petunias
12/12/2006 10:00 a.m.

petunias

i will take the sea home
with me
wallpaper my walls
with its waters
there will be no difference
between my furniture
and the rocks
stones are impatient
lichen hovers
streetlights stain
a dozen or so flowers
await their turn
patient as a breath
in the black plastic container,
raking the dampened topsoil,
truant wrists prepare
the earth to run away
nubile parasols unwind
from the bone

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Suitable to our togetherness
12/09/2006 04:26 p.m.
Suitable to our togetherness

Give me a drag of life
I don't smoke enough
I don't get enough lime spritzer
in between my vast toes.

The almond tree and lemon tree kiss-mix.
Kismet.
Did they decide: “We'll evolve out of our clothes
into Eden's vapors.”?

Tendrils grow between the ladder
sewing rungs into the sea sand;
stung plums strew the ground
in schoolgirl French Knots.

Its a drowsy wet day, wet knickers
wet woolen socks, other voluptuous,
heavy washing drips over the bathtub.
It's a day for meat, potatoes, stew.
It's not a day for cuisine or the other
pretentious French words I like so much:
boudoir, crepuscular, evanescent.

Give me a puff of Gauloise strife
I don't fight enough
I don't put enough of my own
into the flow I just go

with it – you talk
like talk is cheap but talk is not cheap
or expensive, it has price
like everything else.

Around 1700 an “ornate headdress”
called a “commode” became very popular.

I fill the sea with trees – the forest
infinitesimal calculus of greens
permute the singers and biters
to give me a dangerously fragrant
fragrantly dangerous drag of LIFE -
the sea puts too much in
takes too much back
pouts too much

I take the sea for all its worth
in a game of poker,
I sit in a coven of rocks
hunched, deciding on the fate of crabs,
the rock pool is a roulette wheel,
my feet, the dice.

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left
12/07/2006 06:29 a.m.
what sylvan hand left this poem pinned to my blouse
or the rosy word leafed in that child's hair

the petunia has opened down, her parasol
reversing the frailty of her drawn eyes

who, in all their silk armor, left a plea on my lips, a petition
in my fist, a plantation of bees in my gut

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I wrote the earth before it fell
11/30/2006 08:54 a.m.

I wrote the earth before it fell The rock pool is bay leaf green fig split open in which a lavender fist is clenched crouched, sinister, tense; bent by a directionless wind i would never start something like this as the feather broke through her skin, uncomplaining, feverish, calm, the sea played lion with my sleepless limbs and lock-jaw, its gruff breath intending to distract me to its unopenable depths and jagged windows – come kill yourself in my maw. With the sea then i went, with the sea's intractable hand, and held on to missing walls of not listening to the inhuman sounds, as absent as myself, bent by a directionless wind, with the sea's hand cradling my hip, i went to the rock pool to soak my feet in its fig jam sweet cold relief. I was there, waiting by the breathing fence sun-breathing, converting, transforming, already gone, folded into the palm of a hundredth thousandth liminal flower not waiting for birth, but the bitterest taste of all – mountains to form inside my mouth letting down their silver river hair, to fall from the first molecular weight, the first jostling of hips, Adam and Eve had ever heard, arms twisted into principles, an ouroboros, oxidizing the all-encompassing vibrationless void into which, wildly, and with startling confidence, the bluest feather fell & together with a blood trickle from a flock of snaking peacocks magick in the sky! & the paling mountains fanned into circling peacock tails, skrying, i was there, waiting, changing, by the fence leaning, wheezing, cold feet overlapping, noticing the shallows where colors are events only visionaries can predict, such lost, miraculous hues.

Waif-high phlox, scarlet-lipped and other potted flowers encroach their disembodied happy steps, a hedgerow of tongues graze the sinus numbness until i know i shall not smell it when it comes to clamp my neck words betray the forest photosynthesizing i hook a struggling bee or moth that laid its fingers beneath our costumes like hidden leaves and hollow jackets from the limp water i have met each thousandth granule yet none has truly scored my hand, met my friends as they have not met me, i test shallows, but depths resist i fool myself into believing light exists outside the dark leaves of moist breath that is not me where you begin – and i beg in to see your lapping bourbon coves as eyes in which to sink my gaze piercing a turquoise hell i wrote the earth before it fell hemless, helmless, telescopic wrists untwist from hands washed by the rain & that was where i began, as the day was finishing, and the sky a bus shelter strewn with silver bottle-tops, forgave my faceless whispers into the mailbox's metal tube: “this is not my voice, i have moved from this address.” Senses confuse - i hear thick sea or flower scents climb towards my heart taste the train driver's gaze dragging past see down the street but do not see

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Trinity
11/24/2006 02:58 p.m.

Trinity a being parted from the river      another           then another only part of a bench      inhabited today; shoe-drying      don't breathe just in case      they whispered in turn the third smiled strummed my hair        there are only stars between us she said      they parted be coming one

Where sameness dips we are one love you say twisting off the beer top that moment you stop being my friend and i start to write call me unreliable i do not plan these flat excursions bring no supplies you say be unprepared easy enough i think the sun passes over the rain twists off the roof there is no difference there is no difference between the sun u the rain i private in tense comprehensive same at one twenty nine am or five twenty five i enjoy a cider stand on a spider leave my finger on your back drum or tap till one twenty nine am

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