Poemunity — your poem community

Stop belonging to me so much, face-head. Leave me to my child and my flowers. I can’t run with you hanging on to me like that. It’s like having ten dogs on a single lead and no talent for creatures. No hands, no trees. Not my dogs, nobody’s. Don’t you have a place to go, face-head? Deep into the brick basement of another life? To kill some time, I mean. That furnace light could take a shine to you. There are always places, none of them mine. And always time—rainbow sugar show of jimmies falling from ice cream’s sky— but that stuff’s extra, it’s never in supply. “Never,” however, acres of it. Violet beans and sarcasm. Too many flavors of it. All those prodigal particles, flimsily whimsical miracles, an embarrassment of glitches. The chorus just more us. But nowhere bare and slippery have I got a prayer. If I had two hands to rub together I wouldn’t waste the air.

For Michael Coyle and Donna Frieze 1 You said anyone could walk in with a pack of explosives as we passed through the crowds of tourists and school kids — under the glass-grid ceiling lit with sun. I was saying:She’s our earth, our body, our sex, as we drifted down the halls of statues and colonnades and hunks of facades of Greek temples until we found room 22, “The Hellenistic World,” where a bronze face in a glass box on the wall stared back at us. Head from a bronze cult statue of Anahita, a local goddess in the guise of Aphrodite (

Sing slowly, then fast. Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, And eyes and ears and mouth and nose, Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.

We shouldn’t raise mixed babies in the South, Kay says as I drive up the crest of another hill on our way into Kentucky. The South, where humidity leaves a sweat mustache, where a truck with a Confederate flag painted on the back windshield skitters in front of us. In its bed, avoiding our eyes, a boy with blond hair split down the middle like a Bible left open to the Book of Psalms. His shirtless, sun-licked skin drapes, a thin coat for his bones, his clavicles sharp. I want to know who’s driving this raggedy truck. I want the boy to look at us. I want to spray paint a black fist over that flag. I want the truck to find its way into the ravine. I want to— Stepping on the gas, I pass the truck, Kay and I turn our heads. The boy smiles and waves. The man driving doesn’t turn his head, keeps his eyes on the road. Kay turns red as she draws her fingers into fists. I stare at the whites of her eyes.

As one may be relieved by the myriad marigold faces held aloft beside the freeway — their articulation — and, too, by the rush of notes following their own likenesses in these headlong phrases Relieved of what? Relieved of what?

I encountered a scaffold outside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir, Russia. At first I didn’t notice her slumped against the side of the church — she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un- assuming. Her safety mesh was torn in places and sun-bleached all over and threatened to dislodge due to a forceful wind that was typical of the season. She was shaking. She was fundamentally insecure. She told me that good foundations are essential and that the men who had put her together hadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities. Now, each day, someone came by called her “unsafe” and also “a liability” then left, failing to initiate the dismantling process that yes would have been painful and slow, but kinder. International visitors to the church blamed her for the mess of tools and rags on the grounds and for the fact that they could no longer see the church’s celebrated mural depicting Saint Artemy of Verkola unusually pious highly venerated child saint killed by lightning. His dead body radiated light never showed signs of decay and was in fact said to have effected multiple miracles of healing. I said comforting things to the scaffold but she only seemed to lean more heavily against the side of the church. We are rarely independent structures she said before she dropped a bolt pin which released a long section of tube which released another bolt pin which released several wooden boards that scraped another tube and made an unbearable sound.

for The People The people don't mention it much. It goes without saying, it stays without saying— that concentration camp on their reservation. And they avoid that massive site as they avoid contamination— that massive void punctuated by crusted nails, punctured pipes, crumbled failings of foundations . . . What else is there to say? This was a lush land once, graced by a gifted people gifted with the wisdom of rivers, seasons, irrigation. The waters went flowing through a network of canals in the delicate workings of balances and health . . . What else is there to say? Then came the nation. Then came the death. Then came the desert. Then came the camp. But the desert is not deserted. It goes without saying, it stays without saying— wind, spirits, tumbleweeds, pain.

If you undo your do you would be strange. Hair has been on my mind. I used to lean in the doorway and watch my stony woman wind the copper through the black, and play with my understanding, show me she cóuld take a cup of river water, and watch it shimmy, watch it change, turn around and become ash bone. Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me to a day so thin its breastbone shows, so paid out it shakes me free of its blue dust. I will arrange that river water, bottom juice. I conjure my head in the stream and ride with the silk feel of it as my woman bathes me, and shaves away the scorn, sponges the grit of solitude from my skin, laves the salt water of self-esteem over my feathering body. How like joy to come upon me in remembering a head of hair and the way water would caress it, and stress beauty in the flair and cut of the only witness to my dance under sorrow's tree. This swift darkness is spring's first hour. I carried my life, like a stone, in a ragged pocket, but I had a true weaving song, a sly way with rhythm, a healing tone.

I’m four at the hospital I was born in. From behind the nurse’s white gown and mask: I want you to count backward from ten for me now out loud. * My stepmother with a stack of my father’s papers. What do I do with it, Jimmie? * It was a beautiful suit of clothes, very expensive. I saw it hanging from the mirror on the far side of his car. He was so pleased when he found my note on the windshield. He took the suit upstairs and came back down to let me see it on him. * When they want rain, they put their mouths to the water and blow. They take some in their hands and as they throw it upward cry Look here! Do like this! * A note to her television set was left by a woman who then took her own life. * We were replaced on the line by the Unimates. They’re good at the work. They’re never late. The one problem with them is that they don’t buy cars. * It defies me. I put it right here where I always do, and it’s not there. I loathe a beastly key. * If you work hard to keep a secret, you’re resentful when it’s not found out. * Through our closed eyelids as the bomb exploded, we could see every bone in our hands. * It has a Slavic name he couldn’t pronounce. I said It’s flanged and chrome, with seven spiders on each side. That’s it, he said. Where can he but it, he needs it today. I told him I don’t know, but I’ve got one in my garage. * She can’t leave you alone. Sits you down, feeds you what you don’t need to eat. It’s no use telling Bertie Mae no. And of course we wouldn’t take nothing for her. * I’ve killed other people. You’ll find that this will go better if you and I don’t talk. * Foreplay starts at breakfast. * On the answering machine: If you could call me tonight no matter how late, it would be a good idea.

Back when it took all day to come up from the curving broad ponds on the plains where the green-winged jaçanas ran on the lily pads easing past tracks at the mouths of gorges crossing villages silted in hollows in the foothills each with its lime-washed church by the baked square of red earth and its talkers eating fruit under trees turning a corner and catching sight at last of inky forests far above steep as faces with the clouds stroking them and the glimmering airy valleys opening out of them waterfalls still roared from the folds of the mountain white and thundering and spray drifted around us swirling into the broad leaves and the waiting boughs once I took a tin cup and climbed the sluiced rocks and mossy branches beside one of the high falls looking up step by step into the green sky from which rain was falling when I looked back from a ledge there were only dripping leaves below me and flowers beside me the hissing cataract plunged into the trees holding on I moved closer left foot on a rock in the water right foot on a rock in deeper water at the edge of the fall then from under the weight of my right foot came a voice like a small bell singing over and over one clear treble syllable I could feel it move I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin everywhere in my ears in my hair I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand holding the cup as long as I stood there it went on without changing when I moved the cup still it went on when I filled the cup in the falling column still it went on when I drank it rang in my eyes through the thunder curtain when I filled the cup again when I raised my foot still it went on and all the way down from wet rock to wet rock green branch to green branch it came with me until I stood looking up and we drank the light water and when we went on we could still hear the sound as far as the next turn on the way over