Inside they hide bright walls.
Turquoise or lipstick pink.
Good colors in another country.
Here they can’t make you forget

They say I’m a beast.
And feast on it. When all along
I thought that’s what a woman was.

What the body might guess,
what the hand requests,
what language assumes
becomes amulet,
which is to say
I am carrying your face
in a locket in a box
to a virtual location
guarded by kestrels,

The effect of the water on voices, the illusion of brilliance and suspense, was the same here as it had been at the Bunkers’ but the sounds here were louder, harsher, and more shrill, and as soon as he entered the crowded enclosure he was confronted with regimentation.

Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.

Women don’t riot, not in maquilas in Malaysia, Mexico, or Korea,
not in sweatshops in New York or El Paso.
They don’t revolt
in kitchens, laundries, or nurseries.
Not by the hundreds or thousands, changing
sheets in hotels or in laundries
when scalded by hot water,
not in restaurants where they clean and clean
and clean their hands raw.

Remembering Revelation I wanted to laugh,
the way a nonbeliever remembers Sunday School
and laughs, which is to say–after flood and rains,
drought and despair,
abrupt invasions,
disease and famine everywhere,
we’re still left dumbfounded
at the persistence of fiction.

Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy the light
of freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an
Indiana owl
or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the
imagination

Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your
sculpture factory
Turns magical at times
Behind its dark blue Druid door.     Last night,
Inside you, sweetheart,
It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself.

My mouth is snow slowly caking that stiff pigeon.
My mouth, the intricately moist machinery of a plant.
I have forgotten if I ever had a mouth.