BETRAYAL

What I want is the difficult
want of your bones. What I want
is to retrieve the bones
of your breath speaking only the breath

of my name. In the quiet,
in the dark moon of night's
tongue, I want the water running
up the thighs of your

breath, up the corridors of your breathing
into another:
the woman whose breath is escaping
from her hands like wind.

Soon, they will have
no feeling. Soon, there will be
a limbless, still wanting.
Night's violent breath

shimmering to the edge
of her, and her bones will be
dead, will not be as easy
to undress as mine were easy.

Soon, it will be difficult to want
so many hearts at once.
Difficult to know the breath
of only one who mattered

who offered you her name
as a supplicant offers
her stillness
to God.

Soon, belonging will know its difficult
demand, like a hand
without feeling, like a hand
trying to carry the breathing

of one who wanted to know only
the sweet ache of your bones,
who you tossed away
easy as night's dark.

Soon, I will sleep with the breath
of another. Undressing for her
as fire undresses for water,
as water for stone,

as stone for the deep breath
of night's stillness,
the haunting gravity of desire
moving through us as water

moves through light.
Soon, my mouth will whisper
her name like a prayer, the way
your mouth once whispered mine,

the way the moon whispers
telling a white lie to the terrible dark.

MENAGERIE

Here is a poem I wrote after sleeping with someone early on that I loved. (Since time is our illusion, still love.) It was one of those magical nights that is a miracle, when our bodies meld with the animals in the dream. When the giraffe and the hyena not only co-existed, but are intimate friends. Where our most angry and our most gentle of selves finally understand, forgive, and at long last, make love.

MENAGERIE

One morning you awaken too early and the animals are there sleeping peacefully
all around you. The hyena. The giraffe with his head cocked petulantly
on the lap of the hyena. And you wonder if they've been here all of your life,
dozing in the wake of a thousand moons, a thousand crimes
that you didn't have stomach enough to commit --

although it would mean this, this miracle among the souls of animals.
And you. You with sheen before your eyes that so blinds you from their fine-ness.
Finesse, they say, is a matter of competence

without ego. Hold me like flowers in the moon,
says the giraffe. You're not sure whether he's speaking to the hyena or to you
so you pretend not to hear him. This pretense goes on and on for years

until you have convinced yourself that the giraffe and the hyena
are not really there at all. Your denial is so complete
it is like an announcement to the world.

You're a woman.
But one night you hear the man inside of you say,
Phfaww! Action. Action is the only thing of any consequence!
It is the first voice in all the world, and it breaks the eggshell
of quiet. The sound shatters the sheen from your eyes
with astonishing effortlessness.

You know he's been saying this all of your life.
And like a knee-jerk, you've been answering.

Suddenly there is a giraffe weeping like a flower in the moon.
You gather the giraffe like a bouquet of your own neglect. And you rock it.
You rock it .

THE LAUNDROMAT

Walking down the road this morning, I counted no less than five different shades of fushia flooding the sky. I thought, "How did I end up like this? This road, this meadow? This day? Alone after all these years, and still walking?"

Is anyone out there?


THE LAUNDROMAT

Every time you go down a road, it changes into something else.
You think you're on your way to do the laundry, and then a face

will smile at you. She's pretty. She asks for a walk.
Pretty soon you're in Mozambique or China.

The peasants are rising up and all you wanted
was some clean underwear. You feel resentful, victimized even.

You never meant to be on this road, but then
your therapist reminds you, you chose it.

Somewhere in the middle, the light grows dim. A forest
grows up around you and blocks the sun. The pretty face

is gone and you're stuck with all these peasants
who want you to feed them. Their mouths open

and caw at you like baby birds. You fly
from river to river looking for food. You want to nest,

but you're too busy. In the middle of your journey you hear
a rumble. You look down. Somewhere a washing

machine is calling. It looks vaguely familiar, you think,
like a dream you once had. But you fly right on,

mistaking the Laundromat
for someone else's life.

WHITE NOISE AT MIDNIGHT

They all want me to stop talking to you.
My mother with the face of a television
Blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses --
Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie
on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon.

Even you are tired of my chatter -- Smart girl
Your ears stuffed with happiness,
Lying with your incest victim a year now
You haven't sent me word as you promised, my darling
Of second chances.

In the light graves the sheets are so clean.
I gather them up and sheath their silk
For bandages. When the armies arrive, Deborah
And Bill and I all lie and spread
For them. The way you liked me, stupid and silent.

We want to please them. We want every
thing absorbed -- The liquids taken in like a sponge.
No messes. No white horses running wild at midnight.
Nothing fecund left to the brown fields. The Blue

Herons lift -- Their wings wild with applause. The Moon turns
Creamy. Everyone gets excited. There is nothing to do.
I cannot stop talking to you.

VANISHING

Sending missives into the black hole
and no reply.
This invisibility must be what the dead feel.
My father, his long rowing home,
is never far from me now.
My mother always saying, You would have been happy
living a nun’s life if we hadn’t been
Jewish. Not a soul invades
my tiny world day in or out.

Looking always toward the river,
I am lost, as you once said.
Lost, looking there, toward the river,
where you always are.
Not beautiful exactly, but
solitary, inviolable,
all of your own making.

It’s a lie of course. Not a lie exactly,
but my own romantic illusion. I wanted you
like that in those days, complete in yourself,
because I wanted that in me.

Now, in this afterlife,
when everything, even illusion, has been taken away,
nothing tempts me
so much as needing our life together
to have been possible.

Look, out the window, how the leaves
race in the puddle after the rain.
Imagine how it is possible for them to love
their own vanishing, and you have just possibly
imagined me.