38 Baby poems

1 FAT is the soul of this flesh. Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand breasts, why everyone adores them—Rubens’ great custard nudes—why we can’t help sleeping with pillows. The old woman in the park pointed, Is it yours? Her gold eye-teeth gleamed. I bend down, taste the fluted nipples, the elbows, the pads of the feet. Nibble earlobes, dip my tongue in the salt fold of shoulder and throat. Even now he is changing, as if I were licking him thin. 2 HE SQUEEZES his eyes tight to hide and blink! he’s still here. It’s always a surprise. Safety-fat, angel-fat, steal it in mouthfuls, store it away where you save the face that you touched for the last time over and over, your eyes closed so it wouldn’t go away. 3 WATCH HIM sleeping. Touch the pulse where the bones haven’t locked in his damp hair: the navel of dreams. His eyes open for a moment, underwater. His arms drift in the dark as your breath washes over him. Bite one cheek. Again. It’s your own life you lean over, greedy, going back for more.

1 fat is the soul of this flesh. Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand breasts, why everyone adores them—Rubens' great custard nudes—why we can't help sleeping with pillows. The old woman in the park pointed, Is it yours? Her gold eye-teeth gleamed. I bend down, taste the fluted nipples, the elbows, the pads of the feet. Nibble earlobes, dip my tongue in the salt fold of shoulder and throat. Even now he is changing, as if I were licking him thin. 2 he squeezes his eyes tight to hide and blink! he's still here. It's always a surprise. Safety-fat, angel-fat, steal it in mouthfuls, store it away where you save the face that you touched for the last time over and over, your eyes closed so it wouldn't go away. 3 watch him sleeping. Touch the pulse where the bones haven't locked in his damp hair: the navel of dreams. His eyes open for a moment, underwater. His arms drift in the dark as your breath washes over him. Bite one cheek. Again. It's your own life you lean over, greedy, going back for more.

I place a black cloth the size of a dot over his head. Wrap his entire miniscule body with a thread of my black hair. He lies there on a white sheet of paper and squirms like a dark cocoon, thinks he is going to transform. The letter, when it begins to lose color in a book never opened, becomes a macula in thought. And when read through the lens of a decimal point: see its dark fleck of a cranium, see expendable language—grab the letter j next to him, hold it like a tiny black scythe, behead the i and watch its dot head roll to the back of a sentence.

What stays in Doesn’t come out Nipples hard with milk When things are of another time They are of that time Not timeless They are no longer here Nipples hard with liquid or falsities White and soft I can’t get it out No matter how hard I yank Or pull and suck Face watching with my own Nipple in my mouth Like the room she’s in I went and I seduced But no matter what I couldn’t get her to leave Aqua and in the morning, coffee The bathroom gold and green No matter what I said She stayed there She had her own fantasies to wait for Milk that never comes out It grows inside Does it fold back in time I want to say it becomes different The man who grafted another face What poems I wrote for him No I want to say That when you came at me With the syringe That I loved you In gold and green You came at me Revision upon revision Of your love It wasn’t like you To give up I knocked and knocked And you went back Into your doorway What days The nipples rising With future things to come What happened to those thoughts To those people I loved that woman In the building Sunset road The place With the dead babies But no matter what I did How hard I yanked She would never leave I knocked and knocked No matter what I did Or said I just couldn’t Get her out of there

Not even the males and the men of the males make use of their pinched tongues to sing, not even the females and the women of the females, corollas stemmed to spray on end sing their ruddy stones The males and the men of the males feel the sea the ranch and the wheat, rice ears polyglottal weddings unseasonable lips one body to the next Indigenes displaced by indigenes displaced wherein the ranchlands, then the fields of wheat, burn to the crust The choice between taking the flowers-of-the-trees- to-blossom and the long-as-the-rocks always lands on the flowers-of-the-trees- to blossom— bouquet thrown hurriedly into the sun

If   love is like a doll’s shoe — the color of nascent snow that laces over the ankle or the polychromatic beaded baby moccasins we saw lying in the museum drawer that belonged to an infant from a sea tribe of seal hunters. Or the rutilant pink blossoms of the locust tree that bloomed in the dark while I slept dreaming of my arrival on a red-eye wearing a long to the floor skirt — not of a postulant, but of a flower vendor or a woman covering disfigurement. Freud believed that religious faith is a wish-fulfilling illusion. I can’t locate faith in a carved or uncarved pew. I’m more focused on the altar boy’s shoes. Under his white robe he’s wearing a man’s black loafers vastly oversized for his small feet with sufficient spare space for a coyote den in each toe. I want to buy him a kite. If   love is a mezzanine floor we will not fall from, a hand holding back my hair from my face as I’m sick on the side of the bus. The mouth so at home in the vicinity of pavement. Pew also means to enclose, as in men who were as willingly pewed in the parish church

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness; long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and stud the sky; long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them, a girl unlatches a window, walks shoeless into a forest, her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness. She walks into woods, her feet light-stepping through puddles, over hard packed dirt, through grassy hills, over sticks and pebbles over sand soaked in day, stones sun-sizzled over lakes and frigid streams through dim cobbled streets darkened squares and dusty pastures. She runs from nothing, runs to nothing, beyond pain, beyond graveyards and clearings. In the dark the eyes of startled creatures gleam like a herd of candles. They scatter and give night its meaning. What echo of a bell lulled her what spirit, what scent of a word whose storm wrote her what banks fell to drown her which blood star which thread of water which trickle of light whose heart being launched whose floating soul seduced her what promise did it make her whose memory burned her whose prayer did she run to answer whose help, what sorrow clot what pain dammed inside her what wall must she rebuild now whose treasure beckons her who spread ivy like a veil to blind her? Daybreak lies chained to a blue wall from which the stars drop and lose all meaning. She runs past villages that lost their names roads that lost their destinations seas that lost their compasses and sailors rivers that lost their marshlands and travelers houses that lost their sleepers and criers trees that lost their songs and shadows gardens that lost their violets and benches valleys that lost their worms and farmers mountains that lost their prophets and marauders temples that lost their sinners and spires lightning that lost its silver and wires chimeras that lost their bridges minotaurs that lost their fountains. Crescent moons hover above her, ancient white feathers, birdless, wingless lost to their own meaning. Music rises out of her vision. It stands, a wall covered with silver mosses. A clarinet sounds a wounded mare, violins women who lost their children. Flutes blow their hot dry breezes. Drums chuckle the earth’s ceaseless laughter. Pianos are mumbling sorcerers calling spirits and powers. Cellos chew on the sounds of thunder. Dulcimers skip about on crutches. Dance floors flash their knives daring their dancers. Words mill about the streets like orphans. Then a lute begins groaning and dawn loses its meaning. Night girl, night girl your book is full now. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Stars held your sky in place and moons floated on your lakes and washed them. When a bird sings when dewed branches tilt sunlight into eyes when curtains are soaked with light when mirrors drown in shadows, take your day to the shore, my child. Put out the words that fired your waking, scatter them on the sand like seeds, then with your feet gently tap them, and let the bright waves receive your meaning.

1 Three sparrows in the schoolyard while waiting for my daughter to finish up her play with friends whose purity she will come to question in a few weeks and in that way I am reminded of the president when he speaks of enemies to the other side of the mirror but only in that way the three sparrows ruffled up the dirt as their wings and heads spun motorbike doughnuts after one of them had come back with a massive potato chip for the other two to fight over perhaps he was the provider or wasn’t hungry but simply couldn’t let a good bit of food go to waste Then a crow came and the winner sparrow went zooming into the orange orchard knowing fully well it would be impossible to alight and reappeared with a chip the size of his beak and a flurry of birds descended on the scene (I even saw a Fletcher) but kept my eyes on that little sparrow and am happy to report he kept what his mouth held though it occurs to me he was also mean and the one who seemed a provider might have been yoked in that way my wife during delivery was rung up like a bar code whenever the nurse knocked or the doctor was called 2 In the room there were women Counting up to ten dressed in blue The doctor was also Pregnant in her final week The neonate came out broke The sound barrier and was whisked Away from the mother the father Had cut the cord having held Scissors before he couldn’t turn down The doctor’s offer as if he would Have denied someone an entry Or exit visa Then the women were gone And neighbors and friends had to go To work and the mother was alone With breast or formula milk One nurse suggested the latter Was the better soporific 3 An infant smile A gas tickle The price of milk It goes up in war My son is here to teach me My temperament is genetic His smile is blind It dreams a spandrel Turns opiate in the eyes He grunts impatient wants Gas out as soon as It forms in peace He coos It’s what doves do Though excitable Observant of moving lips Attempts utterance Throws up happy spit And hunger’s renewed

to Simone Wandering off under those astrological signs charted just for you, my quiet trekker—all those houses & planets so perfectly straight-faced but still baffling at birth—don't think badly of me when I'm dead & you've gone deep into the distance of love tangles, moneyed interests, & old-fashioned commutes—into life in other words—I did what I could for you, knowing it might not be enough—I see now that I can't save you from suffering, & trying to hurts if I'm not kind. Tho I still want your life to be untroubled, & am afraid for you, a fear made out of my own fear of a future I can't control— the world so often a human heart that eats itself— places like New Orleans the Swat Valley Fukushima— the names of those remote destinations for film crews and symposium panels are places people die native to those regions & out to kill or defend life from itself—there is so much misery there that refuses to call itself misery & that sees itself instead as the unimpeachable power of a righteous day. And there are criminals & dunces elsewhere— hideous partyline whips, Saxon in outlook and proud of it—there are the bodysnatched and the inane candy-stripers & the greedy and the martini narcissists high on the rising year— but let's take the long view: these are not your true companions, & out of my reach your life will make itself in struggle & love perhaps dependent on the strength that will come if I only let go when you step out the door as hazel-eyed now as always & maybe more so this morning in slate-gray Gore-Tex.

Saturday I ran to Mytilene. Bushes and grass along the glass-still way Were all dabbled with rain And the road reeled with shattered skies. Towards noon an inky, petulant wind Ravelled the pools, and rinsed the black grass round them. Gulls were up in the late afternoon And the air gleamed and billowed And broadcast flung astringent spray All swordy-silver. I saw the hills lie brown and vast and passive. The men of Mytilene waited restive Until the yellow melt of sun. I shouted out my news as I sped towards them That all, rejoicing, could go down to dark. All nests, with all moist downy young Blinking and gulping daylight; and all lambs Four-braced in straw, shivering and mild; And the first blood-root up from the ravaged beaches Of the old equinox; and frangible robins' blue Teethed right around to sun: These first we loudly hymned; And then The hour of genesis When the first moody firmament Swam out of Arctic chaos, Orbed solidly as the huge frame for this Cramped little swaddled creature's coming forth To slowly, foolishly, marvellously Discover a unique estate, held wrapt Away from all men else, which to embrace Our world would have to stretch and swell with strangeness. This made us smile, and laugh at last. There was Rejoicing all night long in Mytilene.