Second Love Sonnet (2)
How odd that I cannot resent this weight.
Your head is pressing on my throat; I’ll wait
until you are entirely asleep
before I move: this forehead is the same
you touched to trace for me the way your deep
and laughing wrinkles will appear. That game
was serious: you traced my fated seams
as well, and said you hoped I would not mind,
that all my worried multiplying streams
would spill across my face, and you would find
them wonderful. This is untenable:
I cannot sigh or swallow, so I take
your head in trembling soft treasonable
hands: you murmur, but you do not wake.

Judith (1) revised
I think of you, o Judith, as I lie awake.
I will not be a cold Lucretia, or a saint,
her tongue cut out: I will not wrench my ecstasy
from silence or self-sacrifice. Why should I be
like anyone but gray-eyed Judith, who perfumed
herself with spice and sandalwood, who then bitumed
the sheets with monster's blood? You carried home his head
as though it were a cabbage or a loaf of bread
bought in the marketplace. I only hope the sweat
that ran into your stinging eyes did not prevent
you glutting on your fury when those hands,
like drunken crabs that scrambled at your skirt, released.
So woman's vengeance must be tenderer than man's --
my awful sister, we're exacting to appease.

First love sonnet #2

My worm, my private monster who resides
between my eyelids and my itching eyes,

you are still here. My bloated spider, crouched
above my brain, your needle-slender legs
tap sonnets on my skull; a silk-spun pouch
wraps warm around a hundred thousand eggs.

My parasite, your viney body binds
my tortured tongue, caressing fingers wind
along my throat; your double hooking teeth
are nestled in my voice, and underneath

my crawling skin, between my hips, I feel
you still, at times more clamorously real
than any lover whose keen lips transform
to yours, whose trembling hands take on your form.

Judith (2)
The flesh resists my penetration but
there's one soft place beneath the heavy chin.
This then will be my entrance point: I surge.
We two are pressed so close your desperate hands
are scrambling on my skirt like drunken crabs
your breath still slow and stuporous and sweet
and rank with wine is snarling the sheets
around our legs. And when an eager louse
goes skittering across the hand that seized
you by your greasy goatwool hair I heave.
But swordweight sweat-slicked palms wet tent-trapped heat
I am gray owl wings in hunting flight.
Your head rolls heavy, dull-ripe-thumps like fruit
nudge-bumps my foot before I scoop you up.

Apoptosis
I will be an inconvenience from now on.
We die like cells, politely; we gather ourselves in.
We fold our organs up in clean canopic packages
in waxed white paper labeled kidneys lungs etcetera.
Our empty fair and unpolluted shapes
are neatly boxed to go.
Enough, enough, enough. Start dying ugly.
O let's be terrible as staring wings.
When stars die,
they burst their insides out
so should we
so should we make it bitter arsenic and vomit choke up apples black and bloated tongues and fear
and fear us, gentlemen.

I think of you, o Judith, as I lie awake.
I will not be a cold Lucretia, nor a saint,
her tongue cut out: I will not wrench my ecstasy
from silence or self-sacrifice. Why should I be
like anyone but gray-eyed Judith, who perfumed
herself with spice and sandalwood, and then bitumed
the sheets with monster's blood? You carried home his head
as though it were a cabbage or a loaf of bread
bought in the marketplace. I only hope the sweat
that ran into your stinging eyes did not prevent
your satisfying anger when you saw those hands,
like drunken crabs that scrambled at your skirt, release.
If woman's vengeance must be tenderer than man's --
at least, then, Sister, we're exacting to appease.

There's nothing irreducibly complex:
a driven randomness details
the corkscrew of flagellar tails
and parasites impel us to have sex.

So grind flagella into dust: you'll find
old Yersinia's spare needle;
when she isn't plaguing people
she blindly tinkers, as do all our kind.

We living things are ad hoc engineers:
the human eye sees upside down;
the brain must flip the world around.
The skies are not fixed Matryoshka spheres.

I tend to mince my words, and exercise
strict posture when I eat: my arms and eyes
ahead, my feet laid flat, and back fixed straight,
I pepper every phrase before I taste.
But I should shave my head, be vulture-bald
and impolite, extract the offal all
the lionesses and prim epicures
disdain, and tear intestines and get fur
stuck in my teeth. The best are redolent
of bloat with microbes and with metaphors --
the choicest, juiciest of words ferment;
putrescent dainties please detritivores.
Or else a fungus, with tremendous roots,
and rotting earth will birth unlovely fruits.

How strange! The heavens stopped like freight trains stop,
those sobbing, grinding planetary wheels
-- that metal sound that makes the marrow drop
down to the bottom of one's bones. I reel
at first; you kiss as though you're never sad,
and there I was, my feet and eyes on stones
so old they move arthritically, their bones
begrimed with soot -- and you, an oread,
sun-crowned! My daydreams love to torture me
like boys who pull the wings off flies, to see
their hopelessness -- and so I walked, when you
dreamed up yourself, and dropped white asters through
your fingers, so they fell like stars; their scent
trailed after them like light in their descent.

Forget the fall! Just tell me how you flew
before the air around you pivoted
right-angle with the sea, and plummeted
by skywards, when you traded blue for blue.

Forget the melting-candle smell before,
and don't tell me you were afraid -- you bore
me when you do. Keep on this way, I'll go --
unless you'll tell me how it was to know

the sky as intimately as the earth
knows rain. You're flotsam now, and wash ashore
in floating feathers, nibbled bones -- it's worth
it for the myth and gorgeous metaphor.

Indifferent poets picked your ribs like eels --
you never said how flight or falling feels.

Listen, lover, when you asked, I told
you, "Bring me wild roses" -- well, I meant
it like the princess who, unloving, sent
her swain to find a star. Since it is cold

December and no wild roses are
alive -- but you come back, your hands and arms

in tatters, like the fragrant feral things
Resisted you, as I have, with their claws.
What kind of idiot would think to bring
me what I asked for, when no binding clause

can hold me to the promises I made?
Did you collect me stories with those blooms?
You're spattered with their barbarous perfume --
but tell me all you saw, and I'll be swayed.

The origin of "chrysalis" is "gold" --
so etymology is beautiful,
and entomology, as well, unfolds
exquisite wings. Creation's bountiful

in connotations, natural poetry
and little jokes we find like Easter eggs
in ordinary speech. Bathymetry
of language or the living cosmos begs

Attention, but, distracted, we ignore
Incalculable depths so we can speak.
There are no simple words. They're only more
or less compact. Just think what we could wreak --

A "nymph," from "veiled" and "bud" and "bride"
is only insubstantial from outside.

Come, be my lover in the garden, dear --
And let sophisticated orchids leer,
and let the virgin violets shield their eyes
And let sunflowers toss their manes and roar
Indifference. Barbaric dragonflies
Mate cartwheeling in flight; the slugs adore
Each other in a dangling embrace.
Let’s not speak of the butterflies, who face
Apart, but otherwise let’s be like low
And crawling things. So, apple blossom-fed
And honeysuckle-drunk, we will forego
Formalities. Among dead leaves, we’ll shed
Our rattling skins. The fingers of the grass
Will tattoo secret music on our backs.

I leave you with my hair and thoughts as fierce
in disarray as dandelion seeds.
And who would think those windblown wisps could pierce
the ground, come spring, like my impatient needs
will do? Tell me how I can comfort you --
what do the dandelions tell the wind?
You scatter me so easily -- I flew
before your touch. Now I cannot begin
To root myself – the dying earth forbids
intrusions of that kind, so I am still
at wing. I'd spin us both a chrysalis
against the coming cold -- but how then will
we two emerge? We'll breathe the shocking air --
and scatter snake-green sproutlings everywhere.

For Emma Bovary


I used to think it was your tragedy
to choose an ugly means of suicide.
I've reconsidered since. That irony
is less important than it seems. You died

(though all unknowingly) defiantly;
you were magnificent in agony.
You took your beauty back into yourself,
and swallowed it like arsenic. What wealth

you left your pretty daughter, when you seized
yourself from their astonished hands, released
your body from their hungry gorging gaze --
your last act was to force their eyes away.

How odd to think that you'd be horrified
to see subversion in your suicide.

Ophelia was tougher than you thought -

I would imagine, at the end, she fought

herself; the urge to breathe is powerful.

The willow helped; I'm sure those terrible

arthritic fingers in her drunken dress

gave more authority to the command

to drown. But then, she pressed her slender hand

against the glassy surface. She transgressed.

For this audacity, they buried her

without a requiem -- let them inter

an empty fair and unpolluted shape

for virgin violet food, so she escaped --

So all my sisters' mad despairs are mine;

pills tangle in my arms like willow vines.

Those flowers, straining at their branchlets in the wind
that bent the slender trunk of our young crabapple
Reminded me of dying moths that flutter, pinned
alive, displayed as though they could be beautiful

Preserved and still -- not yet; but in their agony
if only they'd the leverage, they would tear through
their small dark bodies, they would fall breathlessly,
they would stray softly to the ground as petals do.

I watched them, and I thought how it would be to burst
ahead, and leave my moth-dust on your fingertips.
I thought I was alone, and so inclined perverse --
I thought of flight, and mapped the rivers of my wrists.

And you stood strained and strangely silent, watching me
until the moths turned back to flowers on the tree.

I write unseasonable rhyme for you.

The time for poetry is when the figs

Are falling-ripe; and arch the supple twigs
Like lovers' backs. But even if I grew
Around you, vine-like, I'd not blossom now
Or in a hundred years; I am so young,
And others' words trip strangely on my tongue,
And I revolt against their fusty vows.
As foolish children of the modern age,
We are too wise and cynical to – but
I will avoid the word; I cannot gauge
Its usefulness as yet. But here is what
Impels my rhyme: though wise, I still remember
Your foolish gift -- primroses in December.

The Poet Reconciles Her Two Worlds

When asked why I believe I say (well first
I mark my battered Origin) but then:
Consider anglerfish, that most perverse
Of finned and swimming mouths (or one of them).
It is no proof, or not in formal sense
And yet those cave-like bear-trap maws that gape
Like evil shipwrecks or a graveyard fence
Are in their way divine -- or how they mate!
The ladies with their harems on their backs,
The tiny gentlemen reduced to sacks
Of clinging parasitic sperm, or how
That deadly dinner-bell hangs from her brow!
For all the world's uncertain, we have this:
If God can make a joke, then God exists.

Let me pour drops of myself out to you --
But so: the trembling-insubstantial dew
Leaves ghosts upon the grass. We two will grow
Together like the jagged teeth of caves
In concentrated, ore-dense beads and slow
Relentless rhythms. Once, the dead gods gave
Their blessing to the linden and the oak
Who stand with winter-budding limbs entwined --
And so we will be ancient, by and by.
We will be monuments. We will evoke
A rippling stillness in the mortal things
Who will, beside our reaching arms, stand small,
And we will flood the air with echoing
Of salt-rich heavy droplets as they fall.

I wish I'd been the first to write the rose
Though I could not have given it to you;
I am the one with thorns. And I suppose
That years of imitation wear the truth
From metaphors, although the flattery
Is nice. They'd compost the original.
So will you be an oak? My botany
is half-remembered, but as I recall,
An oak has a solemnity and age
That is not yours, and then there are the roots.
You are more wonderful and far more strange --
I don't think I will find a plant to suit.
How would you like to be an octopus?
So unbotanical! Unobvious!


In Reply to the One to Whom I Last Wrote Poetry, Who Was Not Satisfied

If you would be a flower, be my artichoke.
You could be so delicious dipped in olive oil
Like a green Greek wrestler – but now I think I spoke
Too soon, betrayed myself – don't let this blunder spoil
Our courtship. I woo as well as Cyrano
And patient as Penelope – I must be so.
For you I'll be a poet: soft, persuading, slow
So when at last I peel your steaming leaves – but no –
Though not for you that haughty coldness of the rose
Whom you resemble in your dense complexity
Though you are earthily delectable and those
Small spines are no dissuasion, my carnality
Is premature. This is the wooer's art
To make you steam, and then to win your heart.

My love for you should not be poetry,

nor budding rose nor sunset nor

another usual aesthetic metaphor.

I’ve tried on every tired simile

I found, like ugly hats. What’s more,

for just how long can you sit still and watch

(and I mean really watch) the sun descend

as stars appear like needles through a swatch

of dusk? After all, you know how the rose

and sunset end:

with clarity,
with curling clouds and petals, drifting prose --

But if my love for you were gravity!

I nurture thoughts of suicide like cuckoo chicks

in warblers' nests; I read last night about the tricks

the cuckoo plays on stupid mother birds:

she leaves her offspring in the other nest

to kill its foster-siblings and protest

its shrilling hunger to its nurse; absurd

and small beside the monstrous infant-thing,

she stuffs its gaping maw with dainty worms

and hairy caterpillars, which she brings

unceasingly. Bright twitching insects squirm

and cram its gut; she loves the parasite.

Her own chicks never feathered; their first flight

was falling, so their mother must deceive --

delude, beguile, blind herself or grieve.