A View From the Nest: A Sonnet

She sank against my arm and turned her head

to eye the stack of luggage by the door

and murmured sternly 'did you make your bed?'

(a question she had always asked before).

I felt her ribs expand against my side,

corseted 'neath her women's choir dress

and felt the slightest impulse to deride

her age old inclination to digress.

'Of course,' I squeezed her hand and, with a sigh,

lifted my gaze to meet the opened door,

a grinning portal, a wide, unblinking eye,

an exit I had never made before.

The Sunday sun was spilling through the shutters

and lighted the dust that stirred our farewell mutters.

Picking up a Hitchhiker

I

Am

The

One at

The wheel

And you have

Your hands on

My shoulders from

Behind the seat. You

tell me that you’re so

dreadfully grateful, you

grin and yell that we are

Leaving and never coming

Back, and I look at your eyes

As they peer into the rearview

Mirror. They are so blue that

I’d gladly never see the sky again

If I could stare into those pools

Of yours. We’ll have more time

Once we pull over for a pit stop,

Of course. Funny to think that I

Found you there on the side of

the road with no belongings but

ripped jeans and a white t-shirt

and combat boots and a dirty

knapsack. You looked so rough

I almost didn’t pull over, but I

Saw your face, gazing into me

Through the windshield, trying

To catch my eye. Then I knew I

Had to pull over to help you. I

Know something’s happened to

You and you don’t have to tell

Me what, but I picked you up for

a reason, and

I want you to

Know that you

can talk to

me if you’d

like to. I didn’t

catch your

name by

the way. My
name is-

What’s in

your hand?

I just saw

something

flash in the

mirror. Never-

mind, it’s

probably my

imagination.

Sorry, I was

Saying, my

Name is- why

Are you…

Why are you

Laughing?

The Rest is Silence - a 6 line play after Hamlet

Hamlet enters, shuffling off the mortal coil of the earth, and into a white room. This is Purgatory. Ophelia sits in a chair, with flowers in her hair, singing. She is trying to remember how the song goes… Hamlet sits beside her. He takes a flower out of her hair and starts to pick its petals. He lets them fall to the ground. She watches him.

Hamlet: Not to be. Not to be. Not to BE. Not TO be. NOT to be. NOT to BE. NOT TO be. not TO BE. Not-

Ophelia: I haven’t seen my dad yet, but that’s probably because you sent him straight to Hell. So, thanks for that. (pause) You know, if you would have told me you weren’t actually mad, you would have made things a lot easier for me. After all your love letters and promises you go and pull a stunt like that?! You think you see a ghost and you turn the world upside down. I don’t know if you know this, but this is it for us. It’s all over. Life. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. There’s no going back to haunt people. Even you, the observed of all observers, can’t go back. You’re done. You don’t get to revisit the goodly frame, the earth, or the excellent canopy, the air, as you called it. What you saw that night was not your father. You threw your life away. I hope you know that.

Hamlet: (crumbles the flower in his hand, pause) Well, you killed yourself. How does that wash with the officials in the afterlife?

Ophelia: I’m pleading temporary insanity. See I was actually insane. I didn’t fake my way out. I’ll have to do some purgatorial janitorial work here and there for a few months, then I get to go to Heaven, on probation. With good behavior, I’ll get to settle down there. Make a garden with rosemary, rue and daisies. Go swimming. Not have to worry about drowning anymore. (pause) You’re welcome to come visit. You know, if you want to, or whatever.

Hamlet: (silence) I really did love you when we were alive, you know that? (pause) You were just too much of a daddy’s girl.

Ophelia: Momma’s boy.

They look at each other and laugh, loud and long. The laughter echoes in the room as the lights get brighter and brighter. So bright, there’s nothing left but light.

Inventor of Scissors

He........................................................................................is
the....................................................................................one
who..................................................................................took
steel,...............................................................................whet
edges..........................................................................with an
obdurate....................................................................stone, a
slice of twi...............................................................light in his
left eye, sweat....................................................dripping onto
newborn blades..............................................honed for battle
but of another kind....................................The rasping sheets
sparked and burst, flying......................pyrotechnics off of the
hot shear, off of one then....................the other, simultaneous
blades so sharp blood would........ rise at the touch of a thumb.
He gripped the polished cast steel pieces. He bore a hole, a fire
beneath, made the metal drippy as milk. He blew through the
eye sized break and through it wrapped a fallen willow bough.
The crescent cut sky bled pinpricks of light, his hands working
with a single thought as sharp as sin itself. He held it up against
the sky as if to carve a second celestial body, to slice away the
dark, to blunt the blades with blackness, to carve his way out.

Superstition

Two silhouettes through
The windowpane dance
The thirteen step, heel
To toe.

Milk and salt, inauspicious
Whiteness, lie spilt atop
The tabletop, the lesser
Of a wishbone, drowning
In the white.

Pitch black Mitsy, ‘neath the staircase
Kneads the oriental rug: her
Claws popping like static
On a radio.

You say you will wait with me
The seven years it will take
For this curse to subside.
Each shard in your hand,
a year, you croon,
Eyeing the reflections of
Your eyes’ reflections,
Slicing into the pulpit
Of the trashcan.

In my own shredded hand,
an umbrella blossoms,
Shaking like a palindrome, its
Endless beginnings ending and
Beginning again...

A single fracture underfoot
Touches each of our toes
Across the length of hallway.

A tempest politely raps
At the door. You tell me
With a crooked grin
You’ll float face down, and
I, with my face skyward
if I don't help clean up
this mess.

What Is

On a bridge

I am not the sky

Nor the bridge.

I exist in both.

Hovering

Above the water

Which also is not me.

When I stand

On the edge

I become

The edge,

The possibility

Of the air and what

Is beneath.

We all come

To this edge,

Hovering, becoming

Instead of what is not,

What is.

Hindsight

After the Prince

Now, hindsight has come:

Once passions in the blood
Have congealed,

Once I have been wheeled,
Ceaselessly wheeled
Through hospital corridors, fluorescence
Overtaking disinfectant days, filled with IV drips
Dripping, slipping down into the blood
Pumping, burning the inner skin,

Once salt and citrus pooled

in the gash of my open heart,

For the loss of love,

Once dilation contracted
And eyes could see
Up nostrils of objective men
When the needles were cut
Like umbilical cords,

Once the fetus sleep, etherized
On the tabletop, broke, seeped
Each cell into consciousness
And the pain of being born returned again,

Once the paper dress ripped clean away,
Crumbled in some urine stained corner,
Was replaced by my pocketless rags,
Dirty, dew stained at the hem,

Once I was elbow carried into
The sun, bright as the side of an eye,
And heaped on the bus bench,
Told to wait for the uptown.

This is when hindsight arrived:

Pinned beneath the gawking
Cadaver of the sky, your picture fell
From a stitch in my cuff, face up.

And I squinted to see.
And I finally saw.
Saw your smile was crooked.
Your smile was crooked after all.

Sleepwalker

Somnambulist in crinoline, 

wandering my condominium, 

to a symposium of ciccedas, 

singing through the dark.

Sunday

Smelling of morning orange peels and

Lackadaisical nectarines,

you found me quiet, snuggled

beneath antique furrowed linens and

dusty ruffels.

"Don't hide, but seek and ye shall find,"

you say

and set me unwilling and upright,

wiping Sunday sleep dust

from my eyes.

The bedspreads you've knitted

lie bunched and dirty,

tangled around my skinny unshaven

summer legs.

The day is too young for hymns, Grandma.

But none of that. You stand tall,

enveloped in your own fine linens

no thicker

in the peachy breeze

than your lenses.

I breathe shallow when I am near,

you maker of story time,

harbinger of daylight

in the slumbers of my innocence.

I will put on my dress

and wear my sterling cross

I will not let dust gather

at your orthapedic feet

for it, as darling and dainty as you,

will one day be swept 

with an orange broom kept

beside the impatient washing machine

and all the linens will wake.

one of us

the house was dark behind us

and the moon had cheese grated all its 

whiteness

onto the winter ground. snow covered everything

but us. It had stopped snowing.

we held cigarettes in gloved hands.

a dog barked in another yard.

one of us was saying

we thought we were in love with 

someone we met in a different country, with

deep eyes and humor and hope.

we begin to believe

love is attainable after all.

one of us was saying a radio was playing

down the frosted road, probably from a passing car.

then one of us said something about how

late

it was, how we should turn in

before the sun came up, before another day

began.

Tristesse

I have been in arms before, arms grown
Oaken ‘round my flesh; Neolithic limbs,
swallowing the sweat from my skin,
the dew the body makes for love.

And I have ridden the swelling chest,
o’ergrown with wire black hair, face craned
away, so that even in sleep I may not see
the amnesic flashes of nose, razor cut, tooth.

There is an art to drowning. To be swallowed like
a pill is healthy, some say, to drop into
the gullet, to churn, grow seasick with the motion
of love, of the feeling of love, without ever possessing it.

Simple Math

Arithmetic question:

If one plus one equals two

Then where are you?

Art

Please understand, I

had to hurt you to write the

beauty of your tears.

Le Garçon Sans Visage

Lend an arm for me to hold

Kiss my cheek and walk me through the door

Wrap me in your arms, the air is cold.

Look at me, without blinking, if you can,

See me radiant, glowing, as you did before

I am the weeping woman and you the man

Soft in shadows, pitiful to behold.

I would rather turn into the night

And leave you standing here, alone.

Take the candle, leaving just the white

Of the unblinking moon staring down.

If only I could not know what I have known

Sleeping beside you in a silk nightgown

When you refused to switch on the light.

He didn’t move, but with the faint light cast

Upon the trodden leaves, crisp and departed,

His shadow stretched across the ground so vast

I thought for just a moment he would follow.

Silly girl, longing for the way things started,

Naive to the infinite depths of the hollow

Boy, left alone on the dead, trodden grass.

Liar, Liar

if the rhyme is correct,

your pants should be on fire,

burning you alive.

Nocturne; a Sonnet

Anon! A note, anonymous and new

Anoints in me a nameless naivete.

A nocturne, anecdotal nimbles through

Noiseless first, and nervous now – but nay!

Its noise alike an angel’s native voice

Needles into the naked ancient night

A nascent, nearly nonchalant rejoice

Nurturing nocturnal memories to ignite.

Nostalgic, negating nefarious exploit,

This nocturne nestles near my very soul

Nomenclativly Neoclassically adroit

An amorous nod to nightingales on patrol.

As Neptune navigates night upon the sky,

This nocturne negotiates evening needn't be nigh.

Bookmark

i've left this here because
i know you love this book
and that you would pick it
up when you had some
time away from me. i've
changed my number and
moved away, and i don't
think you'll go to any trouble
finding me. i hope you enjoy
this book, as you've enjoyed
the way i've honeyed your
tea each morning, and woken
you with my mouth, and
snoozed when you asked me
to snooze, and woke when you
bid me to wake. now you have
so much time to read, dear, and
you no longer have to feel that
pang of danger that you felt. that
danger of letting me get too close
to you. i am gone now and you
should rest easy, and read your
marvelous book. that danger you
felt is the danger felt when
champagne is about to bubble
over its bottle. that fear of spillage.
that fear of waste in poverty. this
was your fear. and it was despicable.
as horrifying as the shepherd seeing
his lambs slaughtered, wondering if
his smock would be stained. though
i have stained your smocks, dear,
you are safe from danger now. at
last, you can honey your own
chamomile, kiss your own hand,
and snooze awhile, for now there
is no one distracting you from yourself.
this book was made for you, my dear,
and i'm so glad you have unearthed it.
put your feet up and enjoy. go back
to your book, please.

Undertow

The bed ebbs, pulls us

into the undertow. In

each other, we drown.

No Answer

Of all the things

you could have asked me, I will not

answer this question.

Arachnophobia

In each corner darkness

Grows an hourglass, red and

Hungry for my flesh.

Single Mother

Screaming for candy.

Bedlam in the candy aisle.

What if I just ran?

A Toothless Man's Jealousy

Wet snap of green skin

White apple-meat churns in the

Sea of his young teeth.

Nana Folding my Late Grandfather’s Laundry

Underarms flap like

Seraph wings. She prays to finish

Her final chore.

Polonaise

He waits for stillness,

Eyes lidded, breath calm as a cradle.

The slightest silent metronomic motion

lifts his face, as if waking from a dream,

as if having mumbled a murmured amen

for a prayer he needn’t have prayed.

Such hands could crush a woman’s heart.

Such fingers could carve faults into stone,

Pry apart cogs, jaws, teeth of factories,

crumble mortice locks, or shatter bone,

but his

anoint the heavy trodden keys,

soften, settle. Listen! He breathes

and the first note of his reprise

begins.

Such cadence alters the beating of the heart.

From a promontory of black and white slabs,

Strung taught with wire, all in a row,

Rises ecstasy itself, making drunk the air

And quiet eyes moist in adoration.

Each note, a wholehearted assent

His face flickers with such content

For this polonaisical compliment.

He courts the keys, woos them,

Teaches them to sing, to break

Like hurricane waves on a stunned

Chromatic shore. The more

He plays, the more

Impossible this is, these precisions

unfathomable faultless tender decisions

Which dance in air like elated visions.

He is a teller of tales, an oracle

Who, unmoving, rises, lifts himself,

With furious and tender violence.

He creates a reason to break the silence.

Ocean View

Sight can be felt, unseen.

Eyes slicing into a spine, pushing,

like the memory of white waves, a body

into the undertow

of ocean view suite 12 C.

Now returning to the linens, riding the ghost of the sea

You speak without speaking, your sibilant whispers

Inarticulate, deliberate, slow.

High tides sigh as blind gulls lull in violet dusk.

Once again, the act replaces the memory,

kept in the distant shores of the mind.

Our primordial love song conceives no words,

As we conceive, in silence, no more than we.

The easy pain of faithless love

Wrings the laundry of our limbs

Slides aside, crescendos into a kind of mitosis.

Beyond the glass door, the obsidian shore

Is shushing the cackles of gulls who, unlike we

Are not seen, yet see.

The Young Widow

She wandered through the sycamore that night
weaving withered garlands through her hair
like tiers of brittle halos in the light
which hung their mourning buds in the evening air.
The grove illumined and stirred when she approached,
parting its pathways to let her wander in
as if to say, 'please, let us not encroach
upon the grieving you have yet to begin.'
No briar caught her dress, no rock her heel,
no owl breathed, for they already knew
the midnight living were the ones to feel
the torment of breezes, the agony of the dew.
Her bare feet rooted as if they had no choice,
and she lifted her ear, straining to hear his voice.

Ransom

Written because I woke from this dream, sweating and dizzy.

I awake in a prison cell next to a man with no arms and no legs on a cot. He is face down in a bowl of porridge, gorging himself. I twist and claw at my back, desperately scratching. Why are you here? I didn’t pay the ransom, he said, and continued eating, limbless and hungry. I walk out of the cell to see others standing under a massive steaming shower, naked, their backs bleeding like mine from the shoulder blades. The warden takes a scythe from the wall and the prisoners hold out limbs for him to remove. They shower again, armless, legless, singing hymns. Through another door they are wheeled, into a woodshop where they are fit with wooden replacements. A manicurist for the limbless paints their wooden nails, as they sing. They stand on new legs, and greet me with new arms, still singing. The warden turns and sees me. I escape and bolt the door behind me, the itch on my back becoming unbearable. I reach around again, scratching, back bloody, door thundering, until wings… I sprout wings. Down comes the door, and the wooden soldiers advance. I stretch my wings and run at them. I have to get enough speed to lift off the ground. I’m up. My ankles fill with splinters from their hands. The warden slices the air. Takes off a toe. I hit the ground. Wooden men surround me. I start running again, wings beating, legs burning. I think I’m flying.

A Lesson

Her paranoia was

Feverish

She

Should have

considered

these accusations

more carefully.

Pretty mouth

infected with such

nonsense.

Wild talk

Poppycock

Shut the window

and

There was a time

when

this sort of thing

wouldn't have

bothered

me

so much

but

should really

stop

straining

see

she

just needed a little guidance

from

me

see.

she

understands

so well now

and when it stops raining

we will take a stroll

hush

your

mouth now

stop

begging

I

give and give and give

show

your 

teeth

let me see that

smile.

Woods

Out past the tomato garden

men have chopped down the woods

we used to play in as children.

The few saplings left sit gazing

in shame at their naked state.

They quietly conspire in the wake of this

new beginning. All afternoon

my brother talks of the brook

that survived the demolition,

how it runs deep beneath the hills

of stumps and fallen bee hives,

secretly feeding thirsty roots

and nurturning the splintered warriors

back to life. Where is this brook, I ask

and find myself being pulled

down past the garden, into

the wasteland at dusk.

My eyes had never seen such barefaced

destruction; corpses of redwood, strands of

pine needle hair, and the limbless deformities

of half-survivors

huddled together for the night.

Further and further we plunged into evening.

Stumbled, lurched, and took another route.

This way, he hissed amidst snap, splinter,

Shatter and crunch of the unkind crippled wood.

And then we were there, gaping

like the moon's lazy eye, deep into the dark

crevices and veins of the pulsing earth

beneath our feet. It sounded like the womb,

each trickling drop bearing the burden

of an unseen child waiting to be born.

Far into the distance, we could hear our

mother's voice calling to us from the garden

asking us to come back home.

We knelt by the water's edge,

our faces turned down stream,

and waited for thunder.

Aftermath

The standards of the evening

now tell their tales of carnage.

Siren choirs sing their songs

up and down these soggy streets.

Men bow low their heavy heads

and start off for home.

It has struck the hour of aftermath,

the silent hour, the quiet time,

dusk ushers forth the steady marches

and cathedral bells

chime.

London

I wrote this after the 7/7 attack on London.

Oh, sweet city, you will not let them depart

the earth unloved. You led them knowingly

to that place and time, a rush-hour coincidence

bereft of reason and rhyme to that place

and tim, that seat, window or aisle

with yawning morning slumbers

that let them pass the journey. Meanwhile,

a solemn boy in the back slides a steady hand

beneath his coat.

Oh, city, I know you saw, you are not blind,

you cried your drizzled sobs. You are too kind.

Your mourning for the dawn-drawn affair

puddles quickly and spreads

beneath the feet of millions

marching their quiet ways, home to their beds.

Oh, city, you are not my city, I know too well.

You have seen the bulge of battles,

the ruins of hell smoking up the grids beneath

your childrens' quick and cautious feet.

You open wide your streets and let them pass,

you yawn with empty parks of un-trodden grass,

you close your shows on the night

and let them roam, for even you know

on some dark nights,

all children must return home.

Grandmother

The night before my grandmother died I promised to go see her, and to bring a poem I had just written so I could read it aloud to her before she went to bed.

I was in a convertible that belonged to a very handsome boy, and he was driving so fast I couldn’t hear anything except for the beating of wind against my eardrums.

I yelled for him to take a left turn, down the road that led to my grandmother’s house, and he slipped his hand between my legs, and I told him to keep driving.

The poem was in my pocket. We fucked in his back seat while, across town, my grandmother decided to shut her eyes for a moment, just before company came.

Home Movie

An epileptic dance of achromatic ants,

and visions yawn into clarity: a Technicolor

child, puffy cheeked, wrapped

in fur and sunglasses, blinks

at the lens and the man behind the lens. A mink,

her mother’s, trails behind like a wedding pelt

on her bouncing baby body.

Her fat face behind mother’s glasses, shaded by no son,

goos and spits in the kaleidoscope of infancy.

She silhouettes in their eyes.

Sound lurches in, static bursts

into loud and rapturous applause. She staggers

forward, pink fists pumping,

grabby at the camera lens, tightrope walking

with a bear upon her back.

This is the sacred dance of dress-up, chronicled

by a silent man, behind a silent screen. Then over,

she topples, facedown in carpet, and

the illogical screams of her infancy rise.

Camera pans to shrugging mother and adjusts

to the light.

These are the visions of an unremembered day,

on an unremembered street,

of a family. Zoom out. Mother

kneels beside the girl, out of focus, in jigsaw.

Sweetheart. Buttercup. Don’t cry, my

sweet, don’t cry. Her arms too thin to lift the girl.

Zoom in.

The fat face squeals as the focus blurs.

Peek-a-boo, ad nauseam. And, at last, she laughs

so hard she cries, pees, wets herself in mother’s mink.

Nevermind, she’s just a child. Keep filming.

It’s fine, keep filming.

The child squeals as the camera reels,

stopping, dropping, rolling around

like she’s on fire,

like she’s burning alive.

So much love is in this room.

Calendar

A dark account of a state of mind. Hopefully not poetic masturbation, but you can be the judge of that.

My calendar keeps getting shorter.

Years back, I began to erase the dates

On which unfortunate events had occurred:

A death, a disappointment, a fracture in my ankle to prevent hiking that spring, Hitler’s birthday, a high school reunion when I slept with Jeremy at last, and it turned out he did it on a dare, and wasn’t that so funny…

I haven’t simply used white out, or black lines to cross through the days.

I’ve ripped each day away from its page, square, alone, clinging to none of the good days left, unable to infect them with misfortune.

My birthday needed to go, of course, Mother’s day as well. It’s a silly holiday anyway, don’t you think? Useless for most of us. Twofold useless for me, now. Twofold useless. Useless now.

Valentine’s Day is gone, having always ended tragically. The 12^th of May, the last two days of June, and any evening that bore a full moon.

I look at my pure calendar often, yet each time I find it impossible to leave alone. There is always something that happened, if I think hard enough, something unpleasant, some memory that haunts that day, some ghost standing in that window to my past.

Those days are becoming more frequent now, and my box of unfortunate days is slowly growing.

More checkered than a checker board, my calendar waits beside my bed.

And when that last pure day is gone, I’ll put a bullet through my head.

Haikus

Coming to Christ

Fucking the preacher’s son

Means no obscene words

On a Sunday morning.

Beating Your Wife

Bruises no wider

than two fingers? Buy a horse

whip. Wait by the door.

Cannibal

You are what you eat

And though I look delicious

You’re too good for me.

Safe Word

Let it be "I love

You" so we can scream it and

Soften at the sound.

Home Video

Home video

Laughter and a child

So hard it cries

Pees

Wets itself

Camera reels

Squeals

Holds its aching sides

Stop, drop

Rolling on the floor

Like it’s on fire

Like it’s burning alive