butterfly,dip your hand
in the wooden box
of papers on my back
and open me Take
the hand inside the hand
I'm struggling to leave:
Let my hand play!
My old body
My old body:
a ladder of sunlight, mercury dust floating through—
My forgivenesses,
how you have learned to love me in my sleep.
Inkwell daybreak
| Inkwellstairway | daybreak |
| stairway |
Dear girls and boys,
would you go with me and tell me
back to the beginning
—so we can understand!
the journey of our lives
where we met with cruelty
but kindness, too,
and nosed up out
of the cold dark water,
and walked on our fins…
The path between
The path between the two twelve-foot hedges
between the fire and the window
hot on the left side sharp on the right
something wrong Born wrong
cleaves to itself deflects you
Still, someone wrote something here in the dirt
and I sip at the word—
The Night Sea
The longing for touch
was what they lived out of
not mainly their bodies
For that friend
we walked inside of the night sea
shedding our skins—
The Shirt
The shirt was going to be red:
he had to have this shirt—no other—
to stay alive, in prison.
We were setting about to cut, and sew,
but the cotton, they said, was sacred
—we had to fold it and give it back to them.
Then, even though you're so much lighter, and it was white,
you gave him yours…
One Foot in the Dark
People forget
Don't forget me
You
the only white head
in the crowd of young men
live oaks
waiting to be let out of the Visiting Area.
A weed green
A weed green
with a black shadow village under it
and then browngray dirt then a browngray stick
stuck on a stone
which has its own black shoah moat to the north
how hungrily life like an o goes after life
Fears: Night Cabin
Snake tick
black widow
brown recluse
—The truck last night on 79
dragging a chain
—A cloud
rounding slowly
at the window
—The wick unlit
curled cold in the kerosene lamp.
so wild
so wild
I didn't notice for a long time
under your ten skins
your skull
—When life
for the fourth time touched my eyes
with mud and spit
and groaned
—Then
I saw your and my fingerbones
outstretching in the thin blue planet water.
I have lived in your face
I have lived in your face.
Have I been you? Your mother? giving you birth
—this pain
whenever I say goodbye to thee
—up to now I always wanted it
but not this
A goldfinch in the rain
A goldfinch
