over me. It is a waste of words to disclose small gleaming details. My boyfriend braids my hair. I begin to weep.

I am beginning my seventh month of pregnancy trying to protect something. After I fall asleep, my boyfriend (and I) make love. That's what we did. Panic ensues. It felt nice. I am beginning my seventh month of pregnancy after a few weeks of beginning my seventh month of pregnancy. To which I respond, "inside the mysteries of the body I see sensation." "A development," my boyfriend says finally. Tiny images of legs hairs, with no consistent theme, suggesting all sorts of things. It is early spring.

* * * * *

where we measure silence

[ where we measure silence ]

Mary Magdalene lays on the ground and pretends autumn tracked her down. But thank you for the beautiful book that you gave me. To which she replied: good evening, this is my body, my wild battle with the twigs, I dream my son, I can leave anytime. Thank you to the very existence of the willow leaves in the garden. Thank you to the other meaning of maroon. I desire a dream of being dead, dressing my final body in a screen of moonflowers. Once upon a time, in fact, I opened the book skyward amidst the scentless leaves, curled into claws, falling. How to tell you now, I have become a story, become bones, become a misunderstanding of this birch's shade. So much flowering in the autumn midair. Which is when she touched her bed of moss, solemnly. Which is when she imagines, I suppose, his hands deep, her mouth a plum blossom moaning in the mud. Heaven in a simple way. A dream not big enough for a heart, I fell asleep in. The blur of leaves made the wind pick up; I tried to climb down from the tree, then I tried to study rain. It's always raining. From a distance, I watched myself climb down, speaking calmly about how I love you. Beautiful Mary, why don't you answer. Your sleeping turns my heart into a pair of crows. I hold my chest. My wounds close up before you reach up for a kiss.

* * * * *
Poem quotes and/or paraphrases, in part, both Nick Flynn's book of poems, "Some Ether," and Araki Yasusada's e-Book, "Doubled Flowering."

prayers of many summers come

[ prayers of many summers to come ]

Summer is insensitive but mother-close, lying in my bed all this time, I imagine, lying in a strange geometry, her tongue coaxing my nipple. If the floorboards are filled with silted smoke and cooling ash. Undoubtedly Summer, you are intimately beyond dust, another sort of ageless flower. Summer lies on the ground and pretends to be hammered silk, of being present at my parent's wedding. At sunset we would find her lifting a bucket of water, for instance, as the other room fills with commotion, and a sense of her own breath, as Summer fills the washing machine with the warm surface, of sorrow, far away in the heavens. She gasps at the weeping willows, shaped like family. Thus in the shade, resting too quietly: whipped clouds crawl near my shoulder blades, work clothes draped over hamper edges, the air within her lungs, indelible as a name. My breath becomes a blowfish. I imagine my beard flowering green with white leaves and assume it will be coming home. I may be in parallel summer. The surgeon notices Summer is ink-brushed with ochre and fragments of small-maple. Her sister, Mary, sobs away from the kitchen and spreads indecently under the inconsolable carob tree. The sound of a train surprises me. Summer remembers seeing boxcars, unhurried, crossing a bridge of feathers, under the northern sky, where people don't die. My eyelids are makeshift suitcases. We can mourn right here. But Summer imagines that her foliage will not be plucked from bloodied mouths, her secret blouse slowly unbuttoned. Peeking my head from a barrel I watch the bright fruit coffin under the walnut tree. I imagine my grave into a nocturama. From our driveway at dusk, I reach for her thigh studded with fireflies. And then there was the dream of being present in our driveway at dusk: Summer slips into bed beside me. A gust from my belly, a perfume of just mowed grass, probing the undiscovered portals under lush moss over nothing. A condom trail from family portraits tilts toward our quilt. I'm divorcing the same moment it happens. As moonlight arcs overhead, a pitch of cardinals tickles the hair on my legs. In late summer, her dark fur is combed into a series of doves. What I remember most about Summer was our continual desire to love in the gaining darkness, soliloquies the late leaves of cherry trees lost in a valley, a curious need for our endlessness. I bring in the groceries, fold the wet towels. What now? No one had swept the doorway, and from the cat's white meowing, I want to give her milk.
* * * * *


* Author's note: The poem paraphrases Randall Williams' poem "Star City: Winter," in Octopus magazine

An Account of Kissing

[ An Account of Kissing ]

I stood on the shore facing her pale,
And senselessly, she turned from me,
Was turned from me, and turned to salt;

And yet it happened in the imagination
Where we stood together, where I dissolved
Into a cloud. I held the finger, hers,

To touch the sky. Pointing until light enough.
We spoke in a language of no tongue
On earth. The shore, ours, is not a story.

I breathed terra and driftwood
And with horrible flagellum
I scourged my bare legs on ox-hide.

"Et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus"
"The calm globe of Morning is upon us"
"Your limbs are twisted olive branches"

I listened, years before I knew you,
To the inamoratam, and yet it happened
In the nettles, it happened till I reddened

All the more. And I believed you.
And I stood on the shore facing you,
Hours upon hours, until the flowers,

Wild as wohnt, wilted into rainwhisps,
Pouring words upon us like pearls
And the grateful sky's attribution

Knows God's wrath. I know about mourning.
In the end flush everything red parted;
We spent passing a night over a humid bed

Between two lips called Small Pleasure.

You woke me at dawn, holding my living face,
Where I still live. And yet it happens
In the imagination, as many others
Behind us had drowned.
* * * * *

* poem quotes or paraphrases, in part, from Joshua Cohen's prose, "An Account of the Saltscape, in Three Parts."

a little patch of basil

[ a little patch of basil under the woodshed ]

The weather is something you notice. I
remember dying of starvation during one protracted                       cold
patch, and a gentle turning of the
mind, walking up to you in a dream asking to borrow
sugar, so that we
all might be
blessed
with sweeter gifts. Kiss my polished green eyes or I
cannot
stay; I will sing in Italian until                                                my needs
are met. Like coming to the end of a
cul-de-sac in a fever dream, as you stare at the nimbus thinning behind the
houses to revea-
l the thuggish sea. Only it's not the
intolerable
sea, it's a heart of
pure murder
blowing open in the                                         storm; a familiar
weight
pressed down on the
                 shoulders, in one ear and out the
aorta. In my opinion, standing on
head before bright light.
        Only it's not light,
it's a cool patch
            of lichen
                         as seen                                                           from space. What we need is a cast
shadow taken from the crook of
branch that comes from shared                                   perspective.
In a day or two this will not be over. The situation is
something that you can type up during the
evening in a livid sweat. Only it's not
                             sweat, it's bath salts
melting on your cheek, keeping quiet about the
way it is more or
less
always hard to imagine that much                              freedom.
It took me years to recognize your body
as a landscape, and then my
delight which had not
diminished. I
was bent
over
examining the river, refusing to acknowledge the
huge brown cloud hung over the
garden. I had whispered not
every holy drop of rain hates you. Only this one.
                                                         Only the very fact that you
are writing this poem,
and the illusion that someone else is its
author, sighing my name far apart from every                       deluded

view.
* * * * *