It was a family of traveling gypsy map-
makers, charting their way through the stars, staring
into the heavens to seek out the best path, stirring
and churning and secreting slightly
sticky secrets between the atlas-pages.

The news came over the phone and slow-
quickly everyone knew and the noose of knowing
tightened. Some wept questions. Others
wept without questions. The girl, the tightrope
girl drank the remembered
perforated heart-beaten silence
of the man’s hand seashelling to her ear.
The others sat consulting maps and the girl gathered
their muffled sounds and questions and silences and the secret
highways of her arteries and veins distilled the poison
into thread, tightrope-web that wrapped around and drew
her up and as the gypsy circus wagon fell away
into the downness and the down
of clouds brushed by her cheeks she froze
into the web’s equationed tangles.
They all think that it’s an act.
She can’t come down.

I remember a time when flame was alive, and
we couldn’t prove it otherwise.
We learn.
We learn that light is the inverse
of color alchemy; that cold is in absence, an
absence. We measure the cicadas’ song, extract
its why and how.

At eight I constructed mind-machines, defined
Willow to be a sort of tall grass where Heart
or Soul can migrate, driven mad with love. I, too, commuted.
Back when roses were red and still poetic, hearts
were drawn cleft. I didn’t know the esoteric symbol
was just the child of man’s conversion to human,
via the missionary position, history lesson #3.
Biology taught me to preserve accuracy
in the shape of a conglomeration of muscle
and fat. We dissected them, and they had holes.
Desire was an instinct, searching for a haven amidst the organs,
coursing in the blood under the guise of chocolate or pills.

Sometimes, I write down all my questions, ink
them off the page—they are too difficult, too answerable.
But I can leave one query without fearing a reply—
why don’t we ever find the bodies of dead
butterflies?

Tea was served with chocolates
that melted in the wrapper, half-bad
peaches; the fan was black, turned on low, rigid
cord trailing along floorboards then up
onto the table; such shapes recalled photographs
of you doing ballet, the fish-position straining of the back, toes
touching hair for moments of up-faced tension; in yoga
fish flipped to cat as you arched forward into yourself;
when we watched city-women walking puppies,
you often wondered if the cross
between the disciplines would yield a
defecating dog-stance, and we laughed at that.

At times of the year, ladybugs live only
in your apartment; you returned home that day, drawn
by tales of their appearing, unbidden, being pursued
and caught with careful finger-tips, deposited
on outside window-ledges and released; one
stayed and hid in corners of the ceiling,
came out that night once more, drawn
by the light of the halogen lamp. She circled
in the black disk-bowl, reverently flitting in
and out of shadow, after all the preparation landed
on the burning bulb; uplighted motes rose into whiteness.

Ponder the origin of dust; returning
to the scene on later days and years, observe
the permanence, the ring of yellow that was tea
on inner lips of china cups; remark
the peach-pit on a plate; notice the arcing
of the angle between chair-leg and floorboard; ponder
the dust; from where, these resting sparks?
Why don’t the ladybugs return here anymore?

Rain falls into puddles—
hyperactive piano-playing fingers, hectic trills—
the night is soaked gray silk, worn
thin round the lamppost and windows of rooms
with too many lights and too few people...

Candles and quilts would do justice to sleep
at a time like this, sleep
in two-story houses with attics
and gas-lamps in city streets, and the old men
who go around lighting them.

A century ago—two-three
generations, ten decades, a hundred
years, (millions of minutes?),
someone named Celia lived in the farmhouse
by the lake-shore, slimy with seagull droppings,
and on a rainy March night
she read Dickens with a candle
and wore a wool shawl.

There is something beautiful in grief,
in the curving arms of sadness drooping, draped
over sofa backs or sharpbent knees,
cradling a bird that has escaped,
flying, flowing, fluid, out of reach.
Grieving has a body of its own,
straight and long and languishing and limp,
flexible and gray and monotone
in its futile repetitious lines,
(slender branches, tapered, heavytipped),
face framed with long strands of light-brown hair,
wide-eyed, widow-peaked, innocent-lipped...

The magic ship can never be recovered.
The room is filled with blue tobacco-mist.
A mermaid stands before us, seaweed-covered
and green-eyed. She’s ashamed that she has missed

the point and never learned the art of smoking.
The burning cinders scald her parted lips.
She doesn’t notice that her dress is smoking,
that ashes fall from its green silken wisps.

The sea-farers found neither pipes nor pipe-stems:
the emerald depths hold on for all they’re worth.
It’s hard to get accustomed to the lights and
breathe the dry and bitter vapors of the earth.

Please, don’t torment yourself; you mustn’t cry,
You know, those tears—they cannot change a thing...
The dawn is coming. With it, by and by
Comes your reward for all this suffering.

Cast off the flaming covers, toss the bedding
Away, throw on a dress, walk out the door,
And follow any path… The heat is spreading;
Direction doesn’t matter anymore.

The sun has taken you as its possession
It holds you in its heat like in its hand.
The rays glint in your eyes, flash their obsession,
Cover your heart like an autumnal tan.

And when its beams converge within your body
And fill you with their majesty and bliss,
Be honest with yourself—has anybody
Ever embraced you with a passion matching this?

Go dive into the cold flow of the river
And if you can, begin to swim upstream
And feel the freedom you’ve awakened quiver
Inside you—you have roused a dormant dream.

Relaxed, so you can barely feel your troubles,
You can’t recall if—or if so, then where—
You’ve shared such kisses: lighter than these bubbles,
As gentle as the moisture-heavy air.
Now, once again, you’re beautiful and wanted,
Desirable. The water’s cool and thin
Fingers run down your spine. You will be haunted
By memories of their touch against your skin.

What of the air? He stays with you forever,
Solemn or periwinkle-blue by whim.
Even the gods envy your love—you two can never
Part—he breathes you, just as you breathe him.

Across the rooftops, rain will come to woo you,
The rhythm of his tears will never break.
The noblest of all those who dare pursue you,
He weeps for you all night, lying awake.

So now you see that nature has united
Forces that are in love. Call them your own,
Possess them… Though your love is unrequited,
You needn’t stay here, lonely and alone.

Please, don’t torment yourself; you mustn’t cry,
You know, those tears—they cannot change a thing...
The night is ending—with the brightening sky
Comes your reward for all this suffering.

Perhaps I want you
to think that maybe
I’m just a little
crazy, so you could worry
about my moods, and bring
me roses on dismal
Tuesday evenings, sing
me to sleep. In my dream
we would take the wrapped-up
bone-dry seashells and pebbles
from last summer’s salt-hazy beach,
and spread them out, sand-scattering,
on the living room rug. I’d bury
you alive in scraps
of grit-filled tissue-paper, empty and creased,
and we would get up, bits of
pearl-dust and starfish in our hair, to
go dance in the rain without galoshes.

I grew out of quagmire and quicksand,
of silence and rustling reeds,
breathed secret and quiet and careful,
for life was forbidden to me.

Though no one can see, I sink back into
my haven of mud, rain, and cold.
The short autumn minutes acknowledge me
and rustle their transient gold.

I’m glad of the insults you hurl at me,
the crumbs from you beings above
my station in this dream-reality,
you whom I all envy and love.

p.27
Heaven! I dream of heaven every night.
I know its eyes are more than sightless gashes,
despite this burned-out day, whose paper-white
is now a puff of smoke, a little heap of ashes.

p. 7
Out of the semi-darkened chamber
you slipped, wrapped in a summer shawl.
We didn’t bother anyone at all,
we didn’t wake the servants or the neighbors...

p. 6
The fool’s gold of the Christmas firs
burns brightly in the winter woods;
the horrid eyes of small toy wolves
shine from their fortresses of fur.

p. 17
I am as poor as Sister Nature,
as simple as the evening clouds.
My freedom’s of a ghostly nature,
recalls the midnight birds’ sharp sound.

I see the moon’s unbreathing crescent,
the blank sky’s canvas bathed in rain.
I will accept you, emptiness,
I will take in your odd, dull pain.

June is the season of derelict roses
climbing the fence and drooping
over the wall of the football field, draping
around a garbage bag.
It is the time of a dead fly, in brittle rigor mortis
in the corner of the fifth floor landing.
               At dusk, late,
streetlights glint in your bottomless pupils,
and open windows exude the smell of running water
and sheer curtains fluttering in the breeze.
Evening falls into the net of old women’s gossip by the gate,
and children’s shouts and whistles.

Walk me home to a June night ten years ago,
past closing stores and open doors and babies
with chocolate and strawberry ice cream down white cotton tee-shirt fronts.
We will trample the grass, pick the petunias,
and stay out late playing music, be
those people I can still remember hearing through the summer nights.

Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow
and chill.
Crosses of yellow light
burn through the white of the curtain,
throbbing with echoes of cricketsong
and homely silence.
        The wind
sweeps through the cold-stiffened fingers of leaves—
trees sullenly twiddle their thumbs,
gloomily stare at the nothing around them, for nothing exists
but this blurry-edged corner of earth in my eyes and my mind.
My mind’s eye:
a tangle of thread, soft and blue,
that expands to a sphere
hung with fireflies and stars that are
motionless, trapped in the netting...

Summer night,
unreal even as I felt his lips on my own—
no, I knew they were there,
but had lost the sensation—I only remember his hands,
warm hands, whispering words, empty promises, made to be broken...
Fingers touching my hair and
caressing my shoulder.
        The air
warning me, piercing me with
a needle of ice in the moment we stopped

to listen
to the night...

It’s been a while since I’ve untied this bow,
And looked into the notebook of my soul
And read the words, bitter and lonely, let them roll
Over me, take me back to long ago,

Old wishes, dreams, old plans and thoughts and fears.
The tide of swirling language rises high
To sink me, drown me, roars that I deserve to die,
That I have finished my allotted space of years.

The seaweed wraps its fingers round my wrists,
Decaying tentacles of green and black and brown
So strong, so unrelenting as they drag me down,
And haggard mermaids shake their slimy fists.

The crabs will scuttle, fish will nibble, and
The salt will eat away at cloth and skin,
And of an evening, when the light grows thin,
You’ll find the skeleton upon the sand.

You won’t know that the storm had been my fault,
Or that it had begun with my old book,
Won’t understand that I had dared to look
Back, like Lot’s wife, and also turned to salt.

Two people met, an autumn evening in a park; It was twilight,
and perhaps there was a river and a railing
by which to watch the sunset, and a city that the sun set
behind. The words they said were slow, and beautiful,
and easily forgotten, and a breeze diluted their goodbyes,
because they would meet again.

He came to her door, or to her window, bringing chrysanthemums
that were white, and she put them in a blue vase of blue
water. They went walking, and he found her a dandelion, and she blew
away the white nothingness. Those first few weeks
they were flower-drunk, leaf-struck, and spent the days outside
whenever they could.

They came to know each other,
know each other well, finishing sentences and constructing
the curve of the other’s neck, the course of the other’s thought.
He knew her dreams, she knew his past,
and this did not hinder their passion, which was quieter
now, but more constant, more even,
even.

Certain small details were forgotten or mislaid.
He did not notice, one dying gilt-edged afternoon,
the little bruise in the hollow of her shoulder, and she
ignored his fraying cuffs, his lengthening hair.
The oversight was noted, but they decided
that this was the comfortable stage, when
memory meant nothing, applied to small things.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Perhaps he will not love her any more, and she will learn,
grow wispy, thin like the shadows before the streetlights
go on. There will be little crows’-feet wrinkles
in the corners of her eyes, which might still be smiling, belatedly,
lost.

Perhaps they will grow old and ridiculous together,
and he will wear a visor and long woolen underwear,
and she will have a big straw hat
and worn-down hands with many rings,
and one day, someone will see them sharing a peeled tangerine
in a subway-car.

It was a summer of forest fires,
hungry red blazed licking across the x by y inch
TV screen. The swings were red, too,
red-painted wood blocks and metal bars of the playground.
Morning, early (at nine or ten) would fill
with liquid air the dim-lit hall of the apartment.
Morning hung over the bath-water in the blue-green tub,
almost as thick. Towels soaked it in.
It rang with ice-cream truck music, passing
on to sticky afternoon, sun and cracker crumbs,
illegal barbecues on burnt-out grass. Evening,
a girl in cutoffs and a red halter top sat on a swing,
waiting. The children left, and she still sat,
reached for the harvest moon
to slip into that little pocket on her hip
that was never meant to be filled.
It showed over the top, like a golden
silver dollar. The oaks beyond the lattice fence grew
taller, and trees that had no name because she didn’t know them
spread their branches over her head.
She sprouted glasses and her legs
and hair grew longer, and in the misty-
breathing hours before dawn she rose
and left, stepping slow and quiet.
The swing still swayed—it could be caught
by careful eyes—but no one watched.

walks by, humming
the song of the pretty girls (we
are the narrow people, slide us
into slots like quarters, tie
the bows around our wrists);

slowly wanders down crack-paved
streets, at dusk and on hazy Monday
mornings, stroking the bristly bushes in passing;

sits weary-shouldered and limp
in subway cars clattering down el tracks, looks
through windows of adjacent tenement into long rooms, tunneling
(briefly bright) to mirrors on the back wall, flashing
ghosts of her hollow face;

lies on the grass, deflowering a clover
or a dandelion, tenderly, crooning
to the snagging weed-strands (there is still time
to learn the names of all the flowers, know
the smell of lavender and the song
of a thrush, there is still time,
the clocks are wrong, and life is slow);

on her back in the grass in the sun, so still
that sparrows wander into the forest of her hair
as into piles of autumn leaves; she feels their little feet,
her eyelids flutter (once) and close again; she does not get up.

What would you, parents, do if I stopped
washing my hair and ate cold chicken
wings with my fingers at sunrise? As the pile
of bones grows, I might even learn to fly,
to the stars and back in a single night, proving
that they are only lonely little light bulbs,
lightning bugs built by nature, nurtured
somewhere in a sticky navy-dark
cocoon. What would you say if I insisted that the moon
was high-strung and sugar-high? I could sit
by my window at night, stalling slumber,
and regard the sky. You would sprawl together on the bed
and argue over my freedom of expression, and listen
as I rub against the walls on my way to the kitchen
for the carnivorous pre-dawn indulgence.