My Heart A Collection of Prose Poetry Mazie Louise Montgomery Dicey Brown Media Publications, Inc. Raleigh, North Carolina MY HEART Names, characters, places, and incidents of these poems are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher. DICEY BROWN MEDIA PUBLICATIONS, INC. Manufactured in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Copyright 2006 by Karen Ashburner All rights reserved First Edition Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications where certain stories of the collection have first appeared: "An Evolution of Body," Menda City Review. "In The Center of That Red Chaos," Juked. Meda City Review. "Mental Exertion Alone Will Not Set You Free," Juked. "An Angel Wears a Wreath of Roses," Menda City Review. "And the Woodpeckers with Their Beeks and the Owls in the Night," Juked. "A Beautiful Stripe of Red," Juked. "Immolate," Dicey Brown. "First, The Egg," Wandering Army. "Life's Basic Plot," Wandering Army. "Two Different Forms of The Same Curiosity," and "Squandering for Simplicity," Wandering Army. "The Web of the Spider" "Boxcars and Bottletops," and "Her Eyes Wide and Not Looking at Anything in Particular," Alice Blue Review. "Lost to Passion or Folly," and "Just Beyond That," 42 Opus. HER EYES WIDE AND NOT LOOKING AT ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR THE WEB OF THE SPIDER BOXCARS AND BOTTLETOPS SQUANDERING FOR SIMPLICITY TWO DIFFERENT FORMS OF THE SAME CURIOSITY LIFE'S BASIC PLOT FIRST THE EGG A FACE OF IRON SHEETS AN EVOLUTION OF BODY AN ANGEL WEARS A WREATH OF ROSES IN THE CENTER OF THAT RED CHAOS IN THE BLUE OF THE NIGHT My Heart IMMOLATE MENTAL EXERTION ALONE WILL NOT SET YOU FREE THE DUST OF A NAKED PLANET THE EXPERIMENTAL FACT AND THE WOODPECKERS WITH THEIR BEAKS AND THE OWLS IN THE NIGHT AROUND US THE FLOWERS BLOOM AND BLOOM THE OUTSIDE WORLD IN ITS ENTIRETY SQUANDERING FOR SIMPLICITY TWO DIFFERENT FORMS OF THE SAME CURIOSITY A BEAUTIFUL STRIPE OF RED LOST TO PASSION OR FOLLY AND US A DISTANT THIRD AGAINST THIS DISTANT BACKGROUND JUST BEYOND THAT BETWEEN THE SIGNIFIER AND THE SIGNIFIED AND FINALLY, THE SOUL OF ALL THIS OLD DUST INTO THE BLUE STARS OF HEAVEN THE WINDOWS FACE EACH OTHER ALL YEAR LONG HER EYES WIDE AND NOT LOOKING AT ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR This painting looks better in the mirror. This painting looks better after sunset, the horizon still on fire, still brilliant and red. There are mountains. Can you see them? Blue mountains in the distance holding up the red, brilliant in its need. Can you see baby Bacchus getting his evening meal? He is hungry, he drinks eagerly from the dish. What I like is the wine-sprite in the background, a wreath of green leaves on his tender head. What I like are the handsome young men on their knees squeezing grapes into juice. I am drawing a picture for you, simple and neat. Can you see it, dear boy? Can you trace the quiet beauty of nature? It is like a footprint melting into a pallid sky. It is a painted story of St. George and the dragon. I will play tragic for you. I will play dead, invite the flies to buzz around my face as you draw the scene on the palm of your hand with a red ink pen. We will invite the public, charge a hefty admission. Have you a better suggestion? I know what you think but they are harmless. They wander around in a hundred different directions looking for gourmet coffee. We will tell them it is French art. We will say the artist has studied in Italy, that he has learned to unite the beauty of nature with the beauty of people. You believe the people are beautiful, don't you? You believe in swimming naked, your palm dripping red through the water? What I like about French art is that it does not speak of wanting things, of infinite loneliness. Bacchus does not speak of memories. Bacchus does not speak of perhaps learning from a fatal past. This painting looks better with a fair maiden on her knees. Around her is a clouded blue sky and a Frenchman painting Italian landscapes, exactly the right background for her moody features, exactly the right background for plenty of talk about sexual gratification. I know what you are thinking but there is no special devotion on her face, she is merely thoughtful; more directly impacted by her problem than you, forever correcting, forever a red flower in the palm of your hand. THE WEB OF THE SPIDER Some spiders live under the water, building tents in the shape of a bell. They carry down air, trapping it under, trapping themselves under their little bell-shaped tents for days at a time. They come out for food. They come out for light. They do not dig holes in the ground. They do not build webs from one branch of a swaying tree to another. They make no notice of their footprints in the sand. They trace nothing, not their own path, not their breath in the air. They make no notice of romance or apathy. They do not know, they do not care, they do not think. They swim down, they swim up; they catch bubbles of air and take it below. They have no voice. They feel no embarrassment or stupidity or foolishness. They do not record new phone messages in hopes of listening to the heavy voice of a lover calling to say goodbye just one last time. They are spiders. They have adapted to the environment. The female lays her eggs and dies. She has no memory. She has no way of erasing. She is quiet; she says nothing; she was never there. BOXCARS AND BOTTLETOPS It is almost time for the show to start. It is almost time for the peanuts and the popcorn and the crowds. Can you hear the noise? Here is the ringmaster, humming into his megaphone: soon she will not be able to breathe; soon she will walk around asking the children if they have seen her tiny elephant and her red umbrella. The tickets are selling fast enough, there is money to be made. This is America; this is the land of concrete and barbed wire. Here is me putting on make-up, making my nose look like a little round ball. Here is me making myself a new face for myself, a big red mouth going up one side and down the other. The parade is on its way down the street. Here they are now, throwing candy on my behalf; the people are clapping, they are waiting to see what funny things the little clown will do. They want to see me make silence out of an elephant, pink cotton candy from a red umbrella. They are selfish like that. They want to see me disappear, feeling very happy, feeling very full as they walk to their cars; creating a sense of home, creating a new face, painted white, a thick black line from ear to ear. LIFE'S BASIC PLOT There are things we do when the other is not around. We go out, we take pictures; we drink tea and smoke cigarettes. We stay out late and wake up early and meet people the other will never know: fascinating people and boring people and people who talk nothing but crazy all day long. We talk about the other to the new people we have met, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. Sometimes we talk crazy about the other and then feel crazy for having done so. Sometimes the other is not mentioned for an entire day and we feel guilty. There are small things the other will see in a day and remember for a lifetime: a crushed beer can, a bum asleep on the street, the movement of a stranger's hand. These things we will never know, they belong to the other in a permanent kind of way. Sometimes we can try and steal these things from the other. We can ask about the color of a woman's skirt, the shape of her blouse, the smell of her skin. But these things will never belong to us, and there is simply nothing we can do about it. FIRST THE EGG You have made the bed. You have folded the clothes and walked the dog and straightened up the closet so that nothing is on the floor, so that your sweaters are stacked neatly on the top shelf just as they should be. There is, you think, some vague value in finally learning to be neat, even at your age. You have read the book of stories he gave to you before leaving, and washed the shirt that smelled like his aftershave. Your suitcase is empty. You stare from the window at the trees and flowers and birds below. Yours will be serene memories of perfect days: early purple orchids; a Peacock butterfly; a wild periwinkle vine, its spirals interlacing in uniform thickness. Yours will be days not subject to the pull of their own weight. A FACE OF IRON SHEETS Go to bed. Pull the covers over your head and sing that song your mother taught you when you were small. How did it go? It was lovely but who can remember it now? Who can be bothered with such foolishness when you are being ignored and no one paints you a Madonna sitting on a bench in a friendly landscape. What did you expect? French artists like to paint their subjects as if caught by chance and you are always posing. You are not a Moses wrestling with himself. You are a seal with neither head nor tail, looking for the magic land where everything is meant to be eaten. Do you really think you can find a sea of milk and a mountain made of rice? Here you are, believing in ridiculous things, going about your ridiculous day as if the ridiculous world were paying attention. You look awkward and rather funny, fat and lazy, your table full of food. The little dog watches the skill of the glutton dropping a piece of cake into his wide-open mouth. Get up off the ground and pick up your gun, stop looking for the beauty in people. Stop looking for that little bit of blue sky. It is cold outside; bury yourself in heavy clothes; bury your face into the dust on the feet of the poor children who don't have so many good things to eat. Their land is a hare made of gingerbread and you eat it like a big piece of bread dipped in honey. You are not a smiling angel making an announcement to Mary. You are only a glutton looking for your next plate of food, looking for your next delicious bite. Hurry down to the square; make us feel the pain in the face of the defeated man; make us feel we have stepped out from under a forest of lances held by the Spanish Army. You are the attractive soldier, your fist lifted to strike; another victorious young man; a brown muscular arm contrasted to mine, soft and white. AN EVOLUTION OF BODY I will take you out, early in the morning, when only a few people are about in the streets. We can take the road that leads toward the hills. We can gaze out at the city from the roof of our handmade palace, our many doors all bolted and locked, our hearts, big and rangy. When I'm not looking you can trace the outline of my spine with the tip of your finger, press your open mouth to the base of my neck, ignoring the disapproving expressions I see in the clouds, ignoring the sellers and the beggars and the kings among the flocks of messengers sent to drag us back down. We can fill our time with stories and jokes, you can pretend to be honored, I can pretend to be delighted. We can amuse the gathering people with heavy sighs and yawns and blinking eyes. You can run the palm of your hand around my neck, chase my freckles in zig-zagging circles. We can drop to the ground below in a rush of folly, filling our pockets with pebbles and stones as we run, our hearts beating in time with our wonder, our eyes clear and glowing blue. Later you can tell me secrets made of mountains and misplaced seashells. Later we can eat peanut butter toast as we canoe down the Rhine toward a ravenous light in the dark. AN ANGEL WEARS A WREATH OF ROSES Here she sets the table. Here she turns her attention toward the lights in the in the ceiling. Here she elevates her cooking to an art form. Here she uses a standing mixer with a single ingredient. Here she cuts her finger on the edge of a bowl; here is a drop of her blood, rolling toward her lips. Here she puts the kids to bed. Here she dyes her hair a satin blonde. Here she is, in vibrant photos. Here is her new beau; here are his hands. Here he touches her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. Here he points out her flaws. Here are her flaws. Here are her jeans, her hips, and her legs. Here are her shoes, tied into knots. Here are the strings, unstrung and cut in two. Here she is, wanting more candy. Here she is, laughing. Here is her father; here is her mother. Here are her eyes. Here are her arms, swinging as she walks. Here she is lying. Here she is on her knees. Here she is, pulling and adjusting her dress. Here she is lying down. Here she says, "All right, dear." Here she is also lying. Here, she imagines herself. "Here," she says, "there is nothing to see." IN THE CENTER OF THAT RED CHAOS I dream we are watching television, a funny show about two people who are in love but won't act on it. You say nobody wants to see a happy couple. You kiss my nipple. I moan. You laugh at the television. I say my heart is breaking. You whisper something in my ear. There is a slight pain in my head that feels like a reversible trench coat. I ask you to read a poem to me, something sad, something with a tinted nuance. You say I shouldn't use words like tinted nuance, that no one will understand what I am trying to say. I say the whole world will understand what I say if I repeat myself enough. You say the world isn't listening, you say their hearing is superficial and flighty. You kiss my nipple. I moan. Do you know that I am half edible? There is a slight pain in my head that feels like blue summer daylight. I say read me a poem about sex, something written when sensuality was still in everyone's blood. You say you don't understand but you know a poem by Kenneth Koch. You don't know the name but you have a part of it memorized. I tell you I have no boyfriend. I tell you I went to the beach yesterday. I was wearing a green sweater. I say there were origami birds in the sky. You say you won't ask questions about the other boys. I say there are no other boys. You say you won't ask questions. There is a slight pain in my head with a silvery tint. I tell you to slap my face. You laugh and pour yourself some juice. Slap me, I say. Bite my nipple. Don't you know I'm half edible? You laugh and drink your juice. I suggest we start a romance, my hand in your back pocket, your hand in my shirt. You say, didn't we do that already? I say no, we were only pretending. Across the street there is a farm. I say is that cow wearing a pink organdy frock? You laugh. We are animals, I say. Let's have sex in the tall grass and pretend it's the edge of the world. You suggest a shoebox. I bite your nipple. You slap my face. We are swimming from leaf to leaf. We are drawing jerky, zigzagging lines across a blue sky. Nothing I say is really what I want to say. There is a pain in my head that feels like Kenneth Koch. You kiss my neck. I think about sending a handful of sand in the mail, shells and broken bits of coral. I imagine us on a green blanket, your warm hands on my back, your mouth on my neck. I imagine a sweet wind, and a sky of white origami birds. IN THE BLUE OF THE NIGHT Come here, midnight. Come out from underneath the bushes and kiss me quick. The blue night has led me down an empty country road and I don't know where I'm going. I'm looking intently for the roadbed but all I see are blue flowers reaching up to heaven. Run fast, midnight. Run fast and jump into my arms. They are fine arms, midnight, long and lean. They can cradle the blue night into the day. Run fast, midnight, come and see my legs. They are fine legs midnight, they can press hard against the blue night, press the blue night into the stars above. Come, midnight. Come fast. Run at me hard. I am out of breath and sleepy from the night but I can catch you with my hands. Come and fall into them, midnight. They are fine hands. They can surround our blue night and hold it safe from the world. They can keep the disarray out of our darkness, midnight. They can enclose our blue night as a treasure-box, shining and gleaming in the light of the moon. My Heart I am washing the dishes. Outside the air is cool, the afternoon sky the color of blue milkglass. He comes up behind me, his white socks sliding on the linoleum. He leans into me, whispers something at the base of my neck. His hands are on my hips, his thumbs circling my bones. The cat is tossing a rubber band into the air with her paws and catching it with her teeth. My belt buckle clicks at the base of the counter as I move. My hands are wet and soapy. I want to go to the park, he says. His hands rest at my waist. My hands are wet and soapy, I say. He laughs. You think this is funny, I say. He says yes. He says let us go into the bedroom and pretend it is midnight in the park. He says let us pretend we are surrounded by stars and blackness. I say stars and blackness are not as romantic as people want them to be. His thumbs circle my bones. The star live in my heart, he says. The bowl I have been scrubbing slides back into the warm water. It settles gently at the bottom of the sink with the forks and the butter dish. He says later he will scratch and bite his way to my heart, whether it is midnight or not. The room smells like vanilla soap and motor oil. My hands are wet and soapy. His hands are at my stomach. He says we are fit for a midnight ejaculation into the stars. I say let us mask the spectacle of our perfect bourgeois condition. Bite and scratch now, I say, there is time enough tomorrow to fold the socks and wash the dishes. IMMOLATE If I were a beautiful woman I would be dark, and Spanish. I would live in the jungle. My body would always be wet from the heat. Jungle heat. My breasts would be perfect and coiled around them, the heat. Having been captured by a mad tyrant I would be locked in a cage made of bamboo and hung above a murky river. Piranhas would look up at me with lust. My hair would be long and dark and it would fall down the length of my back when I turned to speak. When I spoke English it would be broken, stunted, and naïve. My screams would be bold and reckless; they would loop the trees with an indolent hug and fall slowly to the ground like the seeds of a pinecone: spinning, twirling, lazy seeds. A brave man would come to my rescue, a handsome man who would speak to me in French. He would beg me to marry him in Mexico, on a beach. We would dig through the sand until we found warmth for only us two. Our world is heat, he would say. It is red, and orange. La chaleur. It steals the breath from us. Jungle steam. Magma snake. Hot, yellow tiger-eyes. It slides down our spines, sullen, and back up, to the hollow of his neck. La chaleur, dark and hot; he would waste away, my incursion, my possession. Outside, all would be silence. La chaleur, rouge foncé: lips across his skin, flared and bright orange. Look how I resemble a ghost, flicking, sliding, mingled with the dark, the mirror of the moon. Eyes half-closed, Je respire la chaleur, I whisper, a smoldering mouth, a hot green night, for him, the red ember. MENTAL EXERTION ALONE WILL NOT SET YOU FREE I remember building a tower; I remember Legos and color schemes. I had this idea. I had this idea I had a cowboy. I had a cowboy but I left him to become a scientist. I had this idea I was a scientist but what is left of it now? I cannot bake cookies. I get lost on short trips to the supermarket. I stand in front of the meat market for hours, watching young boys in white aprons mop up the blood. I've got nothing going; I left it all at the bus station: my Legos, my color schemes, my tower. I made it all too difficult. I got on a bus and headed north, to Paris. But the nights are cold here. The days are long and filled with too much sun. I imagine the outline of my dirty footprint on the wall. Am I the only one dreaming? I wanted to be alone with my tower. I wanted to take long walks in the city. I wanted to take pictures of strangers and imagine their color schemes, their Legos, their towers. But sometimes I just want to annihilate. I am consumed now that I have been consumed. I thought I had a cowboy but he was really just a stranger, outlined on top of a horse made of Legos. Is it really so hard? I want to leave behind love notes made from macaroni, to press my chest upon the glass counter in the candy store. I made a card for him out of a book I bought for two dollars. I bought him a book for two dollars but kept it hidden in my bag. I live like a stranger to myself. I live like a stranger building a tower out of red macaroni. When I am old and dying I will trace the outline of my hand on a piece of white paper. I will send it to him with the book, and the tower, and seven new stories about my lonely trip to Paris. THE DUST OF A NAKED PLANET I can live without him. A daisy can be plucked without troubling the dust of a naked planet. We are more than two animals driven on instinct, overheating and chilling, hopelessly immobilized. We are not two seeds under a microscope, wriggling their way through life, adapting and changing the earth with a violent explosion. I am not the rejected compromise of commerce. He is not the green marcher leaving his soggy footholds on my heart. I do not need trips to Montana, red flowers in my hair, the poetry of Charles Simic scribbled on my back with the tip of his finger. It is absurd, an intangible shape, a curious undulation criss-crossing at the middle. It can be tagged and categorized and understood. It is hard and polished and glistening, a perfect specimen resting in a glass jar. It is the product of endless effort, explosively short; it is an aesthetic impulse, a period of helpless and naked infancy, a varying manifestation between us two. THE EXPERIMENTAL FACT I am waiting for the sad ghost story to fall into my lap, a profound daydream that will begin with the death of Paul Cézanne and represent the idea of a ghost rather than the genius of the phantom itself. It startles the pigeons from their somber perch, allows the dreamers to question whether the nature of the world is changing under their shoeless feet. It describes the ingenuity of man with a magnifying glass, our own tiny nucleus, a perfect curve multiplied again and again at the center. All around us the flowers bloom and bloom and the nighttime moon is stamped in the meadowed grass. We crawl into an exaggerated fantasy of flightless birds, a bottle of whiskey at our hip, a clever monologue at the ready: a variation on the theme of man's ingenuity and the intellectual ways he finds to burn his own skin. AND THE WOODPECKERS WITH THEIR BEAKS AND THE OWLS IN THE NIGHT Here's a very noisy picture for our little girl. Everywhere there is sound, ticking and steaming in the kitchen, whirring and rapping, back and forth, in the basement and on your rooftop. Do you hear it, girl? It never stops to even brush its teeth or say goodnight to its mother. It does not need to be tucked in or say its prayers. It is strong and willful. It will wake you with a clank, it will grate its teeth upon your walls and the panes of your windows, dripping and sloshing. It will grow roots in your bed and scatter its seeds with the wind, its whistle so shrill, its bell going bong-bong. What do you you hear at night, pretty baby? Everywhere the cows are mooing, the pigs are squealing, the hawks are screeching as they fall from the sky with their talons and their beaks. And you can look away if you want, sweet baby, but they will still fall long and hard for their dinner and the songbirds will keep chirping and singing to themselves and the woodpeckers with their beaks and the owls in the night, they all know nothing of it. Only you, only you with the big blue eyes can hear the unzipping of zippers and the moaning, the soft, quiet moaning in the next room. There's the phone, someone wants to talk to you, dear girl. There's a train, coming down the track. Can't you hear it, pretty thing? Can't you get the hell out of the way? Can't you tell the sound of the ticking tic-toc on the clock in the hall from the click-clack of a train? It wants to run you down; it wants to scrape its shiny wheels against your pretty insides, turn you into a machine that bang-bangs through the night. It wants to see you marching in time with all the other little feet; the wind rustling in the leaves, the rain tapping on the windows. But you are not a machine just yet, you are still just a sweet apple, changing your shape every day as you hang from the tree. You are still just a pussy cat, purring and mirawing when you are hungry, hissing at the dark when you are tired and afraid. One day you will learn there are many other animal sounds you can make. One day you will find all of the sounds and make them for yourself, in your own noisy picture. One day you will roar and chirp and paw and clickety-clack like a drum; you will blow hard and long into your trumpet; you will boom and crash and wham and crunch, metal against metal, until your hands are stained red like the beak of the hawk, when the rest of have long gone to sleep, when the rest of us hear nothing but the constant ringing of morning in our ears. AROUND US THE FLOWERS BLOOM AND BLOOM We can be a great ball of sun setting over the desert, rainbows in miniature bursting open in white light with our very breath. I will keep you in my pocket, a little secret, your affections newly minted. I have my own built-in blind spot: a glint in a golden eye; a fawn-colored iris, mechanical, a network of fibers; a transparent body. We can be spots of color; a texture in the open sky; an unbroken fashion behind a geometric figure; a uniform shape of blue. You can develop an opinion about fantasy summers, about sitting rooms and Hollywood-looking nineteen-year-old girls with big dreams and determination. In the morning we'll argue about the arc of acuity, at night we'll set books on top of one another, building a ramp, leaving behind our red crayons and our puzzle pictures and our silly expressions of economics and sexual gratification. Eventually it will all seem right: our primary distinctions between up and down, our pillorying of the innocent, our tremendous admiration for horses and dogs and majority stockholdings. I will spend more time thinking about great hair, about bangs that soften the forehead and cascading waves. I slip on a red dress that shows a lot of leg and practice being a sweetheart. This is the life we wanted; this is the life we are living in that house made of sun-dried brick, in that hut made of glass. This is our speeded-up motion picture, our great ball of sun going down. In the foreground we dance in a freshly plowed field, an unbroken contour of land, a deceptive circle, a ring of uniform gray. THE OUTSIDE WORLD IN ITS ENTIRETY Burn us. Pick up your tools and alight us in flame. We are scientifically diagnosed and dismissed, we are an unsightly tree with graven leaves, inconceivable and remote; a clock in the body; a fragment of experience gleaming and turning in the light. All that heat dancing over the pavement, all that long way behind us, a wailing of expectation where everything changes but remains. We do not exist. We are heaped upon each other in rage with a certain foreboding; a floating dandelion seed; a wisp of gossamer in the eye of the sun remembered only by the burning hills. SQUANDERING FOR SIMPLICITY My only hunger is for a head full of song, for all that is trite and hasty, all that is selected from milieux without interest. My indulgence is a passion common to all men, hand in hand with the novelty of collected objects: dolls made of straw, wooden buttons and tin soldiers. Let us retreat to the blue mountains, let us lie down in the tall grass and pretend it is the edge of the world. We can hold hands and create a less spiteful equality. Let the curious minds condemn it, let us be condemned right and left; let us keep to our follies, our world moving slowly toward uniformity. Touch my cheek. Run the tips of your fingers down my spine. We have the turmoil of the world to amuse us. We have the weight of the past in our pockets, the authority of our generation in the tips of our shoes. Love is just a jargon word used by the popular press. We have the heat of our burning clothes accumulating in the attic with our violins, our books, our bottles of wine. We are the newly-bored inhabitants of vanity; we are the exiled lovers parading down the Champs Elysées with our natural curiosities. Let us light the last of our fireworks and spend our remaining days squandering for simplicity. TWO DIFFERENT FORMS OF THE SAME CURIOSITY Touch my hand. Move your fingers over the bones of my wrist. My palm waits for nothing but the tips of your fingers. A hundred years from now we can rest. A hundred years from now we can count ourselves the custodians of distress and anguish. Let us think ourselves young and despise the work of old men. We are two different forms of the same curiosity; the beautiful and the perfect cornered in a range of blue mountains. We have acquired nothing in our resistance but the desire for submission. Let us be dangerous; let us consume ourselves with the irrelevant. Let us collect the silly and the absurd, souvenirs of temptation to fill our own imaginary museum. We are not wrong to do so. We are not privation and long patience. Whisper a plan of high treason in my ear. Who would dare question the cleverness of our plan? We are brought together by curiosity and ordered by taste. We are the passionate pilgrims, falling on our knees in a field of red flowers. Let us live in a world so far removed from regret. A BEAUTIFUL STRIPE OF RED If you can find an old brick in your back yard, or a piece of slate, you can break it up with a hammer. You can throw it down on the cement driveway, duck down below the silver bumper of your mother's Dodge Omni, and smash it to pieces, bit-by-bit, sending fragments of slate into the neighbor's daisy garden, flinging bits of red brick into the corners of your eyes. When you are done you can put the pieces into an old glass mayonnaise jar and fill it with water, careful not to cut your hands with the sharp fragments you gather into a pile with the palm of your hand, careful not to let the gray and red dust seep into your bony lungs. You can screw the lid on tight and shake the jar with everything you've got. You and your friends can take turns shaking: ten, twenty, a hundred times each. You can open the lid from time to time, and see that the sharp edges of the brick and the slate have become smooth. This is what happens to rocks that are tossed about in the ocean: carrying and dumping, carrying and dumping, in rivers and streams and oceans all over the world, day after day, year after year, over and over again . . . There is no relief; there is no stopping for cookies and playing jacks in the corner of the living room floor. There are only more rocks to break down, hard and glassy. There is only the ocean's waves crashing against the rocks, along the shore, breaking them into pebbles, grinding them into sand and mud, carried by the rivers and streams, finally rushing down to broad valleys and open seas, banging and chipping each other as they go, finally settling on the ocean floor. Perhaps as you are shaking you can think about what might happen to your bits of slate and brick in a million years, when the trees in your backyard fall into swamps and are covered by mud, when glaciers move slowly through your little town, gouging out a U-shaped valley, broad and flat, its sides rising straight up, holding onto rocks deposited far from where they first formed. Maybe you can think about your own small body, lying in a bed of clay and settled to the bottom of the sea, covered and squeezed by layer upon layer, hardening under heat and pressure, crystallizing, buckling and folding until you are made-over into a beautiful stripe of red, pushing up into the high, high cliffs, now becoming yellow, now readily burning under the sun, now cracking and splitting into another thin, flat layer. LOST TO PASSION OR FOLLY I woke up thinking there were beautiful people under the covers. I woke up thinking beauty had followed me home in the form of an economical soap. If only I could abandon myself to ruin. If only I could find some rhinestone-studded castle to storm, some handsome young man to bless me as a good woman. I should be blessed, a good woman such as I. Then I should be the good woodcutter, prancing around the room on all fours, swinging my axe with shouts of laughter and merriment. Someone might call me a lively kitty. Not a particle of me would be lost to passion or folly, not a particle of me would lapse to steadfast and gravely. If only I could find him alone in some corner, bent over his writing table, deeply engrossed in the arrangement of some important papers. I could climb the arch of his back, stretching my claws across the ridges of his spine. If only I could find him alone in the morning with his outrage, his beauty falling silent all the same. AND US A DISTANT THIRD We are ruined. We are living a partial life. Yesterday our story was about making strawberry jam. Yesterday you held my hand as we walked under a pink umbrella. Look at us now. Look at me, my eyes tacked to your waist, my mouth to your hip. This is me charting me. This is me charting me against Jack Daniels. I have a list of words in my mind. I have a list of words written on the chalkboard for study: look, funny, run, come, fast. Are you the child that can first read a phrase? Are you the child that can match the picture cards to the name cards? You are a smart child. You have chosen your fight well. It is not you against Jack Daniels. It is you against sex. It is you against the hypocrisy and evil. Have I built you into a tower made of sex when you are nothing but a child? Sweep your hands under. My senses are drugged with analogues and exterior forms of life. We have nothing to think about when we think of sex. It isn't even a dream. Sweep your hands into the night sky and steal a piece of Montana for my scrapbook. Our image is the excess. Our midnight is a home teacher. We are the characters thus introduced a distant third; we are crystalling into a multitude. Our midnight is with us. Our midnight is forgotten through disuse. This is the reality of my someone. The reality of my someone sweeping a hand under. I am a child. Cradle me in your arms. Cradle me against the study of the class. Cradle me against the midnight gaining in the bushes. AGAINST THIS DISTANT BACKGROUND Let us die tonight. Let us enclose ourselves in a pearl-encrusted chest and bury ourselves in the backyard. Let us be reborn into bits of bone and treasure. We will burst through the soil at midnight, our moans flying recklessly into the skeleton of the sweet wind. We will fill our coffers with heavy breath and the ashes of our skin. Let us rebuild ourselves slowly in the light of the moon. Everything we need is here in the palm of our hands. This is not a grave but an image based on the movements of animals. Peel away my skin. Bite and tear and rip and claw your way to my heart. These are beautiful things. Without you I am a woman dead. I am a woman prepared for the catastrophe of the falling house. My silence is the sound of the sleeping dishes resting in the sink. My silence is the weight of the walls arranging themselves for collapse. I listen to the flowers in the windowsill. They speak of the shaking. They speak of the soil and the tiny bones of the birds in the trees. I am the woman dead, resting on the ground. I am the woman dead, washing the bones of the sleeping birds in a quiet sink. Our image is a refuge. We live the insignificant; we live in the difficulty of our birth. Let us die tonight, your legs pushed heavily against mine. Let us be reborn, our movements forever engraved in our flesh. JUST BEYOND THAT This is eternal, this lack of skill and know-how, this devout, this impractical, this inoculated pink and golden dawn, one or two languages in bed, a desk, a bureau, a table, two or three chairs. I stayed awake. I stayed among the fragile sand hoppers; the damp white sand in front of the sliding water; mothers with babies in their arms; strong, broad-shouldered fathers. I whistled a rollicking dance tune, never asking myself to stop, never telling myself if I stayed here, in my fancy petticoat and red ribbons, we could get this whole thing resolved in our own particular fashion. Should I order you a box of crackers, love, should I spin around on my toes and read poetry from a cookbook? The many children are all around with roses in their cheeks. It does not matter when you are all grown up: the faded carpets and rag rugs on the floor, the breath and the emerald sea and still just beyond that: the sea rising higher than the walls, pale orange and olive green. I will build my very fine sand castle, it's banner tacked to the highest tower. Just you say something. Just you speak, my fool. BETWEEN THE SIGNIFIER AND THE SIGNIFIED There is a little something here. Something bright and noisy in the valley. Can you see it? It is a little something I want, a cold and wet something on the edge of my tongue, a spinning and whirling ride shining in the light of the moon. Can you see the Ferris wheel at night from your bed? Can you see it standing in the distance, cold and dark against the walls of your bedroom? I will stand before you and spin wooden hoops on my arms while the crowd walks by, eating bags of peanuts and clucking their tongues. Do you want me to win you a duck? Do you want me to push some hoops through your hand and bite your lip? Why are you running? Why are you running when I want to win you a duck? When I want to stand in the distance, cold and dark against your bedroom walls? Look at my wooden hoops, spinning gracefully on my arms. See my hoops go. Don't run. We can build a big red home together in the valley and tattoo a list of important words down the center of our backs: foolhardy, absurd, origami. We can set sail on a green and yellow boat. Here comes our boat down the river now. Here comes a little something I want. Run little something. Run and hide by the Ferris wheel and say nothing to the ducks. Is it midnight under the bushes yet? Is it time to bite my lip hard and toss the hoop? The duck in the middle of the tank is swimming with his eyes closed. The Ferris wheel is not moving. It does not twinkle. The duck in the middle has never stopped his quacking. Don't run. Stay with me and spin these hoops forever. We can build a bigger valley. We can fill it with bags of peanuts and quaking ducks and a Ferris wheel that twinkles against our red sky. You are a very silly boy. I am tracing the outline of your face in the center of my hoops. Stay and ride on the highest seats with me. Stay and whisper one or two sugared secrets in my ear. AND FINALLY, THE SOUL OF ALL THIS OLD DUST Here you are frustrated, poor girl. Here you are, a pure heart cornered between the ebony cabinets and the cans of green beans and vegetable soup. Here you are marveling at the Balzac attributes found in a painting while the dishes rest in the sink, one piled on top of the other. Is that last week's spaghetti? What is the milk doing out on the counter? You are going to spoil everything. You are good at that. You know how to fuck a good thing up, don't you? You look at the dishes as if they were something beautiful. You take pictures of them, you rearrange them, fork on top of knife, spoon inside cup. But they are just dishes. They can't show you the truth about the truth. They assuage no passion; they are not bits of a fairy tale clanking against a steel sink. They are not hastily cataloguing the last of the century. They do not wander sadly through the mall, arm-in-arm with a special someone they like a lot but could never love. They do not testify to bizarre eruditions. They are soulless. They are aluminum and steel and plaster and glass. There is no magic there, stop looking for it. Sit yourself down and make a drink: lots of gin, hold the tonic. Think about things that don't matter: semi-modern art, the promotion of the old in the antique, Earth's first midnight. What you need is a fantasy man, someone created from scratch. Go ahead, no one's looking, humanity is preoccupied with starvation and war. The two of you can do the dishes together, sink your hands in the warm water, talk about the luminescence of a firefly at night. He's a good man, handsome and strong. He comes up behind you, leans against you and whispers against the back of your neck, thoughts of high glacial pastures and the little bones of the birds in the back yard. This is your own little nook of folly and bric-a-brac. You talk about Frank O'Hara and the finest Toulouse-Lautrec; the bastions of capitalism bounded by rolling hills and overlaid with clouds. He's married to a woman who doesn't understand him. She cooks. She irons. She cleans. She wears capri pants. He stays married to her because they have kids. He's noble. You respect him for that but your friends don't understand. Your friends tell you that God will give you a good man when you are ready for something more. You wonder why God is holding your future husband hostage. You frown. You are still frustrated. You think vaguely about the trees and the flowers outside your window. You think about the mudskippers and progressive evolution and the culmination of the end. 9 INTO THE BLUE STARS OF HEAVEN This is the end of us. This is despair and sadness taking off our guider wheels. This is our inept heaven, turning awkwardly in the palm of my hand. Is this your bourgeois posture of devotion? Is this the distant part of you letting go of my hand? I will enlarge the world around us and fill it with blue flowers reaching up to heaven. We can hide in the unfilled corners of absurdity. We can spill ourselves over an isolated image in my hand. We can be perfect, ejaculating ourselves into the naked blackness of the universe, into the blue stars of heaven. Bring your pipe and slippers and we will sit by the fireside. We will burn despair. We will burn the passion of my childhood, the memory of my hands enclosing on a bursting star. I cannot breathe when you are sitting so close to the fire. Come nearer to me. We have the infinite resources of science to feed us. We have my hands, unremittingly closed around our blue mountains. THE WINDOWS FACE EACH OTHER ALL YEAR LONG We walk around memoryless of our passions, prolonging our childhoods through bars of sunlight and shade. This is the life we wanted; this is the life we are living in that house made of sun-dried brick, in that hut made of glass. We are angels dressed in drag, potentially immortal. Fragile and wordless we crawl inside a delicate skin, burning the clocks in our bodies. We contemplate that unsheltered place we measure in utilitarian terms: a little blue box holding the tongue of a bursting star. There are no moments for us to attain a minimum of refuge. There is no cornered space between my head and my heart, only consummation, only the absurdity of a forest built from the ashes of your origami bird. Bye, bye, black bird, we have eaten you at the midnight picnic, en noir et black.