Foul perfume of fear,
my face as lowly wine,
harvest yesterday.
He removes me,
a good counselor.
I know he is clean,
correct,
painful.
His name means success,
In an absent language.
In his cell phone is my stultified image,
another woman
in a lightning world
with no sign
of beauty.
My face is a window.
You see me
standing naked in my heart.
In the smudged silos,
a slipshod grain hungry and unfilling.
The fields here do not even
feed their own.
On the crotchety mountain,
emigres weave stories of
the old cruelty of the thin, dry air,
new cruelty of elevated antiseptic oxygen.
Between a one and a two,
a child is born with four feet.
The cry of a lone lantern in
the nefarious night.
Behind fire,
Sweating desire.
I am a museum of makeup,
the art of the feminine,
the vision of seduction.
By my entrance,
no angel of any kind,
my soul in sackcloth.
Imperfection entrances,
greed entrenched.
She has feasted on the slick sheen
of my alabaster skin for hours.
Having had the skin,
now she will take the fat,
and together we will leave the bone.
When I cry,
My life murmurs in red.
*
In the recital there are some mistakes.
We all make mud of our music sometimes.
*
His hair is silvered like song,
And he seizes me in my depths.
My hair is easy to please –
Satiated with soft careless skin
And uncivil eyes.
The ships on the river
Corrected correction.
Love goes with you.
Your hands glaze me with pride,
a good disease.
Your teeth write me in anger -
Your kiss a knife in another dialect.
In the river,
The dead wash themselves among the stones.
Your pretty lips alight on my breasts
Your hand is on my belly,
taking my soul away.
Between the rippling river reeds,
A timeless photograph
of vice and virtue.
In a journal in well written white,
the presupposition of posies,
the assumption of risk.
Beyond books,
cinders drift lonely through cities
too hot to feel their burn.
All that dust
that pushes pavement forward
to an unforeseeable finale is from
dust to dust
in a fourth world, my mother
cooks salmon on a simulated Saturday.
On a Sunday superimposed on the
wall of my one thousandth year,
my daughter wears sapphires,
asks me for a pond.
Age burrows in me like a tick.
I will write it away.
The inept snow crowds
around the fire,
plotting and dying.
Some terrains cannot be traversed.
In the mascara woods,
children clump together
in the latest
cloud of today’s breath.
Bleary eyed,
the fox fixates on his quarry,
the weakest of the drey.
Cut the phantom from my back.
I am unannounced and unfrequented.
A wavelength no one sees,
a dizzy, dazzling particle
known to science only as
“effusive missing.”
Schrödinger’s dancer dancing in
the dark.
Remove from me the red, digitized light
of sovereignty and certainty.
I’m free of rain.
I show my picture to the mirror.
I was not busy in my shiny days
and now I see
clouds of supplication ahead,
burning bronze.
My shape shifting selfishness
Folded into a skin box,
Origami.
My life was born for a while,
between sameness and joy.
Ten times I memorize myself,
candy candle
I have to light,
To guide kaleidoscope perception
Back home to me.
Interdependence is difficult and soft,
ad infinitum.
The simple grave
of the rain.
The driving wind
makes tracks through parched prairie.
The leanest rabbit escapes the warren.
Teeth marks, bone, thin hair.
Beyond the metronomic society
nourishing sustenance.
This field is sacred and untouched
by the rushing realism of
corporeal men.
Through the bladed brown,
The cottontail prances,
grateful and alone.
Miniature Moon 