The Intellectual Poets
 
The intellectual poets dissect the world and offer up
carefully ordered images arranged in the tasteful etiquette
of the elite and I fret and wonder why I cannot do that thing they
do so well.  We are all full of shit and wonder that we walk
upright and have the time to fondle ourselves and our dreams.
The full weight of our humanity presses down and enfolds
us in ourselves.  If I back far enough away and look closely
it is always the same thing staring back at me.  The arm of the moon
reaches toward the earth, the sun untucks her skirts and showers
her light on the world.  Somewhere a small girl hangs her head over
a pool of water and reflects everything that is happening, everywhere,
and the intellectual poets paste up their Polaroid's and paint reality
with bigger words than I will ever understand, allude to things I will
never care to know.


Sleek and White

Sleek and white in your mouth,
effervescent in your lungs.
An elegant extension of your arm.
Eternity burning between your fingers.

I am that sexy thing
you do with your hands,
steady at starboard,
affirming your visible breath.
In the soft night, a puff of you
lingers and mingles
with your comrades.
My disciples, all.

It was never my intention to harm you.

I am the purest pleasure
corrupted by greed.
Obsession expressed
in a chain of beautiful gestures
and flicks of the wrist.
Art succumbing to starvation.

I would take you back
to the beginning, if I could.
Restore you to joy.
Your bright, sparkling breath
released in a long, contented sigh.
Your perfect fulfillment
curling into the air.


After We Donate Her Body to Science

Her body pinned to the laboratory table,
she watches them come in,
white-suited, angel-masked soldiers snapping
their powdery fingers into place, walking toward her.

Her breasts thrown back over her shoulders,
a knife separating her into long stripes,
its hands larger than the surgical lights
on the ceiling. She waits for the sky to open,
the mushroom glittering spreading its billion
points of light onto her skin,
the slow dissolve of her arms,
her legs lifting in wisps and puffs.

The earth opens its arms and swallows
all her breathing. Her brain is large
and larger still, a vacuum wanting air.
Into vials and tubes she goes jellied and slimed,
secure under glass except for
her eyes bobbing a petri lake, watching
the sawed-off hands clutching the sheet.

She comes back to us in paper--
a stamped coffin waiting in the mailbox.
We weigh her ashes.
One spoonful’s missing.


Aggregate Graves

A young girl knows she is young and meant to live
                    -Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World   

When Octavia read the poem to us
her tears opened me like a zipper
the river of her eyes
washed to the courtyard
the ice and snow
naked bodies blue like fish
the air covered with screaming.

I don't want to remember.

Skeet-shooting babies
cold vivisection.
Aryan arms washed in sentient suds
light soft-filtered through Kosher skin
bone ash pushing up Vergissmeinnicht.
Bodies laid out in rows
aggregate graves on black and white film.

I don't want to know.

The ovens, the gas.
Doctors opening the knees of women
doctors breaking the bones of children.
The bones. This is what we look like
underneath, without the striped costumes.

This is the eye that opens and never closes
the line of jaw that presses inward and never
stops. The flesh of that bone entering my
arms and begging to be touched
demanding that I fold around it and weep.


Pillar of Air
 
God got so heavy he
dropped out of my pocket.
God swelled so large he
burst in my mouth.
 
If he hadn't been so big,
I could have hidden him under my eyelids.
If he hadn't eaten so much,
I could have kept him under my tongue.
 
God was a thorn sticking in my ear.
God was a dipper gathering all the rain.
God was a puppy with sharp milk teeth.
 
It was an impossible situation.
 
Here's the sound of God dropping to the city floor.
Here's the sound of God crying for water.
Here's the sound of God's sandals tied together.
Here's the sound of God's echo in the temple.
 
I do not look back.