Widow Wearing Lipstick

I understand why we mark time in inches of hair,
why we say, "the day this grew, you were with me,"

and let it fall in clumps on the linoleum.
Blessed be the name of Lord.

Color is too soon,
we are allowed sorrow.












Italics: Job 1:21c

Wonderlust

Eat me, Drink me
everything said,
and now I am too large, too small
for this house, these windows cutting out
the same scene as before.

In a month's time, in a year's time,
what will have shrunk and grown?
I want to know.
For now I am ashamed
to find me feverish, insipid,
fearing touch.

If I have returned too blown,
chasten me.

I only ask
You make me once more
wonder at the world,
break against the leaves in hunger,
blow with purpose, burn with charity,
Eros,
which so claimed
my life before.

Let's have no more
of wanderlust.




--
Italics: Reference to Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
"Break...blow...burn," from John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

From Arms to Arms

To be sure, they have created
threescore kinds of wheels, and more,
and touch is bought and sold,    but no one
traveled so before  -

from arms to arms, and lingering

as the last lick of sun
on shoulders. 

I will go home

I will go home
with empty arms
and a heart like a honeycomb.

Clouds, Holy Water, Butter

How do we know when You are speaking to us?
You are something holy,
You keep us up at night.

I hang on your arms like a clingy dancer
apologizing repulsively -
I'm sorry.

This might be indigestion
or a league of angels outside my window,
faces turned full toward me like moons,
pale deer.

           Once I ran, I run, I wanderlust
I wait to be anesthetized. I ring my hands
or swish around in pantaloons, ripening
for the orphanage.

CGT GAA CCT

e = yes.

Antimatter.


Come by here and walk with me among the herbs
like some sophisticated gentleman,
discriminating lavender from lavender
who walks upstairs in slippers
and doesn't use the banister or a pool clad cape. A bag of sand.

Dementia. I will always be a helpless pea-weed, somewhere sending tendrils
out to the patronizing son. Take what I can get. Lick up
a frozen drop azalea, rhododendron.

Rubber buy, rubber buy beads. Rubber buy beads and coats. Old peat coats. Nanny goats
and sleep.

We Are

We are
bared tongue
to the ice

bared eyes
to the sun

bared arms to bared arms

bared arms to bared arms.

Trickle to the Sea

I am always afraid of mediocrity.
But if I say nothing, chance nothing,
sling nothing out into the air,

nothing will set forth
or turn colors,
peach and green and umber.

And so call, spread out, cast off silently on a river.
Earth itself needs to see
the things it grows while sleeping.