For gods’ sake, let Penelope rest.
Come here, just sit beside me on the ground
still packed and hard from winter.
Let’s talk about the acid boiling in our gut
when we catch a lie. Let’s remember
the wet crunch of cockroach beneath a sandal
on a night so hot we could feel the sweat trickling
down the backs of our legs. Let’s talk about love
and arrogance, let’s talk about stink,
let’s taste the mouthful of bus exhaust
that makes us crave the city where we used to live
so many years ago, and haven’t thought of since. 

And if you start to float away
into the cupped dome of the heavens
where nymphs gambol and gods hand down judgments,
I will have to pin you down, grind your face into the soil
still packed and hard from winter, press my knee
into the wingspan of your back, show you that the blood
dripping from your nose isn’t pomegranate red
and doesn’t recall the sunset glow of Erytheia
but that it smells of railroad tracks and sweat
and turns the ground black and sticky as tar.

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Jimmy’s at the blackboard shifting
his weight and fingering the crumpled paper
stuffed in his pocket that reads

with up so floating many bells down.
He’s thinking about the buzz he’ll get
when he reads it, nothing hard, just enough

to get him through the day. The girl in the back
is already gone, mumbling I saw the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness and too baked

to hide the paraphernalia on her desk,
the scraps of worn paper, the old book whose pages
she rolls and unrolls between her fingers,

watching the words curl. In the streets a homeless man
begs for change but the pot-smoking professionals
pass him by and the corporate cokeheads too,

thinking, I know what he’ll spend it on anyway,
and who can blame them? They’ve all seen him buying verse
on the corner, they’ve heard him ranting

April is the cruelest month. Besides, there’s always someone
who takes more than he can handle, who thinks he’s got
many and many a year ago

in a kingdom by the sea until the words start crashing
against his eyes and rocketing through his skull
and all he can hear is this mysterious

gravelly voice whispering I celebrate myself, and sing myself
and the world explodes in wheeling colors which rain down
around him and rupture into light. He starts running

into the streets where all the cars are shrieking around him
until they race him to the hospital where his girlfriend
runs up sobbing something about hope

is the thing with feathers and he starts begging for more,
his whole body in spasms, and he’s shouting baby,
you gotta help me! And before they drag her away

she stands there soaked in sweat and tears screaming
THE APPARITION OF THESE FACES IN THE CROWD!
and oh

the sound just rushes through him, coursing through his veins
until he shudders, gape-mouthed,
and lies still.

(back to top)

He hacked through like the rest of them.
It was a lie, those brambles parted by God.
By the time he reached her he was sweaty
and thorn-scratched but she was too tired
to press her mouth shut once more and
feign sleep. It was all a lie—even the curse
had never existed, only a soft blessing
laying her down in the spinning room
filled with wool. She’d closed her eyes,
willed the court around her into a place
so like sleep that every ten years
the well bucket came up or the logs
burned down and no one ever noticed.
Those quiet years went on turning
beneath her pressed eyes—
until he burst through, dragging her back,
and suddenly there were ball gowns
and chickens and the stench of hay,
and everything bitter, bright, and hard.

(back to top)

Like the faintest smell of rot
before fruit turns, the feeling she had
that she would not keep living—
not the gory dreams of car wrecks
or leukemia, and not suicide,
though she felt a certain affinity
for those who sank into rivers
because they did not belong to life.
Just an absolute sense of ending,
no she to imagine one day washing dishes
in front of a window buzzing with flies,
no Sundays, no vegetable garden,
no drive to work, no she to live
the ordinary waking in the same
pale sun. No sharp fluttering self left
to feel it. So sure was she
that at a certain age the universe
would pull her from the sky, that when
she was first sixteen, then thirty-two,
then forty-five, she felt oddly
betrayed—how strange, to discover
her life had been there waiting,
green and small.

(back to top)

I don’t put in a garden.
I leave the yard packed and littered.
I buy only the lightest furniture,
what’s easy to sell or leave roadside.
I park the car nose-out.
But things start growing
anyway, against my bidding.
All over the yard and neighborhood.
And the Doug-firs stretch out and
the cherry blossoms drop their little petals
on the car’s hood. And in the garden
I didn’t grow the roots tunnel deep,
the plants keep rising up and up.

(back to top)

As if you will stumble
like a toddler. Like an old man
blindly. As if the ground will catch
your little trip, your tumble, your droll
mistake—as if I, as if I will be there
mouth wide laughing, clasping
your hand, bracing the whole
slight weight of my body,
heaving you back up.

(back to top)

I don’t look back.
I know you’re there.

In case you are the sort of man
who looks for ponytails I reach up
and pull mine free so you will see
I am not the sort of woman
who will let her hair become a rope
that trusses her.

And in case you are the sort of man
who counts on shock—a high yelp,
a suggestive O of surprise—I pull my hands
from my pockets, square my hips,
make a pillar of my torso so you will see
you won’t surprise me.

But mostly I am ready, I am waiting
for your hand to reach out and
bridge the space between our bodies,
I am daring you to graze my skin
for just one fraction of a second
so we will see if I

am the sort of woman
who is more flint than flesh,
if I will be my own protective rage,
if there is a cold fuse coiled
in a snake up my spine—
so we will see if you

are the sort of man
who will ignite me.

(back to top)