his body had already vanished.
Belltower
My throat is a belltower
in a stone cathedral
tolled and echoing.
Great pangs of discord
plumb the hollow calm there
where once woolen blue
morning mist filled the arcs
of the belltower’s walls
until gray doves awoke
in the soft down of hope,
of desire. Now the bells
peal all wrong, if an ear
could hear deep, muffled chords
from a tangled up throat
that feels like a belltower
rung wild with fear
by strong hands. But the bells’
tone belongs to no town.
Io
Because he is near
you constantly explode,
revealing the hidden liquid
at your center, a sort of fear
as he hangs there, his great density
anchoring storms,
the globe of his mass
clouded orange in your face.
Tides tied to this lord
of your lava, his appeal
makes you wobble. Your veneer
—the smooth body he longed for—
cracks, then spews out hot jets.
Now your molten heart shows
how a hard shell recovers
with soft, flooding depths.
Hades
(Persephone)
You who pulled me for your dark concerns
must know that I never
wished to be bound,
only taken. And because
overshadowing motion
awoke in you the near-dead coals
so they glowed, I would let you
consider me ember,
ghost with you through those ashen rooms
razed of abandonment,
comb lifeless pools
so deeply inclined. I would gladly
eat with you, touch, discuss
that land beyond your portals, filled
with the dumb and deceived,
venturing out only to prove
my barren preference.
—It was due to me. Plenty
could be had up there in the wrack
of shallows, while we distilled,
turning ourselves on ourselves
like figures in a forge
without light—.
We became more solid
by what we did not meet
in the tenebrous balm
of our element, the enduring gloom.
Our outlines sharpened. Charred
by a smoldering heat, we then cooled
so much that our bodies,
mistaken as husks,
flaked from their cores.
Disobedience
(Eve)
God, I belong to no one.
Not even one of your minions.
So when the strange man pinned
me against the bricks, drew my hand
to his crotch, I thought,
Good! Let Him watch.
Let Him see how I worship
on my knees. In an empty alley.
Let Him see how my lips
open and close to the profane ballet
of desire without a heart.
In these rough motions that start
from knowledge, let there be pleasure.
And when the young man pushed
my head down farther, slipped
himself into my voice,
when I felt the pristine statue
of my body tip and shatter
into many stones, I thought (again)
Good! It does not matter
that I break. It does not mean
I should not speak. I’m not a thing
to be defined, by Him, by any one.
I’m not a thing He orders.
I choose this prayer instead.
If I am afraid, I am afraid
of myself, or of another. Not of you.
Not of You, my absent Father.
Rapture’s Lack
Why must lust
depend on division?
Why does sex stun
when it’s most unbound?
To be whole, they have always told me,
is the province
of a woman: to be full: fulfilled.
Nothing about fear.
Nothing about the sublime
writhed desire
locked in body and mind,
the incapable aches
roiling sleep—.
What spurs the blood
into simmering
does not love it,
would not suffer one lack
to prevent its being spilled.
What becomes one body
to another
is imagining, not truth. How terribly
this sort of rapture
—covetous, uncluttered—
cleaves us empty.
Geometry
I made myself a circle, then a square.
I made a box too small for him to open
and then a portal which, from anywhere,
displayed the magnitude of my affection.
Once full of pliant roundnesses and curves,
his private tapestry, I made a skin
tight as a drum, impervious to pain
and drew this on as if to stop an army,
then turned into a blossom on a plain,
rose-like and fragrant, luring him to come
and nestle in. I threw the flower at him
crumpled in a ball. It hit the floor
and there I was: plain angry red, a sphere
as foreign to his faculties as Mars.
In every way I wanted him to care.
I made myself a circle, then a square.
The Goddess Stopped
(Thetis)
In that grotto I would go to, shadows
rocked along the tufa walls
and low waves cradled out to sea
the bay’s evening detritus. Sprawled
on a stone warmed by a ray that struck
its surface from a gap, I’d rest
until ready to enter the ocean depths
again. He saw me in that slash
of sun—was slinging his net of fish
back to another shore—dropped it, and crept
soft to my sleeping body to link his
arms around me.—Feverish heart
that pounded loudly! I woke to charge
at his hold, a heron with flapping wings
so strong they should have flung him.
He gripped hard. So I jerked upright,
a cedar tree with bristling needles
and scabrous bark—he held. I writhed
to a tiger, volcanic with tearing shafts.
He loosened and I slithered free.
—How could I be one self, yet so many?
Proteus counseled him, and when he came
a second time, as my shape ranged
from wrangling fins to brutal tufa jags,
he refused to weaken, though he bled
and burned from what flailed, lunged, or scraped.
No matter how she changes, keep
your grip. She will be what she was
eventually. Just wait. Proteus’ words.
My last form was an icicle whose crags
thrust tips like blades. Peleus wept
at such concrete estrangements
but he stayed. By the time dawn flared
on the darkened tide, I couldn’t bear
the weight of change any longer, shrank
to myself again. We slept. I dreamed
of the bay, its sickle shape held by the land
and when we woke, we conceived our Achilles.
Second Song
(1978)
First stacked heels, first gold hoops, first sexy
skirt, green and diaphanous wraparound
Danskin skirt meant for my ballet class,
first junior high school dance, first pulsing bulbs
and loud familiar music loosening limbs
to moves I’d only practiced with a girlfriend;
Does this look okay? Is this cool? Or dumb?
Not wobbling between confidence and shame.
Stabs of excitement walking in the gym
darkwashed from pristine bleakness to a den
of red light, strobe light, eleven and twelve year-olds
finding themselves, like me, in their new skins
of carnal creatures in a blurry realm,
a place that in our minds could writhe with vipers
or blaze with stars. We were the epic heroes
in an adventure just shoved off from shore
or else we were little specks inside a beaker
who’d rearrange, assimilate, and die.
First practice stopped, to lose track in the end
of how I wanted to look and begin moving
freely and indiscreetly to the BeeGees,
Marvin Gaye, Santana, the Eagles, Chic.
By song two, I’d wiped out all thought of home,
the port that, dazed and sweating, I’d return to,
a Persephone who wanted to stay with Pluto:
changed on the inside, ready to leave her mother
without a word or tear. I was that young
and unentrenched, first body’s pull that strong.
Safe Swimming
Percy Priest Lake one July afternoon,
me in my bright orange life vest
and round, wide face, wearing a two-piece,
red with beige stripes.
The two of you sit in the motorboat and sip
canned beer out of an ice chest
so cold the aluminum drips.
Into the long, green, odorous wake
of the water, lukewarm and thick
with its summer spawning, its reek of live fish,
I drop my body, sleek and plump as a seal’s.
The lake sheathes my skin, slips over and coats
my hair ends. Up close, the water’s brown.
On the boat you sip your beer again
and laugh. I revise it now, a scene so crisp
nobody but myself has witnessed it
who’s still alive: the clean, white motorboat,
the two of you leaning at ease, lightly dressed,
you laughing, tossing your lipsticked smile back,
your hair freshly set. It’s the mid-1970s.
I’m a spark on this memory’s surface,
its riveted warp; a watery sack of bone
and flesh, a red speck. I am six or seven.
After I swim, we will eat sardines
on crackers smeared with yellow mustard
so bright it seems leaked from the sun.
The two of you look happy in this light
I have captured. Now, you are looking at me.
I’m swimming—see? I’m close to the boat
where you are, but free to swing my vision
to the forested banks behind my head
that hold pockets of darkness, an infinite shimmer
of leaves. The Tennessee sunlight hammers
several feet of the lake to a warm, womb-like silt
that makes me sleepy. I should swim back.
But this day will last hours—we all can feel it.
It holds us in the palm of a leisure
so timeless it might still be here.
I am floating separate, but know your figures
are behind me, in the hold of what’s stopped.
You laugh and talk. I could meet your eyes
from my point in near-distance. The boat gently rocks.
Helioseismology
The study of acoustic oscillations that make the sun ring like a bell.
No hole at the center,
so how do you ring?
Surface oscillations
and low, thrumming waves
roll across you, or shudder
at your deepest range…
One need not be empty
to sound. You’re the stop
in the cosmos’s hollow,
the odd ball of particles
hung in the bell
whose gold dome, hammered fresh
and still smoking, lies stretched
far above us. The top
of this rounded container,
sloped down to a rim
I’ll call wide open “lips”
brimmed with terrible ends
and beginnings, new clappers
of bronze, which will take
giant hold when you’re gone
(they are forging already)
I can’t—listening—see
being stuck in the dumb
middle dust of the gong-haunted,
unsettled chamber
between your last clang
and the vibrating dome.
The Climb
A crack in the grass at their feet.
—The man jerks his legs back
and the black lash whips
swiftly—a quaking crevice
on yellow ground. It splits
the dust-mote laden refuge of late
afternoon with a low
winnowing rustle, shoots
like a loosed arrow from the human pair
who—startled—start backward
and freeze to stare.
Its cross-stitched skin glints, slick
with the sun it had lain in, an oiled refraction.
Perhaps it had been basking in wait
for dusk’s little animal jolts,
priming its throat. Perhaps
it had made a crushed-grass nest
in the sun’s seepage, some golden settlement.
—A gap of pause, in which two moths
list, clumsy and fresh
in ferruginous wings. The humans listen
while the snake hesitates, time hinged
on a break. Then, it slips
into grass blades, yes, but this—it slips
up, into the wrangle of branches
of a recently-leaved bush, uses that
itself to a nearby fir, wires higher
the forked boughs. They hear rasps
of jostled foliage. The slim body of sound
skims bark, twines and writhes,
unfixing leaves, while the pair eye this,
their thoughts lifting
—this being the last thing
from this least thing to expect.
Look! she exclaims, as it reaches one perch
and the bough dips under its weight
(it is a big snake),
almost pours it to dirt. But no: it can bend
for such risk, clamber what’s vertical
to a place above their minds
within the fir tree’s needled fronds
which cast miniature rungs of shadow
rippling its coat. It lies quietly, mottled
by the softly blown fringe filtering light.
A Cove
What I saw there
traveling with my mother
along that dipping coast
as I peered into small coves,
private, unreachable,
hundreds of feet below
and tossed with lucid water
—a guidebook green-blue ocean
beside a perfectly white-grained shore—
was nothing but the water and the shore
and the black rugged rocks
the ocean rocked against
and the calm, dark, longer reaches
at the horizon above an unseen floor
that verged and slipped, I knew
to desolate fathoms.
It was later I imagined
the fish, stranded i
n wild water,
what a life might be that lived perpetually moved,
submitted to the crush,
back and forth, of a rocking border,
the fingernail of shore
never an arrival, unless by mistake.
What you won’t find in the shallows
of the Pacific’s shoreline coves
is the giant clam
whose scalloped shell might be a flute,
an animal which does not move
except to open and close
its shell. But you might discover
hordes of pale crustaceans
gathered and thinned with the tide,
and the grass rockfish
whose scales are the hue of bluegrass,
and the moray eel
whose life began as a silver dart
in some fresh river, and who will,
with its low-slung jaw and giant eyes
kill an octopus,
and the fragile-appearing starfish
who can, with its retractable stomach,
grip and suck
a clam clean of its insides,
and the limpet whose foot strikes the rock,
whose pointed shell looks like a Chinese hat,
and, most telling of all, the small,
circular, coin-like
“sailors-on-the-wind”
so helpless they can go
only where the tide carries. They end
up here, as if cupped in a palm
always tipping, sloshed
to a blue, iridescent phalanx. A bloom
of them may wash up and die
in a gurgle of color, stranded on rocks.
In this spirited flux
it is good to be flexible, like the postelsia,
a sturdy plant rooted to the rock.
When the tide blusters and swells, its stalk
bends to touch the ground on one side
and bends to touch the ground on the other,
springing back and forth
in the happenstance current
its fixed, moving life.
When I feel a darkness
I think of the small fish hanging
in their net of mist,
helpless, silent
as wisdom is,
the water’s torment
sweeping them from one bare moment
to another, like the wave of a mood.
Unflappable,
occasionally swimming against the current
(but not often), they prove
the case that it may be stronger,
when some force is upon you,
to let yourself
be tugged in the wake of its gesture,
however mindless.
If you wait, and if you move
very slowly, it may catch you in its surge