Do you read this?

I am considering moving my poems to another website or service. Livejournal has really petered out over the last few years. If you could, please comment if you read my poetry on this journal.

open secret

an open secret
my longing for you: a house with its doors blown off.
a house with no windows.
my house.

everywhere i go i cannot get close enough to the floor.
there is no basement in this house. i've tried.
i no longer want anyone to see me.
i do not want them to see the way i desire you.

i'm tired of living in someone else's skin.
where is my own skin?
where is the perfect skin?

i could wander around and around in circles.
maybe i'll find the secret passageway.
maybe i'll find my suit of skin. this skin is too thin.
too entire. i need a skin that doesn't just bleed.
i need a skin that is made of blood itself.
i need a skin that doesn't just protect me.
i need a skin that needs no protection.

an open secret
like a too-wide hole in a roof
gaping, like the buildings we used to explore.
i used to love the sky.now only the darkest part
of the night is useful.


Jasper Johns, Skin with O'Hara Poem (Field 48)

subway

riding the subway at three am in new york
we were two sixteen year old white girls
she was wearing a dress. it was after
a radiohead concert. we were
lost and trying not to look like it.

we had acquired a couple of men  who were hanging about us, silently
trying to look down her cleavage, the dim lights of the late nite subway train
flickering above, the incomprehensible station readouts scrolling.
we stepped off to shake the men, two girls in Queens, exited by a highway,
and crossed the deserted stretch to enter a neighborhood empty except
for the group of exceptionally large men loitering in front of us. they turned, noticed us.

the cab pulled up then, and we were told to get in right away, and
we did, and we were told we'd been saved, and we agreed. we gave the cab driver
all the money we had to drive us to the Village. it was forty bucks
plus another twenty Anna found on an escalator.

the assumption, looking back, is that we would have been robbed,
raped. the assumption is mine, too. we were a walking
vulnerability, too far strayed from the protective embrace of the family,
the state, the lights, the assumptions of safety  guarding
otherwise rapeable bodies.

we gave him forty dollars for the ride. the extra twenty was for saving us from
the assumption. looking back, i can wonder
why did we think we knew the future?
there was nothing but demographics: this neighborhood, your body (big, male, dark) our bodies (small, female, pale), this street, this time of night. there was nothing there but demographics.

Fairy Shrimp

slowly, they move together.
he clasping her, feeling the darkness
as they drift between dusty sediments
and sunken leaves that move away from them,
slowly, like great sleepy buffalo.

they have already made love,
but they will stay together until
he can no longer hold on.

they are aware, though they have no words,
that this moment has been given
in between birth and death.

for two nights and days
he will clasp her, until his body, built for two weeks
of life, crumples. she will go the same way
a while after, releasing her eggs
and falling like a leaf to the bottom.

but tonight is the holiest of nights. clasped in
mute symphony they navigate the dark,
their lives a silky liquid pool in a vast darkness
of trees, erect, solemn and nameless,
as alien a landscape as the moon, as vast as the
canvas of space and time.

in my version

in my version of the Dream,
I place my lips on your throat
and i can feel yr pulse
the
hummingbird jewel of your blood
Under the sturdy skin;

in My version of this dream,
I say something to you that means
hello- i am - you are - my life- has been-

and in my mouth i say the words that transmit
that deepest longing in a word unknown
to any language, the secret place.
and you do not laugh.

You respond hello- i am-
you are- my life- has been-
you place your lips on mine and in my mouth
you transmit the secret word,
a round ball of polished obsidian.

o silent night

silent night, holy night
blessed woman in white,
neither virgin nor despoiled but breathing,
hot red blooded human exister,
thundering home
amidst a shellac of stars

cradling the infant at her chest,
her nightgown open to expose the breast

turning to you slyly, she says:

this is the only day when god is a baby,
Holy Christmas day.
Did you not, when your children were born,
feel the exact same way?

Tomorrow the sun will rise over the sand. It will be

the Dawn of Peace.

It will last, for us, the duration of its rising, like the perfect pink morning
when you emerge from the hospital, blinking at the light,
a miracle cradled in your arms.

Every moment, in every day, God is being born; all pink and startling in His newness.

God and I just thought this one human birth
would illuminate the world
so for a moment, so you could see it happen.



the sun is coming up.
it is happening.

Shhh

in my dream

in my dream-time, a hand reaches over my body,
slides over my skin,
sensuous, meandering,
it glides over the side of my stomach
and it does not pause at the gate of the breast,
the underside of that curve, to slide over,
but instead slides under, slides in
so that it reaches across me as if i were flat-chested
the hand that touches
me as if i were new

Bridges Over Satana

I grew up in Satana, where the wheat is pale gold,
seed-topped in the fall by clusters the color of fresh blood.

I was a foal myself in Satana. Like my sisters, my placenta was dug with a spade
into the soil of my people's fields, and that is why the seed-tops are so red
in the fall.

We knew only ourselves, and ourselves were the world:
a million acres of brown-red skin, yellow fields, hummingbirds and deer.
I made love in Satana, and my passion seeped into the fields.
I made love and children in Satana, and they grew up strong as red-topped wheat.
Four strong stalks were my sons and daughters.

When the bridge was built we welcomed our visitors;
our hands were outstretched with the harvest. The Satana river
with its scattered banks of shells and bones and beaver sticks
was now crossed by a span of stone. When they came they brought caravans,
machines and houses that came apart in pieces and went back together.
They brought donkeys and little brown-red children walking beside wagons.
They brought pieces of stone that gleamed in the hand like trapped stars.

I grew up in Satana, and I have died in Satana,
my bones were ground and put into the sacred wheatberry meal,
and my people ate me and they are strong.

My children did not live through the war with the bridge builders;
Four strong stalks cut down in a midnight raid. That was before the bridgers
grew ill and began to draw back across the Satana river, one family at a time
wrapped in rags and sniffling, their faces gone pale and flat.

Before they went they buried their dead in boxes.
Their god-man said the disease was caused by an evil spirit, but if
they left Satana, the spirit would not follow them home.
We watched their donkeys clop, clop over the stone bridge until at last they were gone.

I lived a long time in Satana, over one hundred years,
each one as golden as the last, and we have almost forgotten the bridge-builders.
The bridge itself is a heap of stone for the Satana river to babble around
in the wakening of the earth, while the great brown-black soil warms.

I will come again each spring
in the tender wheat stalks and the bodies of small children,
who are now gaining strength and bone inside their mothers' bellies.
I am Satana's child, the red-gold kernel inside the wheatberry husk.