Lifeboat, Wingspan

When I build a city on the Mississippi,
there's an egret gliding through the air.
She crosses the river then circles back
and lands on a piece of sunlight.
In my city, many buildings surround the egret.
Many clouds sit on the buildings.
There are many ways to predict the weather.
When my head feels light, it rains on Monday.
When the sun returns, the phone rings.
It's my sister saying hello. She's putting
a bullet in my brain. There's no time
for twilight. Or a certain pill has my name
on it, but there's no time to swallow.
I'm on a balcony looking at the Mississippi
like a pill with nowhere to go.
Once I was the luckiest bird in the world
and still I wanted to be something else.
I wanted to be a weightless architect
who finds her mirrored windows on fire.
Once it was a Monday, and I was an egret
holding my red glass breath, not knowing
how to be burned alive. Someone said,
we need water to put out the fire. Soon
water became scarce, water was the new oil.
We remembered how it used to rain.
Each dot on the street was a new idea
until all the dots became one big wet.
Now it's Monday, and when I see an egret,
my tongue flattens. A white stain waves
good-bye very slowly. I hear a voice
on the phone. It's my sister saying hello.
When I deny having a sister, the sun
burns her skin. When I deny it's spring,
rain begins to fall. When twilight arrives,
my city on the Mississippi begins to
disappear. I wave good-bye to the egret.
I'm ready for the pluvial air.

Wolf Lake, white gown blown open

White sky, a tinge of blue,
birds like silver crucifixes
children wear at their First Communion—

the lake, melted candelabra—

no wind, no dust of summer moths, no weeping.

Lichen sleeps like fur on a dead thing
and the bones of the trees don't creak
and the woody stems of the cattails hold
the earth steady—

bearded fish are like drunken tangents of thought
that trail so far from the original idea—

for instance

I once fished here, bass after bass,
shined the flashlight down their throats
and saw all the way to the gold ovaries,
gill slits like louvered blinds
letting out light—

meat, heart, memory.

The boat was the green of naiveté,
the oars mismatched,

and who was that girl—a bride—

catching everything
and releasing nothing?

*

Jack in the Pulpit breaks through.
Purple veins comb the spathe, then the spadex
furred-over with male and female blooms
and the cone of firm red berries—

and the trillium's white gown blown open—

and the lapping sound of water,
like a dog compelled to lick itself.

Lake infested with black swans,
beaks breaking the surface tension
of the water

then pulling out, swallowing down
a writhing fish, another,

dissatisfied.

*

There is mist, there is a smudge of moonlight on the water—

lake the color of the groom's Italian leather shoes.

I grind against him on the muddy edge,
open the gold buttons to get to the skin,
the throbbing lip and tongue and cock—

flesh, right now, the wet smear of him
on my palm and lips and inside me,
inside, where I live, right now bitter with him,
dandelion juice, phosphorous,
muck, milk, food—

and beneath us snail shells burst
like the skulls of the dead in the crematorium.

*

There is body, there is experience, there is narrative,
there is idea, memory, philosophy, love—

and there are gods
and there are the operas of the gods—

there is desire
and desire's cold blue-eyed twin—

and this place in-between—water,
weeds bound by tangled fishing line,
bones washed clean,

and ghosts, laced and corseted, dragging
their anchors and sinkers and veils.

Thirty Lines About the Fro

The fro is homage, shrubbery, and revolt—all at once.
The fro and pick have a co-dependent relationship, so
many strands, snags, such snap and sizzle between
the two. The fro wants to sleep on a silk pillowcase,
abhorring the historical atrocity of cotton.
The fro guffaws at relaxers—how could any other style
claim relaxation when the fro has a gangsta lean,
diamond-in-the-back, sun-roof top kinda attitude,
growing slowly from scalp into sky, launching pad
for brilliance and bravery, for ideas uncontained by
barbershops and their maniacal clippers, monotony
of the fade and buzzcut. The fro has much respect
for dreads, but won't go through life that twisted,
that coiled. Still, much love lives between
the two: secret handshakes, funk-bottomed struts.
The fro doesn't hate you because you're beautiful.
Or ugly. Or out-of-work or working for the Man.
Because who knows who the Man is anymore?
Is the president the Man? He used to have a fro
the size of Toledo, but now it's trimmed down
to respectability, more gray sneaking in each day,
and you've got to wonder if he misses his pick,
for he must have had one of those black power ones
with a fist on the end. After all, the fro is a fist,
all curled power, rebellious shake, impervious
and improper. Water does not scare the fro,
because water cannot change that which is
immutable—that soul-sonic force, that sly
stone-tastic, natural mystic, roots-and-rhythm
crown for the ages, blessed by God and gratitude.

Dramatis Personæ

Once upon a time,
Books began this
Way—the O of once let
The reader beware up
Front that a story as
Ornate and colorful as
We are would follow—
And not for any of us
To be shocked to find
We must return and
Stand for what we are.

Ghost Aurora

All of the apostles, the fortune tellers, all of those committed
to the origins of reason or faith—each is now lost in the hum

of her or his own deepening meditation. What could be the purpose
of those songs the troubadour from Avignon brought us in his leather bag?

What could be the meaning of the carvings of green falcons along
the gourd-like back of his lute? What could be more useful than a loving

principle lifted slowly out of particles, like the frond of a morning fern
uncurling? Take up your coat; take up the morning. This is what it means

to lure the phantom out of the dark, until she lifts us into the space of song

Milk

The nurse has made up the bed so crisply.
Tucked the corners' rote origami
so soundly into the aluminum frame.

Your lips glisten, moistened with a square
of sponge. I hold your hand—weightless
thing of parchment and twig—

no more your daughter than a seed
cast from hoof-split rattlegrass, no more than
an asterisk sprung from thistle, caught, wished upon,

let go. I inhale the antiseptic scent of bay,
of balsam. Rooted here, in this cheap plastic chair,
as if I'll miss something,

as if my missing it would matter.
Just as—branch-snap to feeding deer, wing-shadow
to the scuttling mouse—it has always mattered.

The window frames a square of light
white and blameless as milk. I turn from you
and drink, and drink, and drink.

Lisa Longs to Hold Harry

Lisa longed to hold Harry
Cut
Lisa desired
Cut
Desiring Harry, Lisa
Cut
Desiring, Lisa
Cut
Lisa wanted Harry in the most
Cut
Lisa took Harry
Cut
Lisa surrounded Harry's hairy arms and begged for
Cut
Ever since Lisa was a little girl
Cut
Lisa as a little girl desired
Cut
The little girl playing in the sandbox hit the little boy with
Cut
When her family lived in Baltimore, Lisa
Cut
When her family lived in Boston, Lisa lost
Cut
When her family lived in San Francisco, Lisa stole a
Cut
When her family lived in a high rise overlooking Lincoln Park, Lisa explored the
Cut
Harry graduated a year before
Cut
Because he took summer classes, Harry
Cut
Lisa spent her summers alone. She worked at Marshall
Cut
Lisa looked longingly at the silver water pitcher perched on the glass shelf,
ruminating how
Cut
Even though they both attended Loyola University, Lisa
Cut
Harry bit his lip. Lisa sucked
Cut
When Harry bit down on a
Cut
Lisa had planned pot roast for the night she
Cut
Lisa picked up her cell to text Harry as she pulled over to exit North Avenue
Cut
Inside the burning car, Lisa wondered
Cut
Upside down, Lisa read Harry's
Cut
Hanging from her seatbelt, surrounded by flames, Lisa texted Harry, "I long
to hold you."

Eclogue

Twenty-two Months

Rent in the neighborhood is dropping.
Rent everywhere is dropping. Can you spare
a little CHANGE,
asks the sign where my bank,
merging with the bank across the street,
fails. I want to own land in my country.
I want to make my place in this city certain.
The fish in the bar next to the laundromat:
do they know the limits of their translucent world?
When my wife died I thought,
All within us praise his holy name,
His power and glory ever more proclaimed.
Even then I knew that life didn't really end,
that it would fissure into two places,
inside and out. The woman I love now
distinguishes absence from loss.
When there is no fog on a nearby hill
we walk through her old neighborhood
to the city's highest point.

Scale

Nineteen Months

That spring I pursued the other side of anxiety.
I measured exact distances wherever I went:
days since your death, weeks until your birthday,
how many steps it took to cross the interstate park
where every three weeks the billboard changed
until Oscar season. How I missed being in love.
How I wanted to explain: I miss being in love.
The night your brother stopped talking to his wife
I knew it meant I'd have to choose sides.
I sat dumb and silent, smiling weakly at everything.
At the climbing gym he got faster up the hard-candy steps,
his fingertips smooth and dull. Your nephew
and I registered online an animatronic vulture
whose virtual home contained separate rooms
for each family member. The week he finally
blew out his back your brother slept on the sofa.
He said he didn't want to wake the kids.
Each time he hobbled to the medicine cabinet
the television drowned out his sighs and moans.
I sat in my room listening carefully to music
I knew would make me weep.
Sleeping pills erased the dark room.
Through the window his truck engine turned over four times
before it began its morning loop around the city.

Pin Setter

All jobs have been a variation
of this first one: manual pin setter
at a two-lane bowling alley (paid a dime a game).
I learned it is very quiet
before a firing squad,
and that bowling pins, like moments,
exist as little gods,
and we are curiously inaccurate.

Twilight Sleep

Stop up the keyholes and draw the shades.
Awakening is touching a candle-
wick with a match-tip: a burning smell,
some flickering light, the little roar
of chemistry. You cannot remember it later.

Some woman long ago drank caudle, laboring
in a dim room, stroked by a midwife. Forgotten.
Even my great-grandmother's suffering
was never told, save for the last birth, seventeen
years after the rest. Go to the pictures,
Father said, and the elder children grabbed
the coins and ran. They didn't know and he
was ashamed. The newborn small and powerful,
distilled from the ether, dreams, old rain.

My mother's dress was pressed, her lipstick
pink. My Brylcreemed father drove her around
and around the block until midnight passed,
evading the charge for an extra day.
The nurses strapped her down and hours
of pain vaporized—she did not believe,
in the morning, that I had been born. Who
is that dark girl, her eyes like the first mud,
effervescing. A stranger, a to-do list.

Books say there are good births, but I
don't believe it. All beginnings hurt
someone: the animal, the ground. So much
to witness and all of it slipping away.

Unlock the cupboards, lift all the lids
in the house, to open the womb. Cast rushes
on the floor and heat milk for bathing. Touch
honey to the infant's tongue to wake her hunger,
to sweeten her voice, for she is thinking even
now about the darkness and how to say it.

Supposition Poem

If silent at four the couch
If the book in my hand allows sleep
Like another hand I am holding
If she bears no resemblance to herself
As we knew her as she knew herself
Wearing a resemblance, a semblance, of the self
If dressed in the body of another
If feeding
If wearing this baby as I wear my face
If I become undressed of myself
If on the couch reading or sleeping
A figure, a shape, some matter
The red couch and the red wall behind it
At the wire waking
If another's pain ever travels
If another's pleasure
If weight of the body on the couch
Weight of the body on the couch
If eating is feeding another, if eating is denying another
If dressed in the silence of being never another
If wearing the baby and also my face and the cloth that is the silence
of not hearing, not being able to hear, another
If the window is the sign of departure, the eventual departure
from all others
If the soul is in the body a silence
The silence of flames that don't sputter don't burn out
The red couch and the red wall behind
If the book is as close to another as ever—
wearing the baby and face
wall behind

Inward Abstracts
To enter or to inter.
Both rely on the earth. Terra: which in turn rests on thirst. The earth's opening up: a sigh in the dirt and it will turn. As one enters the other is interred. The wet who comes in, but from within. The very dry one who goes out by going in. I am sorry, which is to say sore, or full of sorrow. To rely is to rally or to re-tie, to gather. This ligamental terrain we lie on. In.

Think of the old, the destroyed. I was a king. Now given as food. Which is an honor. To be eaten. To expect, at the table, a reprisal. Of myself.

The torn bit of skin is expectant: waits to be replaced.

I'm placed as kin toward word. Guarding and regarding that which will round or will rend me.

Knead this matter, this measured month. From kneading comes making: the entwining of mass. If needed I am rounded, insinuated, now sinuous. Mass around which I, curved, imply or am implied. For which and by which I am transparent.

Horizon of Feet

"I hate dancers. Well, I don't really hate them,
but they're not musicians. They just count beats,
oblivious to the music. They wouldn't know a theme
if it bit them. They're arithmetician-athletes."

We're sitting, cooling off, after racquetball,
and I've asked the principal flutist of the New York
City Ballet Orchestra, Paul Dunkel,
to solo in words, to talk about his work.

"Musicians are there to serve the music, not
vice-versa, as with dancers. Think of us
as the composer's lawyers, and our job's to put
forward for our client the best possible case.

"But playing for dancers we're little more than
drummers in a circus, just there to highlight
with sound the dog whose trick it is to run
and jump through a flaming hoop: drumroll, rimshot.

"Likewise, some composers think they're tailors,
writing to order. They make the music fit
the dancing. Four extra steps? Then add two bars.
I call that music-as-Armani-suit.

"The truth is dancers and musicians live in two
different worlds. They're like passengers and pilots
on an airplane, and the conductor's the steward who
talks to them both and connects the dots.

"But Balanchine combined those two worlds with ease.
Russian-trained dancers learn music, and Mr. B.
played both viola and piano, would get ideas
at the keyboard for his choreography.

"My girlfriend used to dance, and when we go
to dance performances we disagree
on everything. She'll say the music's too slow,
I'll say the dancers are too fast; I see

"with my ears, she hears with her eyes. Or I'll say
a female dancer's too thin, and she'll say not.
But one thing we agree on: in his heyday,
Edward Vilella was just right; that is, hot.

"A guy's guy. Tough. I never heard Eddie whine.
He boxed—and learned fast footwork in the ring.
Was always revved, a Harley-Davidson.
Just did his work; let his feet do the talking."

"Vilella could be one of Whitman' s roughs,"
I say, and imagine the poet's ghost, eyes
wide, front row, watching the dancer do his stuff
while partnering Patricia McBride in Rubies.

"Walt leaned and loafed, didn't he? Like the faun.
In fact, we're rehearsing Afternoon today.
Setting the tempo's the catch. The dancers want one,
the musicians want another. They'll win, we'll play.

"Speaking of time ... " He stands to check the clock.
"Those games were long. I'm late. And outta here."
He waves, heads down the hall, then stops, turns back
and adds a coda before he disappears:

'I'm titling my memoir Dancing On My Head.
That sums up playing for dancers in the pit.
Once, I didn't recognize a dancer who said
she knew me. I told her, 'Let me see your feet.'"