After Sappho

The Buzzing

Neither honey nor bee for me, said she,

and I with my roses and my madness

followed merrily, merrily, merrily so.

In a pocket of Soho there was cake.

The flowers remained in their paper dress,

and though mirrors were hung,

one could not find one's face,

even after all the songs were sung.

But in the country: trellises, pools and green.

I do not know why the buzz startles me;

only that when I hear it, my sole instinct
is to dive deep underwater and stay there.

Part

Crimes of the Heart

I played the part of Babe who killed her husband

then whipped up a batch of lemonade and offered

it to him. I had wanted to be Meg because she smoked

but we were in high school and the drama teacher

had her own ideas of who we should be. Zachary,

I yelled from upstage left, could you use a glass?

The drama teacher claimed to have been the Sunbeam girl,

and really, with all that blonde hair, it might not

have been a lie. Our senior year, her youth minister husband

ran away with a 14 year-old girl he had been praying with.

The teacher told us it was okay to cry and curse.

She’d get this crazy look in her eye like she was going to

scale the walls and howl on the roof but instead

she’d pop in a piece of cinnamon Trident, stare up at the lights

and chew. It just gets worse, she said. All of it.

At some point in the play, I stuck my head in the oven.

I’m pretty sure I lived, but after all these years, who can remember?

Hammerspace

(n.) The notional place from which things come when needed and return to when no longer needed, called the god-shaped hole by some, or Bugs Bunny’s pocket, or the tunnel my brother and I tried to dig to China back when we still had shovels and believed the earth was penetrable. 

Lush

Lush

She called me lush, and I was surprised,
verdantly so. Me? I asked, pointing to myself,
bloomingly, and I wanted to take her face
into my two hands, wanted to take my mouth
to her ear and thank her for knowing me,
burstingly and richly; even in this room
with its sickening sheen, she had seen me.
I was thick with stargazers, was lavish, wild,
the deer on the mountain, the door
in the mountain, the mountain itself, that which
formed the mountain, the earth, dark soil,
that which grew from the earth, the overgrown,
the thing that needed to be cut away,
the thing that needed to be nourished,
generously, plenteously, desirously, hungrily,
reachingly for the shrimp that the waiter
carried by. No, she said, A lush, but I didn't hear her
because the room was loud, and I was exploding.  

What Matters

What Matters

A question to the body
formed. I was moving,
was running, was running
on a moving platform
on a place called earth,
but more specifically:
gym.
In the florescent current,
we sweaty humans gathered.
No. We humans gathered,
grew sweaty, became florescent
figments. Strange place,
so bodily but so alone,
so alone but so surrounded.
In darker rooms,
men grunted, dropped weights.
Here, four televisions:
weather, rape, weather,
basketball. The question
formed but I pounded
it out. Rubber soles
on rubber tread.
I think I meant to ask
something about what matters,
why it matters, how
it matters, what is matter,
what's the matter, something
of the body or the weather
or the rape, something
of the distance between
steps or stars or clouds
or matters less significant,
more weighty. Or less
weighty, less about weight,
more about not being
created or destroyed, 
consumed or burned. They say
that a black hole the weight
of a human would disappear
in under a nanosecond.
The weight of a human.
The 525 calories burned.
The oatmeal to energy.
Last night's tacos
as sacrifice to this movement,
this body moving,
this body going nowhere,
and not even very quickly,
but going and going,
flailing with the other bodies,
the ones which will remain
mostly and forever unknown.
And maybe we will nod,
maybe we will wipe
the machine clean when we're done,
maybe we will offer some small grace
to the next body, the one
which is not being sucked
into a black hole but is waiting,
is gazing at its watch, at the TVs,
at the weather, rape, weather,
waiting for this machine to save it,
however meekly, however momentarily,
from the very certain fate that awaits it.  

Late Spring

Late Spring

Stone fruit season is around the corner
but I'm in a whirl: panties in a wad,
lump in the throat. This was not the tornado
that threw an 80-ton train clear across the sky,
not the one that plucked the feathers
out of chickens and left them bald
and wild in a dusty Kansas field. One May,
J. and I tried to race a storm across the state line.
This was back when we were young enough
to smoke, litter, hope to live forever.
All these seasons later, I've learned little.
I still reach my hands into bins; it's like
I believe I can squeeze the peaches into ripeness. 

The Park

The Park

The dog is on its leash,
and I am on a bench.
Above me, an airplane;
inside me, an insistent ache;
In front of me, two little girls
pretending they are jumping rope,
tiring of their game. Tag, one says.
They touch each other instantly.
You're it, they yell.
No, you're it. You're it.
There is wind in the trees--
I am it. This morning
when it was still sunny,
the weatherman promised
there would be more clouds
than sky today.
I didn't believe him.
In this unwieldy life,
I am still sorting out
what it means to believe.