Refuse/d words built into infinite forms of bodies. This collection is unedited; done in one sitting; sometimes daily, frequently infrequent.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Folding a heavy blanket before the rain starts.


Real life is the most important
The default.
All other expression is a shadow,
A reminder
Of the god in our belly.

Own


I keep
The music box.
Old fireplace tinders.
And matchbooks.
A bedspread,
Three pictures
And the leather couches.
I keep
The gate
The trees
And the still pool.
The cave attic
And old clothes.
I keep
Language
To sto moram.
That which I need to.
I keep
Like cannery
The embellished
Edges of memory.  

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Responsibility triptych (topic chosen by my sister, to amend three days of missing posts)



I.
Two cups of sugar
Exactly three teaspoons of oil
Orange peel thinly sliced
Recipes skipped are plagued
With limpid failure.
Sticks of butter
Sweet pickles sorted out
Responsibility
Which plate needs to be filled
With pastry, protection.

II.
Train track switcher
Timed and perfect
With gloved hands built
Spreading tar and busting nails
Supple strong, and used.
These are the imagined hands
Of an imagined man.

III.
My to-do list is not epic:
It involves calling the plumber,
Emailing the insurance man,
And taking the dog for a pee before work.
A domestic paper trail is dull.
However, Ed the Plumber
Recently had a baby, a girl.
And he remarked on how my mother
Got a bang for her buck when she bought our
Dishwasher before I was born.  His
Bag of tools is old, a chrome flashlight
Resting precariously on top. His brother
Came over and helped me move a dresser
Up three flights of stairs when I was alone
In the house and everything was dusty and
Hopeless and my hair was covered in plaster. 
One night my stepmother and I had to bail out the kitchen
When a pipe burst -we ran those bowl fulls
Out the back the door like a fire line and it was the first time I really laughed
With her.  Ed looks at the crusty tiles in the third floor bathroom, a swell like
pregnancy, a balloon of tap water tapped from the street or wherever tap
Water comes from    a pump? Some sort of pump underneath the sidewalk like a mechanical heart beating? Each sewer like a tunnel a whole cityscape contained, ticking. And ticking. 

Saturday, September 25, 2010

(untitled)

I still dream
About laying in a camac
Floating, with nothing,
Not even an oar
No current
With fish sliding beneath.
The sun on my stomach
the sky sharp
And swimming distance
From the dry bareness of
The island.



Friday, September 24, 2010

Sometimes Mother



My mother is five years gone and
Sometimes I still want to say her name
In the stairwell
Where it bounces around
Waiting to receive an answer.
I think my body is becoming more like hers
And I move her way sometimes
And sometimes I stumble
Over English words
Even though I speak English.
I’d like to sit with her quietly
Again on the couch with her sewing box
Stuffed and waiting.
Women are oceans
And mothers make harbors of us.
Sometimes I am full of frightful weather
Ballads are written about my unpredictability
But I draw out ships to me just the same
And wreck them easy
With the sweetness and mystery
Of storytelling.
My fingers touch so many shores
Sea creatures with spotted faces grow
Twisting silently inside me.
I wonder if there is a crescent of land
That will still contain me,
An arm wrapped around
The very center of my body.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

The habit fantastic



Habit. Forms with nations,
a set of customs-
where the spoons go, 
the forks in paths are predictable
when all people previous
have organized their principles. 

Fantastic. Feats happen
in misshapen days,
on wide, forgotten roads
and within criminal minds.
Lean towards the crimson rhythm
of twilight,
take singular and lunar sips
of liquid 
lines of sun.

You are the real-
printed in indelible newsprint.