Nomenclature

Once you might have named her

the velvety redness of a rose unfolding—

       sun-fiery, undaunted, and open to the sky.

Or touched her

as a crimson petaled jellyfish—

       opening, closing, pulsing her body gently through salty brine.

Or known her

as the deepest well—

       a clandestine viscosity where desires undulate thick

       in a pool to overflowing.

Once you might have likened her

to the stillness of an icy dawn,
to that expansive winter hour before the world
stretches back to life and pink-blue fingers begin

unzipping the shroud of night.

Once you might have recognized her.

      
In those moments still dark

when dreams become snowflakes

echoing promises to snowy ground.

And once
you might have
described her.

As flamencoed hands
along the ribs rushing
lost, abandoned,

to the click of unrelenting castanets.

Or

as laughter, longing, need, ache, loneliness, hunger, love, poverty, and want. 

But in the days of her unraveling,
she becomes a stranger. 

And you don't know what name to speak.

Or what language you will use when you call for her again.

You don't yet realize that the heart unmoored

will grow a new chord, will become a child returning

for the umbilicus again.

Or that given time

the heart will launch herself determined

out to sea for another go.

August Song

Hear the song of August sung
through a damply cricketed froggish dance
as two cats sit in a window
and one woman reads of another
who dreams of catching autumn.

Hear the song of August sung
as this euphony is split in two
by a semi's thunderous barreling,
as a woman pauses,
and waits, for the roar of it to pass.
Wondering if it will.
Because it seems so grave it won't.

Hear the song of August sung
as just a hint of it, just a whiff
is the taste that makes a woman dream
of flight through cerulean skies, above burnt orange and crimson pulsing,
as the rumble becomes memory and the song of summer night
wraps its body around the house again.

Hear the song of August sung
as a deer languid-bodied by the window
becomes the promise of a violin
and cats stare
penetrating glass
with eyes sharp, as branches
part dark-armed, trembling
in this symphony of the instant.

Hear the song of August sung
as a woman stands
on the porch become concert hall damply
listening to this end-of-summer place,
where copperheads thread
mosaic rustlings
through tangled grass of August green.

2011

December in Binghamton

It is the language of winter this morning.

Its rules spoken in the ice of words

floating in their new thick sheets

along the hip and thigh curves—gone cold now—

of the Susquehanna.

Walk across the bridge into a grammar of a downtown below freezing you hear.

And a windchill no more than 12. You turn. Look. Pull

your scarf tighter. But there is no one. And you realize it must have been you. Your own voice blowing past. Thoughts lost before they are. Silence crashing into the street. Silence becoming

an alphabet of letters

cracking sharp, fragile, precarious

in the bite of this December wind.

It is

the language of winter this morning

and the language of winter is:

A whisper. A shout. An ache.

An old woman wearing green mittens.

A group of teenagers spilling over the sidewalk in front of the school.

A boy with an unzipped coat and another without gloves

who shiver. Stand under a tree. Pass a cigarette back and forth.

A girl in tight jeans

whose laughter becomes steam

as the one with the dark hat

pushes her down into the snow.

          They kiss.

          You see them

          moving through the language of winter, into

          a grammar they don’t yet know.

Into a place of chapped lips and wild storms.

Into seasons of urgent clamoring and naked limbs.

And on the bridge the man with the navy pea coat

— collar high around his chin

and holding a can of Red Dog—

smiles, waves good morning, says just something to keep me warm.

And this winter language you hear too

in the bodies of the ducks skimming the surface

one after the other

lost along the water.

2004/2011

August Dream

Oh, Anna,

of bones singing now through garden soiled notes

beneath echinacea and hummingbirds come to drink, I dreamed

it was you last night dancing across the sky. Only to wake

to a knife stabbing memory straight into my ears

when clear as a bell you fell silent in the dawn.

And I heard once again, the gray of time passing.

2011

Phonetics

The boy beneath the skin tells her a story

about stones thrown in a lake, and naming them for their sound.

Blabo— he called.

For the moment their weight

broke heavy through the surface.

And she opens

her ears

to a phonetics     of living

to a path

made of the body

              the voice

              the pulse
                         of an instant.

She asks him then
to take her
to that place where memory
carves a dream over flesh

shivering amber through the trees.

                                              2002/11

Sadie Doesn't

Sadie sits. Head turned. Upright in the window. And she doesn't know

of the 76 dead in Norway, or of Amy Winehouse's last song, or of the men

in theater garb carving new myths out of history

as they fight about a debt. Or of the Arctic melting or heat waves spreading or shit leaking into the ocean or the woman strangled in Michigan

          —just like that!—

                                                 (by whose hands?)

last Tuesday.

After 89 years:

Who would have imagined

this room to be my end?

Sadie doesn't know

that Syria is on fire, that eyes crackle to the pavement,

or that the heavens are sucking Somalia dry through pursed lips drawing in

so hard to make children shrivel, become bone, finally losing themselves to

a mass exodus from their collective skins and simply

disappearing

gone quiet

one by one.

Turned inside out as remains

mark the trails of mothers trudging headstrong-
exhausted clamoring for miles into

a vacuum

nightmares

of tiny bodies scorched,

abandoned,

dropped down

to the parched

earth.

No, she doesn't know.

Doesn't know as she stretches above

the birds rustling through the leaves below

the shrubs as she closes her eyes. Feline lost and safe

into a moment of rest once again.

Finessing Old Poems

An ode to a handful of childhood years spent in Kansas. Thank you to Stellasue for encouragement on the poetry front again ....


Being in Kansas

in the rock-strewn sharpness of that place made wild

and sometimes molded from graphite

called the heart
primary colors on a clothesline are t-shirts
peeled from tired bodies and left to hang
into the shape of solitary hours
of being forgotten outside

and near the clothesline in a yard
over ground too flat

is a world whispered kansas!
from the lips of a girl who thinks

her skin in the sun smells

like pancake batter as she tries
in the summer heat to fill
the parched-open earth with water

to fill the cracks that are to her

open mouths—thirsty thick-tongued

grimaces—striking at her ankles

stinging and harsh the way

they will slap on the afternoon she runs

fast for the house dropping the jug

as the fist of her heart beats

a warning into her ribs at the sight of yellow

sleeves thrashing from the almost-invisible

line tangled and angry in the sudden wind

so dry and cutting those days she will remember
when the wind fiery became moments
of tornadoed sirens and hiding alone hunkered
the body as low as possible in bathtubs waiting
down while cold fingers blossomed sweat petals
and ears knew the clackity rumble of coming trains

so strange and far away the green light of those summers made

of a thundery heaviness she will remember as

she turns one morning for his body

naked and able to laugh now as life unexpected

weaves the contours of a rainy dawn

and sharp, rough stone makes way to become

a deluge cool and indigo

             a downpour rushing wet

a place where open mouths are quenched

and parched tongues have no say

                                              

                                             --  2003/11