today overlaps
dual-exposed
on the retinae
stretches all buses to double-deckers
and cupcakes rise in ghost wedding cake layers
my eyes are dreaming
though the body walks
awake
***Who knew a pharmacologic side effect could inspire poetry?
weird sounds: the bellgoat
bellgoat comes from over the mountain. a bellgoat is
your neighbor growing out her hair. bellgoat knows
the anatomy by heart
of every dream in which you will end up running after something
you can’t see.
a bellgoat, incapable of lying, lying in a cape on the shore.
(this sentence intimates a cape: a body of water engulfed by sound…
My, God, I have serious poem envy right now. E. is brilliant!
velliety into volition
Paul (from somewhere in Romans): For I do not do what I want, but do the very thing I hate.
If only
I were a better mother
a kinder daughter
a truer lover,
less a liar sighed into air
and forgotten; inclination
minus drive leans living
in directions I won’t take:
a lightly traveled path
glimpsed and abandoned.
Still, this imperfect
skirting of rubber
kissing asphalt–
my do balanced after
I am and I think
until the scales tip the equation
and I bite the apple.
I take the hand.
I welcome the kiss.
Choice is choice.
memory
We all have shadows,
person-shaped
thrown against our hearts
sometimes,
mine dance.
the promiscuity of pollen
Summers, I drive past
regimented rows of patented plants
weedless and well-watered
behind signs saying where
seed DNA was spun,
like gold from straw was once,
magic from a mundane wheel;
but centrifuged stiltskin-like
and greedy for progeny.
There’s no stopping the spread.
Wind is innocent and bees
follow instinct as directionless.
Pollen is promiscuous and doesn’t care
who owns its code in the scatter
towards seasonal immortality,
the only way plants can know it.
what we are
for T
I don’t read tarot any more
or enumerate names,
but there is safety in archetypes
predicting the obvious
and blaming a planetary dance
for the outcome.
What we are is more real
than a construct of cards fanned flat
on my grandmother’s scarf can tell.
This us requires more than guessing,
a substance fired into the house we grow,
slow in a row of nows, a mortar of yes,
and any future that needs reading
is solid, not scribed on these palms
dry from gardening and strong soap,
but etched in the curve of my mouth,
suggested in the corners of your eyes
when you smile. We are past blueprinting
forever and build it, brick by brick
and stone solid.
when the weather breaks
Spring is an egg, chipped
and spilling rain (not the blue
robin’s egg we know, but
the gray marble sky reflected
in the nests of house sparrows).
Impatient, we pace,
count steamed breath,
wait for weather to break, for what stirs
under that shell
to split one morning open,
becoming summer.
