The Danger of Assignments

I thought I'd teach them odes,
brought in an urn.
They whispered weird. And praise.
I thought I'd teach them,
especially in the month of November,
praise, Whitman, the grass, the stars,
the journeywork, the abundance of the world,
the brimming abundance, but they
just stared, their eyes like the windows
of lined-up slot machines. And Neruda.
He seemed important, and all that fruit.
I passed it out, said "Look at this
Landlord of a watermelon. Slice it
and all those black little eyes blink back at you.
Imagine someone you love housed
down near the rind." Then, Whango!
A mango came flying at high speeds
from the back of the room, and it splattered,
Splat! against the board, right next to the word
"image." Two boys in the third aisle
began sword-fighting with rhubarb sticks,
another shouted "Anarchy!" So I thought I'd teach them
structure and form, just one exquisitely
well-ordered line, but it was time
for Civics. I jumped with the bell,
gathered up my grenades of oranges, apples,
and papayas and made for the door.
"Remember, poetry can save your life," I said,
"Tomorrow no more
assignments. Just write what you feel.
Good-bye, you fledglings, you buds,
you little fleur de lis."

Boat

for Alex Albertus

I think of you leeward
each night

in the room of your mother's
pain, the journey

of her head to your arm,
you holding her—

the hull of her,
the head, luff, leech

of her, hair falling onto
your wrists—the foot,

tack, clew, throat,
the peak of her.

Musings of a Somnambulist

The unconscious takes the body home,
cradles it like water.
This, however, is not The Great Salt Lake,
and here in the prism of lost light
nothing floats, even the mind like a sinker
goes down. Lovers, momentarily tossed
by the currents, unlock arms and legs,
dlsembark, and become two oars moving the dream
forward. But the dream takes its own direction.
The body is tugged quietly below,
the mind, on its line, released.
All this mud at the bottom.
We can swim deeper and still not know.
Sometimes we are stones skipped across water,
lost to whatever is larger, not death,
but something else. It is desire
that brings us back each time.
We follow it with primitive snouts,
only to be delivered vertical and ignorant again,
our bodles plucked at by air.
We don't know where we've been.
We know only that for awhile we were unfaithful,
while the mind scuttled along the bottom,
while the body waited like an old canoe,
while the lovers swam flipperless and blind,
while the name for the sun and all things blurred,
while the dreamer and the dream and the water wandered.
Inside sleep there is no net that can hold us,
and, certainly, there is no holdlng on.

Unfinished Sestina

We were inside the world.
The children were sleeping.
Light fell through the window.
One of us wore red.
Three tulips on the ledge opened the sky.
We touched the cold white walls.

The children were inside the walls.
The tulips closed; the world
opened. We were wearing the sky.
Those of us who were not asleep
watched the sunlight bloom red.
Three of the children turned from the window.

The world came through the window.
It wobbled on the ledge and opened to the walls
where light fell through us, we, who were pourous and red.
The tulips fell over the world.
No one was sleeping.
Three children wore the sky.

No one mocked sky.
The tulips dropped petals in the window.
A light fell over us like sleep.
Someone opened the wall.
One of us blew out of the world.
All of us wore red.

The children, lacquered red,
blew leaf-like from the ledge of the sky,
where light was wearing the world,
where the sky opened like a small wfndow,
where we touched without hands, and the walls
blew away and the flowers slept.

Unswaddled, the dead do not sleep.
Mockingly, the windows are red.
The light of our blood falls through the walls.
All of us touch the sky.
The children are blooming in the wfndow,
and the tulips are in flames on the ledge of the world.

Maybe it's a question

for Stephen

the water
does not ask any questions

glints

white waterbird
striding
the black marsh mud

up to my waist in red clover

sunlight pouring great joy
over us

you smell of horses

Knocking

The Jehovah Witnesses are at the door again
in their long brown coats,
clutching Watchtowers in mittened hands.
I am at the sink in the day-old aroma
of turkey soup, rinsing zucchini.
What shall I say to them this time
when they ask me ahout Armageddon?
That we are all just handprints on the glass;
that faces like theirs with the manageable smiles
float detached through the rooms of my dreams?
They knock. I go to the door with a crookneck
squash, rubbing the rind for the shape of truth.
I invite them in, but they always begin
with the end, with the false prophets
and rumors of war, untfl the night compresses
against the house, and the trees empty their boughs
of wind. Even the repentant decompose.
It's late, I say, so will you excuse me
for a moment, please? I have my own apocalypse.
The soup bones in the broth are bubbling.
I hear spiders in the cupboards,
and the angels shaking tambourines.

Twilight

He who loves what has been saved for the light
will awaken here near a woman who believes she will
some day die upon a salt beach next to a seal,
bearing no odors of decay. Something Greek.

He will summon seabirds to drop flowers on her flesh—
false heather, hom poppies, pale dune peas. Starfish
the color of dried blood will slide from the rocks
to cover her; waves will roll over her ankles, her wrists.

She will lift one hand toward the moon, as if to rub
an old scar, and out of respect for the water,
he will obey the tide and fish from her hips
until mornlng. They will make love slowly. It will be

the last time. The room, the beach, each small
estuary, her body, his mind, the swallows diving low
over water, the white reasons for beds
and memorials, the music of mirrors, barking seals,

harpoon, the smaller compositions of dream,
bone, flowers cut loose on the sea, the habit, the order,
the disorder, whittled moon, all the anemones mouthing
her name, the abandoned shell, his soft sea creature …

From this they willleam the limit of desire;
that the body is the only place for exile; that there
is no horizon; that after swimming this far with drift-
wood for the fire, they must enter the blue flame.

Aggregates

If you were a wall made up
of particles,
I would walk into you
and stay.

And if I were a church
with a sacred altar, you would
enter me, not as the priest
with wooden beads, but as the sexton in boots
with the tongue and teeth of an angel.

Were we to walk off the edge
of this planet
by way of the Straits
of Magellan, we would do so exultant:
aggregates in the wind's asylum,
growing young behind death masks.

If we were to dance a slow dance
on top of scorpions,
we would dance cheek to cheek,
until our faces were molten,
our hips grew hooks,
and we pivoted on
the tip of a pin to these amorous
sounds: hoot owls and saxophones.

If you were infinite, I would
count you anyway, and if I were the color of fire,
you would be the memory of fire.

Staying Home from Work

Sunlight seems to slide from the leaves.
Across the valley, a chorus of dogs—
baritones, tenors, and off-key dogs.
My own dogs, mere mutts, unleashed in the weeds, prowl
and sniff the ditch banks like old pros.
One must walk out into the world again,
if only for the better part of an hour to hear:
table saw grinding across a board,
nail-gun popping, the quick swoop of a wren;
scrub jay cleaning under its feathers in a shallow stream,
a trickle from the water in a pipe.
California must pay tithes for such an early spring.
Warm earth in January, a season of chartreuse—
goldenrod and clover; Acacias blooming
in profusion, the same color as my new tennls balls.
Jeffery Deamer's red bike lies toppled on the lawn
right next to the primroses. Milosz was right.
Even unremembered, the essential, if attended to,
will surely stun, surely last. Windchimes.
For a moment I thought it was the sprinkler heads singing.

it's outside too,

Office Riddles

Desk.
Wooden receptionist. Has good
legs though. Won't kick, even
when scratched. Sturdy, but
not studious. An appetite for paper and blue pen caps.
Watch-dog of the office. Faces
the door. Keeps its mouth
shut most of the time. Can't
lick stamps.

Typewriter.
Indifferent to the computer.
Holds its own. Has known
intimately the tips
of fingers. Woodpecker. Wears
ribbons. Talks in tongues.
Is a symbol-maker. Hums.

Paperclip.
Has it all together.

Paper.
Insists it's not an unpainted
swimming pool. Invites
me in. Terrifies
sometimes. White-out. Blizzard.
Won't answer. Picnic cloth.
The ants come. Can't remember
its own treeness.
Fists of it in the garbage can.

Eight Windows

The newspaper spread all over the kitchen table
as if the painters had been here; my head propped
between elbows, I study the movie section,
the want ads, the box scores; light from eight windows;
my daughter's eighth birthday. Outside, a warm wind
travels through the uncut grass. Serendipity,
the cat, asleep in the bird bath dish,
and the hill, terraced at last, full of wildflowers
and dog bones. My daughter, sitting next to me
with her water color set, tells me last night's dream.
I whistle the same tune my father whistled.
The dogs, toppled like bookends,
have found the one spot of sun on the hardwood floor.
The dishwasher is singing to the white plates.
It's as if we tumbled from another sky and woke up here,
dazzled in our exile. In the smell of honeysuckle
or marmalade, we spread jam over pancakes, hum along
with the water taps. At noon, we'll go out
on the deck and paint our toenails red. She'll pick
the blackberries and I'll make the pie. Shouldn't we
throw garlands over the heads of gargoyles,
blow kisses to the mailman? In the splendor of everything
ordinary, she holds a flower up to my chin,
then asks me if! picked her. I say yes, of course,
most certainly, absolutely, yes.

Jacob

-My third son grows taller,
his legs lifting the rest of him
like the ladder to the treehouse.
He's sullen and wants his own phone.
When we ride to school in the car,
there are continents between us,
words that find no passage out.
Where he used to blow his breath
on cold car windows and finger-in his name,
there is nothing there now,
only the auto glass and the rain.
He wears his hooded sweatshirt like a monk.
"Thanks," he mutters,
and is gone-up the high school steps,
up toward the clock tower, up
to the first tier, to the outer rim of the universe, another cell membrane,
to whatever first separates
a mother from a son.

Fuschia

What survives has more to do with roots than will.
The fuschia returns,
old Lazarus of the vegetable world.
Three years ago, hit by blight,
we took it down to a nub, clipped it with the ratchet shears.
Snails gummed themselves to the woody base;
broad-leafed ivy climbed in mottled greens
to block the sun. We thought the plant gone.
Finished. Now in late July, supple lengths
shoot straight out of the ground.
Fog fingers it like hands
through a woman's hair. A hummingbird,
in a lustrous blur, takes its penciled beak
inside the pinkest bell, and sings
to the very throat of a flower.

Traveling

My daughter says she likes the smell of White-out.
My son says sulphur. He likes
the smell of sulphur. We are traveling
toward the mountains. I say
I like the smell of a light rain
on the dusty asphalt of a high school parking lot
at the end of summer, the first rain
after a long dry season; and the smell
of boutonnieres at proms and funerals.
My husband, who rarely enters into conversations
such as these, says he likes the smell of
his Cloroxed wrist band in a tough tennis match,
toward the end of the third set, the score 5-4.
I think back to last night's drive across the desert,
following the semis through Nevada,
passing through all those towns with the hard
consonant sounds: Elko, Lovelock, Winnemucca—
"Winnemucca," said the billboard, "Eight billion people
have never been here." The beauty of the desert light,
strata of sagebrush, mauve rock and sky;
crossing the stateline, rising over a ridge
of Utah granite, then dropping
down onto the Salt Flats. What desolate splendor!
Alkall earth stretched out before us in all directions
like a plain of cooled white ash after annihilation;
the sky exploding violently with color—
red inside violet, ebony inside cobalt blue.
This is what it will look like at the end of the world,
or this is the end of the world,
and I'm only dreaming of a nuclear family,
driving a white van across Nevada.

Make a list of smells before you lose them:
cinnamon,
deli pickles,
honeysuckle,
manure,
horse blankets,
Easter eggs in dye and vinegar,
German mustard,
mowed grass,
scallops sauteed in garlic and butter,
mocha beans,
dark Belgium chocolate,
sulphur,
a lit match,
tennis balls just out of the can,
autumn leaf mulch,
the sweat and come of love-making,
peppermints,
rain on a hot pavement in a high school parking lot
at the end of August,
rain.

Tide Pool

for Susie Stewart

You lean over
a clear pocket of water.
"Observe the order and clarity
of it all," you say.
I stand there vertically human,
hunting for the bright stirrings
of a single fish.
But nothing moves, only your face
on my face,
riding the water,
rocking the light.
You fiod a thin exterior.
"The crab has lost a claw," you say.
Gulls squeal above us.
The sun sets.
We kneel in dark wet sand,
dig for the shells of creatures
we'll all become.

Vows

for Bob

Our love is not a red woven scarf
blowing behind us in the wind.
We lose it, strand by strand,
then find it again, blowing without us.

The thought is a strange one,
why we choose for all time one love.
We just bought a ticket
and hopped on, stepped off those moon-fused porches.
Imagination came to breakfast, and we
sat in the hum of our appliances
still believing.

In the beginning, we knew
what we had, a promise, a salubrious peach
as round as our words, and all those nights
warm enough for sitting outside
on unswept steps. You brought me
flowers wrapped in the want ads.
I have been instructed by ten carnations
to go on loving.

Story

We plug in the space heater, sink
deeper into the nubby couch.
I read to her an old Italian tale
about Strega Nona, the grandmother witch.

She leans into my arm,
her head burrowing like a small, dark animal.
By the end of the third page, eyes,
in the ancient ritual of storytelling,
close. I place my head on hers.

We could be anybody—
two drunks on a bus bench,
two angels resting from levitation,
but tonight—Demeter and Persephone.

Outside the wind races through the cypress,
untying black branches, scooping
and heaving water onto the shore.
But inside by the one lamp, I, the mother,
continue to read long after she's fallen

asleep, as if words had the power to stop
the wind, or prevent the gods from pulling
her closer to the underworld. Tonight
if she gets to the River Styx,

she'll pet the three-headed dog
with her long piano fingers, find
the vulnerable place just under the jowls,
and by morning they'll be forced

to return her to me. She'll have dog hair
in her hands; she'll have dreams
the color of Italian frescoes
and stories I'll never know
painted on the inside curve of her skull.

Love to the Second Power

Always, my love,
I am startled by transcendence,
even my own, as if
ladders owned our feet
and urged us to climb on,
and the spaces between rungs
were windows, by which
we are taught
new ways to see.