It’s a vocabulary of old country
songs, unfaithful women
and open roads, a scratchy
vinyl itching in her thighs.
This fear of swimming pools
and gas station bathrooms. 

This tiny thing breathing between us that aches something awful.
By summer, I am slipping all the complimentary mints in my coat pockets
while you pay the check. Gripping the railings on bridges to keep
diving over. Some dark dog in my throat when I say hello.

For years, I dreamt of the child who, when I reached out to her,
turned into a sheet of paper, and so, in waking hours, I wrote and
wrote and wrote and my friends consoled me: see, you have book
babies; this, while I looked on at other women who knit bibs and
booties, so many booties, such small socks. 

Caught in the belly of a whale within a turgid sea and among me the sorry remains of little fish. There is no color of blood. (You see, the island will be full of strange foreboding.)

The west was a patchwork of color flung over a racing sky,
The wind was a lover’s whisper that needed no reply,
The strip was of weed-torn concrete, scarring the desert floor,
And a derelict came flying,
Flying, flying,
A derelict came flying,
Long final to zero four.

I hear you walking in the night;
You think I’m fast asleep.
I know your sounds of loneliness;
I hear you pray and weep.

The
sea urchin
is a repository
for the souls
of mariners
reaped by the sea

All night the room breathes out its grief.
Exhales through surfaces. The sideboard.
The curtains: the stale air stalled there.
The kiln-fired claws of the china bird.

In the deep fall, the body awakes,
And we find lions on the sea-shore–
Nothing to fear.
The wind rises, the water is born,
Spreading white tomb clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.

It was Spring but that gave her a feeling of Christmas, this rush of people with bags and parcels all a gift to her and she felt so in control of the direction her life was taking moment by moment as she crisscrossed the city underneath in such a crowd, stood close to the doors so she could always read the blue-tiled station names, unfamiliar and all seductive. Then a hand moved up her thigh.

And the wind is the moan of the prairie
That haunts and bedevils the plains
The soul stealin’ kind that can fray a man’s mind
Till only his whimper remains

He was every burnt out cowboy that I’d seen a million times
With dead man penny eyes, like tarnished brass,
That reflected accusations of his critics and his crimes
And drowned them in the bottom of a glass.

Working backward in sleep, the
last thing you numbed to is what
wakes you.

I woke up today just in time
to introduce a poet
then to hear him read his rhymes
so unlike mine           & not bad
as I’d thought another time

Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.