toadlily press

When I came to your body I spoke it, a language.
You were my tongue. When I came

to your body I knew it as not
even body you were field, you were grasses

rolling themselves into distance. I knew you:
lake, prairie, moon a blank eye

overhead, sky overhead holding
its nosegay of stars. Or I

was not I, but a small sheep
in the wide field, trotting dumb

and glad towards the gleam
in your hand, happy to let you

lead me: your silver grin,
the hook sharpened.

1.
Looking for a post-structural feminist
Pop Rocker with traces of Woolf & Marjorie
Morningstar. Me? I’m just a has-been kind of guy
drunk on the good old B’s (Burroughs, Beckett, Bukowski)
and an occasional C (Celine) with a Tinkers to Evers to
Chance love of background music (Mahler to Mozart
to The Grateful Dead) A hopeless romantic
y’know Ich Liebe this Ich Liebe that

Call me.

2.
Have you ever made love to a homeless person?
You do not have to blow me with your
kindnesses. No name no lineage. I offer you
my copy of Basho & a six-pack of OutKast.
Hobbies: looking through windows without rooms,
listening to the ticking ticking ticking,
leaning into time . . .

You’ve got my number.

3.
When I love I sleep poorly so, criminal,
do not infect me, astound me, bruise me.
(the longing for the dance stirs in the buried
life) I am gentle as death, I cudgel
dead lovers to my breasts. Of course
I could kill you with my tiny knives
that glow like fireflies but there are so many
other ways to say I love you.

Try e-mail.

There are the doors
in and out of the world:
the white bed,
the prison gate,
the still pool, deeper than it looks,
the heart valve open or shut,
the mineshaft,
the stone rolled from the tomb.

There are the doors
of the body:
the mouth that accepts
the drink at last,
the womb that lets in
and lets out,
the eyelid that lifts
in recognition.

There are the doors
you see with an inner eye:
the moment you pull up
a flower and fear
the ground has opened for you;
the wind that enters your room
and asks you
to leave the life you know.

Find what way, you sing,
we each are made to catch and release

(like your tight cup of petals)
more, oh more, long-needed light

after all the torn, wounded
centuries under all those darkly wed

to themselves, to Self only, while we waited
while we wept and sang, dear tulip, we who

once lived lost in your beauty: we
are no longer so tender or weak

we hear and feel now the desperate red
whip of the ache of this time:

and together, just now possible:
together what we gather syllable

brush stroke, bold note swelling
and sailing over and through

what we make and gather enough
at last, an ocean against all rivers

dark and void, this ocean greater
gracing hands that open and release

image after image over the mass
graves and palaces of history and out onto

a dazzling plain (far, near) where finally
we walk, weaponless and unafraid.