from the book

Till It Bleeds

Despite a day that glowed like a coal,
the dark hour’s powerless,
no lulling in its lateness.
The night-blooming tuberose,
with sweet oppressive scent, prevents rest.
Its waxy white flowers, at stem’s end, redden
to the color of my blood, the petals flame—
not flowers, but flares.

Do you too jolt awake from anxiety dreams
in the middle of the night, with a cry
like a wild bird’s?

I see the whole world as through a red lens,
as if existence were a kind of hemorrhage;
my heart groans with a pain as real as hunger,
Death stares back at me with lamp-like eyes.

Does your soul grieve in the night like mine,
when the tuberose,
with all the perverse strength
in its swollen fleshy roots,
sweetly reeks, as if to drown you in flowers?
Does your soul gnaw and scratch
at your daytime life
till it bleeds?

Fortissimo

You played a passionate song,
I was afraid to ask what it was called
because I knew its name would say everything
that had flowed between us
slowly as molten lava.

Nature co-authored this romantic pantomime
of unspoken heart’s history.
The full moon laughed with her round fat face,
laughed light:
she was making us the heroes of a limerick.

Secret laughter shook our hearts’ bedrock
even though our eyes seemed to float in tears
of deepest feeling.
The colors of the patterned rug
glowed a rainbow.

We both felt it—the Turkish rug
became a hallucinatory lawn,
palm trees swayed above us in the breeze,
our blood raced to keep up with these changes.

Our desires broke over us both in a wave,
brought us down as would a beast of prey,
we sank to the soft-as-moss carpet
with cries like those of two dying gazelles.

In the Beginning

a lively composition, to be played with the world as orchestra

I swung from a golden spring cloud
when the world was still young and God a new father.
I balanced myself on a big blue egg
(the sky’s whole dome).
Sparks shot out of my wooly hair,
I sang ring around the rosie,
teased the full moon (my fat grandpa)
till he teetered; I nibbled mama sun’s
gold cookie-crumbs, shut Satan up in heaven
—God I confined to smoky hell.
The pair of them wagged their fingers grandly
cleared indignant throats.
Winds whistled like a whip, I was in for a licking,
but then God thundered a couple of chuckles,
along with the devil, about my idea
of what constituted a deadly sin.
I’d give ten thousand earthly joys
to live again, so God-given,
so God-hidden, so out and out in the open!
Yes, like I did when I was still
God’s brat.