(Untitled, unfinished #1)

To be clear about the sound. What it is
I am pushing. Was A. anything more

than a lithe construction, a handful
of materials I pushed around to fit

a larger space. (Be clear about the space.)
It was the woods. (It was the woods at night.)

Someone was panting. (My throat in fear.)
Tiny twig houses and granite thrones

and what did I do but make love
and kick them over and bury

the materials once exhausted.
It was a spoiled way to learn fear

in this dark hollow (at night the moon
reflecting off the lake like a hag, a bogey)

so I tried to share it with A. I need to be
clear about cutting out my tongue. Ask.

Puy de Dôme

A., rifts in the plaster cast
fatten all unruly: fulsome heat

spends the morning’s parchment
and yearns for a new palm

to ooze over. Lava, flowing pulse
of the underbelly, charcoals

skin, heart, skeleton, spark,
(sundries of the walking spirit)

to Hell’s hardened workplace.
If there’s another way to dust

the history of man, pass under
the molten morning smog

and give me heatless death—depart
from spinal vents bursting, corralled

sudor from the last living sculpture
puddling blood iron, ore. Such silent pain,

this division into orphan halves, cleaved
under the hot throat of day’s final edict.

Newsprint

A., look at the heights
of this goose flesh,
the clamorous feathers
flared broadly and froze
up as though by ice,
quills erect as scared
soldiers. Let me be your
peacock while the sun
still leeches in the glass.
Gun and fold these
interminable mounds.
Find I’ve not an egg
to boil (not a head
to mount on your wall),
just this slush, this mire,
these screams slumping
across a pale limp page.
Wince your dreaming day
through and molt the old
maxim to sleep on it. Sleep
on the lost plumage and eye
a future in leather and wool,
quivering, ready to pluck.

Trick (Not for Laura)

Massachusetts cut into tiny toothpicks, splinters
stacked to a pire and set to flames.
The taste of Massachusetts. Its toxins. Give me

the pricks of your driftwood. Burn me steady
until I slough. It is a leather skin. It is a parchment you
can char. I asked if this is what you Massachusetts

should be: the thing that blazes, smokes stars, wrestles
with the innocence of its sweat, the wetness
that burns me. What can I do friend. Can I drown

in you. Can I drown from away. Must the burn complete.
There was a sun I thought to shine under. Believe
I am the only one with words. Believe when light casts

off the mirror it is onto the face of Sarah and no one.
Yes this is a burn. Yes the daylight burns me.
Massachusetts my will is to burn us the sky.

King of Id

Massachusetts you can't pollinate in the mouth
like the other states. Roll out your clumsy tongue
and pave over your pocked roads. Let's not be dumb

about these highway holes. New York orphaned me
as the ward of the tower winds and it's a long fall
to the kin under its water. Everything I can't remember

is an ancient crime scene. And now Massachusetts
you want me to start a family. New York is aware
there is concrete below and wood above. New York says choose.

I'm sorry I sold my land in you Massachusetts.
But you're only a slow train ride, some cold water
a place to rest my head.

To The Men Who Would Murder

Always the plane crashing, the world
burned. Each day a fever
of the throat. What you have
done to my brain is jarred
it in morgue water. So I cannot help
you past the doubt of your waking,
say who was the monster
between the two grappling on screen.
There were these men who wished
for me to die and I agreed.

I pushed a fiery forehead on you and kept
silent about the plot. Perhaps now
was a murder. Perhaps you felt
fond when we woke. I heard
your murmur. You pawed the blood
in my chest. We crawled back
into the dream and the earth
coffined us. Say it was a comfort:
the man on a kill never came.

When The Octopus Has Had Enough (Lake Revisited in November)

Miracle of your monstrous appendage
suspends the wolfish streams. Many legs
kicking open the land’s dark rent, legs

blacking the water with soft clouds
of tender inscriptions, pulling me
into the bulk at the core of the heart.

No one emerges from the heft
of salt, the weighty cold water
you bed across the earth and all

its children. Fin until you burst,
oh legs, spit your expense
and deflate, dead. Withdraw. Come

back in the pendulant white stars
speckling the shade. The hunt’s relent
poisons me. I have married a soft skeleton

and he a good woman used up.
Eyes wed to the blue ring unbroken,
blazing, stiff. Still decays against the tide.

Journaling

There were mystery rifles in the glue

and glass bullets shot from the stitch. Ink ground

of bed stains, underwater gunk and grime,

words scrawled and spread like poison ivy rash.

Paper shuts up like a claw trap. Direct

hit of the line break. No smiles to sketch now.

No breaths at all in this book. Tore 'em out,

tiny strips culled from old days, reused, love

notes on the back of death notes. Littered,

the journal, surgeried for its organs

like one kidnapped and cut up, sent in bits

through the mail. The cadaver was scrapbooked.

The Secret (Lake Revisited in December)

That was a fake lake. The ice
a toxic gloss, phlegmy,
like what came out my mouth
from the hundred days' cough.

The reflection is not one.
The shapes differ, it's just paint--
paint below some more paint.
God wrings out snow

and it's lighter than mine.
Smells of apple mist,
vanilla. You can push
your nose right through it

unlike my white architecture
which passes for winter.
We can't break
through this. We can't drown

beneath it because we can't
get in. Can I handle the lack
of drowning. Can we sit by
the bank and watch

as the lake blankets itself.
The frozen falls shatter
over a girl too precious. Wait.
Don't touch. The white smears.

Bath Day (Lake Revisited in October)

About the tub: it was the clawfoot type,

white porcelain, slow fill, bronze griffin’s feet.

Under the woozy spell hot water cast

it was the petrified and sleeping gut

of a dead lion, set to come alive

while I bathed in its belly. Let’s say I grew

between the lip and rusted drain for waste.

Let’s say I played at surgery and cut

my birthmark from my chest in there, milked out

the brownish cancer, let it stain the soap

with muddy gore. Or maybe we’d have screwed

when it was empty, spines with fetal curves,

one of our heads hitting the faucet on

and on. I might have gripped the plastic toys

that populated childhood baths and cried

my underwater tears. But now it’s gone.

The tub was no inheritance. It sold

some years ago. Today just naked pipes

are left, sad viscera for hungry dust.

I’ve nowhere to bathe but the earth itself.

Masonic Pt. 1

Whether or not it was really a woman making that sound I never did find out. I wasn't sure I cared to from the start. It was just the slightest push of noise, no louder than a sloppy whistle, no higher in pitch than a child's singsong. For all I knew it could've been a goat with a wolf at its neck, gurgling a cry for its kids as air pushed up on its mortal wound and blood slipped out. Still, when he got sick of the bonfire and wanted to investigate, I took it as an excuse to follow him down through the fields, trampling the dry grass and cutting up my ankles along the way. The first opening in the woods' fortress stood before us like the gate to some grand, protected institution, left ajar just once due to negligence, chance. It seemed it was now or never, as if backing away at this moment would forever eliminate the option of entry. The moon shade hung heavy at the gap in the trees. I watched him go first, breaking branches and scuffing the earth with his foot to mark the way home. I followed his makeshift path with all the speed and enthusiasm I could gather, though it was dark as hell and I'd grown tired since backing away from the big fire we'd warmed ourselves in front of for the better part of the evening.

But I paced after him without complaint. He was dogged, the way he charted the trees, chasing after that persistent sound. He never said a word to me until we'd reached the mouth of the river and the small clearing that surrounded it. I could see him in this cool light better than I had before. His little nostrils were flaring in and out and the smallest bit of sweat had dried off the hair on his temples, leaving the skin beneath dewy, porous, something like a film star from before our parents' lifetimes. He was worked up, in a sense. The night sky glared off his large eyes as he told me we were standing in the spot where they found the arm.

Everyone had heard about that arm. A couple of boys from the public school had stumbled upon it when they snuck out in the middle of the night with a couple of beers. They must have dropped whatever they carried when they came upon it, so cleanly cut and laid out on the ground without any context, without any signs of the body it was severed from. This was months ago, and the detectives on the case still knew very little. A woman's arm, mid thirties, Asian--no more. I had no idea the crime scene was so close to his house. Instinctively I looked at his arms, attached, but dangling aloofly like storybook jungle vines. Dense with muscle for his thin frame, veins raised. Why did he tell me? Was he trying to scare me? To make me afraid so he could act heroic? Was this romance? For a moment I thought he might rape me, and I froze up in the dead night air. But he turned his head so slightly--the cry had grown louder--and walked out of the clearing into the dense mess of trees, purposeful as a hound.

I wasn't afraid of him anymore, but my head throbbed the way anyone's might when brought this close to death. Stalling, I watched the river froth for a minute. They had dragged the water, I was sure, in their quest to recover that armless body, but I couldn't stop picturing a corpse wrapped up in seaweed, moored to the bottom like the bust of a figurehead from a phantom ship sunk long ago. I checked the woods. He had disappeared, surely disinterested in waiting for a pioneer as clumsy and slow as myself. But the sound kept on, and I was sure he'd followed it, so I kept on after his trail markings, hoping I might catch him. This part of the forest was thicker, shadier. Thorned branches needled me every which way. Without him before me as an Indian leader, I took my time to push the stray tree bits aside, careful not to disturb his elaborate code that spelled my route home.

All at once I arrived at a break in the stream. A small cliff scraped the skyline just a jump beyond. There was nowhere else he could have gone. I started to scale it, cutting the bottom of my foot on the rock as my shoe slipped slightly off my heel. By the time I reached the top, I was panting. My mouth tasted of iron, like blood had floated into and up from my lungs into the space behind my tongue. It was a slow climb. I would've liked his help in pulling me to the top. I grasped out for him, and sensing he'd moved on ahead, bellied up onto the flat rock, pushing myself up the face of the rock with the rounds of my knees. With some effort I rolled onto it, then stood.

The top was no longer than five strides in any direction, and ended at the river. It was empty. He was gone. Saw nothing, heard nothing. Even the sound of the woman had faded out of earshot. How long ago had I heard it? I'd worked so hard to keep up with him I'd forgotten to listen. I started to mouth his name. At first quietly, then with power. There was nothing. The river and woods stretched around for miles, and there I sat on top of it all, overlord of my own unwanted kingdom.

It must have been a joke. He must have been kidding me. But we had barely spoken before tonight. To abandon me in the middle of the night so far from help would have been too cruel too soon. I edged myself toward the other side of the cliff overlooking the water. Had he fallen in? Or had someone gotten to him first?

Some measureless time passed. My eyes began to tear. I had to get home. I crawled slowly down the face of the rock as the growing daylight melted out over the woods like a curse. It meant the night had been real, and that it was coming to an end, and that he was still gone. Carefully, so precisely--I followed every broken twig, every raised mound of dirt--I found the clearing he'd pointed out earlier. My fantasy was that he'd be waiting there for me, arms dangling nonchalantly as if he'd done nothing to worry me. It was a dream, though. From there I found the way quite easily, last embers of the fire still burning, guiding me back to the house like a hag lantern.

Did I tell anyone what happened? I wish I could say I had, though they were all so disoriented I'm not sure it would have made a difference. It was weeks before the next arm was found, anyway.

True Porn

(1) Still black slick on the roadway

seeps into a grainy tv dream

and out the licked seal of the envelope.

(2) I should have been writing for your cum shot:

(3) a doe gunned in the head by a cop;

(4) lace washed out in sweat, stinking;

(5) old meat rotted on its stick;

(6) liquid from behind the bruise

slowing your heartbeat, a cold stillness

(7) like hush after feedback; worn ballet shoes;

(8) my breast to pillow your concussion.

I always needed a man.

Forget when I said I was

(9) jerking it by the hell gates. I need

(10) to ferry your boat, to swim through the flesh.

Lover’s Leap (Bear Hunting II)

The sun bruises what grows

too much. With an amputated

branch snatched from the roadside

in hand, become king of the dead

woods, piss on any old log, eat

whichever bush berry looks

most sinful. Become the bear

bounding uphill in secrecy

to peel away your prey’s skin

and feed on the guts. It’s fine

to pretend about scars. Cut

your hair, speak some very

new growl. I can trap you

as bear or man. I can tear

an abyss in your stomach

when on the twig strewn path

just before the summit

I whisper I have a gun.

Last Watch of Hero (Lake Revisited in April)

Paper boats floated out and capsized

from the waves your hands

sent, dissolving to pulp before draining

to seed the bottom. You trained them

for a ruction with your slack folding,

assembling the fleet as carelessly as you turn

a calendar page. The illusion is that

they collapsed their bodies

independently. This is how to lose

a friend, to let a thing so fragile

be born in the dry heat

then set it out in damp isolation

without an arm to force it. The boats

request steering. Alone, they sabotage

one another, kissing bow to bow

and drowning in the Hellespont.

I was misled. I supposed

each ketch would sail tomorrow

when the weather improved. You

laugh hungrily when I tell you this

and look away, setting loose another

lousy paper tiger onto the tireless

water. The surface grins as

its belly fills with the phantom shipyard

virgin hulls condemned to the cloudy

depth of lake weeds

never again to sail in the sun above.

Wintersound (Lake Revisited in February)

Pawing across the ice in self-sameness, two dogs licked the melting lake

on which they stood. Someone may have called from the shore. Someone

may have thrown dynamite. The trotting feet quickened to reach the other

end. Horses fell through and froze beneath last winter, gallop suspended in

a taxidermied rage. Perked ears of dogs, horses shy from the boom. Not one

flirts with trapping. The feet are mouthed clean to ward off frostbite. Glue

of the lake, let pass these animals and keep me foundered here, stuck swift

to your surface. Melt me past the bones of the drowned ones and decay

me until next snow, when I’ll gaze once more at the feet passing overhead.

Funny (Bear Hunting I)

On the honey slick grass

beside the road a garter

snake was tire flattened

and folded over itself

like a child’s trick maze

without start or end. Air

hanging with heat waste

I set out to hunt the bear,

a dim bulk of shadow put

out in daylight. She wants

her cubs to learn her heart

beat and tap it back with

claws in the soil as they

stretch out in the noon

breeze, drunk on the sweat

of the day. My only love is

skinning them and taking

their homes, staying too

long in their caves with

the aging meat. If I could

take this walk without

killing, I would hum

the purest country hymn

and rub my hands clean

with spit from my tongue.

But I’m gurgling blood.

I’ve made up my mind

about these bears. Pacing

well beyond the starving

insects, I push to whistle

no song you’ve heard

all to the rhythm of a

club swinging in hand.

Wet (Lake Revisited in July)

Washing away the salt

of an afternoon

he found me in the cellar

hugging wool to split

gravestone. I blinked

the dust out of sight

and sighed as thirty

years of soap caked

my hands. He wants

to know if I’ll wake up

without fingerprints

for the rest of the evening

or (wrench the dead

skin from my feet)

give my tender

soles to the wood

that carpets the path

back. Let me bite

on sandpaper instead

and grind these teeth

to pearl. My grandmother

sighed the same way

from the ice box

plating a breath of gas

as she swelled up

water in the brain.

I know he breathes

the death of the summer

and when the marble breaks

he can tumble with me

low into the lake at night

where we’ll rest at the bottom

gazing up at the soft ghastly moon.

Buddy (Lake Revisited in August)

The mews keep sulking overhead

as an imprint roars on water.

This is the caligo, young cloud

which rains attar onto chain link.

Follow under the bony bridge

and trail the firth, slim and beading,

a boildown of the lake in which

flowers for the first time grew tongues

and cutlips sprang up like arrows.

They thrust past the greening blooms, slick

with an algal coat. Go chin first

into the murky bed beneath

suspended leaves and rippled orbs.

Go catatonic in residue

milked from the stones that lay before

this false funeral. Children laughed

at the lip of the shore, digging

catacombs now sawn asunder

by foam’s gentle lappings. With mouth

open from beneath the press of air,

gaze into the still world above,

quiet as the surface swelling,

and swear away the nightlit earth.

Now wait for the lungs to desist.

Locksmith

What hell these legs maneuvered in fog

of muscle, stretched and snowy. Your friendless wing

made time for its own paralysis

and each pore surged lightning, the beating it earned.

The whines of so many spiderlings

nascent and drowsy in aureolin gauze

became the tide of this trick. Fondly

I devoured my mate in the nursery

drinking first from his terrified heart

until I’d sucked the rest, sparing just a shell

strung up, a bogeyman, a cuckold.

Did you come for the corpse or the golden strands?

Simply you flew from the underbrush,

arboreal beast who quit his home and song

to be bit. Your neck carved immobile

and I bit. The eyes bulged and the jaws split wide.

Where was the low rumble of toxins

filling tissue, stiffening like lock and key

rusted together? Not a whistle

from you, cadaver. Left now to wild molting

and dangling Christ-like. The widest chest

bit and stuffed silent with the brightest sawdust.

The moon’s white progeny opened up

in the dead fallow, hale and rapt in the gilt.

Trap (for Laura)

Now it’s time I erase the bed, what firmed on the trigger

on the spring splayed flat. Here my thumbnail nestled love-like

in low canyons of each vertebrae. It charted them miserly,

mimicking the claws of a beast claiming its food, until veins

inflamed. Suck out this poison hope. New York wanted me

aware of my hips, to cyst inside and convulse like rain

dropped on park aluminum, to cry through the cloth

of my panties, to know I cried. New York asked me

to stay in the flesh and with a stiff grip held my fingers

hard in the vague space of its concrete, still drying.

When I pulled back, my hands kept glued in the guts

of the sidewalk and severed from me as the city fell away.

Then wrists and limbs and the rest floated off to other haze.

From a height I saw the fingers carve initials in the street,

vacant glyphs for a body that hardly existed. I wondered

how next I’d feel your spine without further use of my hands.

Gloaming

Hello from concrete. The alliances,

the overlaps are always born. A wife runs

from clay, nowhere she runs, with bright neglect

unlike one that weakens from the fittings of drums.

She hides lone yeas and odd nays. Hides no

with yes, and in hiding no she hides hello.

She avoids the languidness of balance.

She sinks into deeper earth less calm

than good beasts floating to cosmos dimly.

Years lost she runs in noise and armament.

She doubts the small halts of earth that throb her

with bricks and breakers, breakers or blunt drear

out of soaks in drums and tongues, the shortest drum

and the slimmest tongue, the thin tongue that disdains.

By sunlight, truths numb speech as it fusses.

The carnal ending is someone’s,

in the lifetime when the bestial drum renounces

those makers departing, in solitude, without skin.

Dogged maid running by the womb

and still in clay and calmness and still

of calm the never-darkening death,

inane, and still the slave and still her name,

gaze from this vacant sewer. What solitude,

skinless, won’t censor it from the clothed slab?

Chupacabra

by a rock sailing backwards I spy you

drowning a little kid that loved once

to graze my barriers with rum fur

bleating in the midnight celestial

harmonies I called you curator

of my bounce still buxom anchoring

to a fog in june with permanence

the always sneaking-in-ness of the lake

is what filthed it when we went there you

married the interior sinking

of witches christened me with face dew

drying itself on a spit that slants

circularly I was able then

for the oops homicide of welcome

and acadian boats slow gunning

ferry wheels into the small foot which

asked you to cross and the falls broke time

to expose your velvet parts hoofing

at hey and the devils that drone why

melt the blonde winter you glittered down

before it consummates a sucking

of glass into something you regard

emptily before you sank you might

fill this molten bucking and christ me

as far north as you sleep the shadow

follows as much hair as you misplace

it is a rape of the coding come

in this cot that sails you lay me in

goat hay and shit I knife you howling

how taunt me with your breeding and bare

bottom feeder you’ve growled your hunger

and one summer I’d offer a vein

but I’m too dry now to be your drink

Jeune fille mangeant un oiseau (after René Magritte)

Because you were young and proper, you drew

birds from the tree with both hands. Your tender

fingers reached hard into their sternums, caught

with the silence of song. A placid face of love

for their little throat muscles like lute strings

sharp and snapping. You chomped until your lips

were seductress red, defying the space-time

of your androgyny. If the other chirps try

to peck out your teeth, or regard with hate

the flightless wings peeled away from trunk,

it’s no shift, your cheeks stay cadaverous,

interred in the heedless soil of your hair.

Tawny, you pray like Daphne your feet will root

low into this forest, your body curve and swell

to a burst of mossy emerald, quitting your browns.

Unknowing birds will fly to your arms and the men

entranced by your evergreen will circle in awe.

And when they all collect, you’ll open your mouth—

The Transformer Explodes

In a wood-burned night the sky flamed allover green,

blood blue and white. The trash-collecting thunder

dumped and his skin inked over, fleshy silkscreen

for the printing of radioactivity. Oh God in wonder

am I dedicated to your spilled paint can apocalypse,

the melting of his body and mine in the burnout furnace

of this sacred turnpike. Say your blow’s not innocuous,

the flash photo clouds no routine overcast turn. Face

should be slipping from skull. You keep bodies bound

to the still skeletons of night-driving until penny metal

does the dissolution. Stay you Lord with us deathbound.

The sooner we soup in the road’s shoulder the less hell

he’ll touch. Light, push fear from his breast and come

let it gel with mine. In a thickening pool, we’re home.

To My Nurse

That woman’s long foot I was setting on fire,

wrapped up in red damp drape to retard the glow

of her bunions like coal, the hardening corns,

wart pads with the fresh stink of Cuba unfurled.

When light goes out she leaves volcanic imprints

in heelprints of other eruptions. Lights up

and she wheelbarrows marketbound on both hands,

buying meat with her ankles. One stays home, burns

as a child. One kicks what has made the meat wrong.

One’s feet are lava that burn the woman’s feet.

Burn the feet and you burn the streets they walked on,

burn the boat they sailed on, the ocean it rode.

Burn all these and she never came with a name

I mispronounce, crying it with the wrong stress

when she brings no water to relieve the burn.

Burn the soles to burn the cry, then burn the loss.

Modern Guide for Cerebral Donation

Faith may be matter. Activity undermines a child’s body

found with a firearm and the reasonable cause to remember.

Gather a live group of wishes. Or endanger respect for the coffin,

as if all enactment of disease could somehow differ from dementia.

Spending seven days in impairment is reasonable when writing

on the bombing of brains, the holy crime that unfolded mortality.

Now death can exit the land. Emergency shall finally terminate law.

Pick a Weekend for Fall River

If it pleas, destroy the coin jar, scoop its marrow

and buy me a lickerish night on the crown floor

of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.

Find sludge in the ass clefts of settees,

tomato ore batter, cobwebbed and dry,

like pressed flowers to treat this gland inferno.

It’s clues now that usher the dawn of the dark.

Blood-slicked cardigans, keyholes to tundra,

all fall under winter’s first fingerprint dusting,

a white mausoleum that smothers fatty evidence.

A lack of telltale bones keeps me hidebound.

For the sake of our love I would like you to chop.