Calypso

Happiness is the clown
that ate its head like a cantaloupe. Like a
piece of birthday cake.
Calypso dances like a shaman
on her island, brings down on you
the currents of love. The rain arrived
like a beaded curtain
with a skull upon it. A candle exiting
the room in yours past’s cupped
ghost-white hands.
A drowned comedian washes
up on shore. His jokes still
being told in sodden pockets.
There is an extinct sea animal
decomposing in my brain. Giving off
that putrid odor of wasted things.
A fisherman who thinks he’s made a fortune.
Holes in ships. Wives that have dissolved.
The lightning pulsing in some
faint message. Popping the miracle
of words into my brain. The water

snake uncoiling, writhing, spelling
it out.

Animals

A colossal bird came
to life and now
feeds
the whale. Each
moment passing
some
bit of him breaking off.
Coming loose from my
descriptions. Drawers
of silver
spoons and knives. The
bloody sun
cooking its head.
Forbearance. With
balloons
tugging at our wrists

we
all have plans
to die.

Not just make it there
but
actually do it.
Celebrate with a small
gathering of wilted relatives,
plum pits, music and
the firing of a
pop gun.

Serves you right.
There must have been something
all this time
as life
coagulated at the joints.
As evil men walked through
evil time with pickaxes,
sunk them into
newly
finished graves, looking for
their mothers.

Near and far. In a
flatland called Medea. Her name
stitched
on maps. Sirens all night.
And the deep, macabre woof
of a dog

I’ve never seen. He brings
something to me in my sleep. Is it

the bone of my aunt Marnie?
Is it the bone she lost
when
she tumbled off
her bicycle?

The spotted moon coming out
from the rotted door.

Entangled and newborn out of the universe.

The aimless glow-faced animal
that prowls

the courtyard.

A Woman With No Gender

She’s scattered about the dark like dreams
or shoes, like memories of her mother’s nylons.
Her diamonds and her mirrors. Powders
and blushes. The scissors she used to
cut out her womanness for the final time. How the
clock smiles at her at all hours, and she
smiles back. And the nameless idea:
A baby and a summer clamming on Long Island.
Birthday cards and cards wishing her well
on a speedy recovery. The letters she wrote too.
The many versions of her story which she whispered
in the blood filled grapefruit of night. Each doing some damage
to some presumption. The white heads
of dandelions. Potted basil and thyme. Washed dishes.

And her past and future combining to make a
pink cake.

Funny How A Crisis Is Born

After what seems like months of nothing—
peace—
it enters the room like the eyeless head of a snail.
Something that has traveled a long way to reach you
and make its little torrential introduction
as we stand terror stricken upon the furniture.

Funny how the crisis moves within the house.
Almost invisible, but with the odor of buried, long
forgotten earth. Insisting to be remembered.
Opens its body and light comes out. Light of a different
fiction. Unfamiliar. Deranged. Where once
there was a wall, a stool, a refrigerator…a person.

Now there is this odd family of muted things, closely resembling
something good but changed in the most unsettling way.

Wedding Day

It is the second time you’ve brought
me here.

This one story
church among the grove of deathly lemon trees.

Yes, it is my wedding day, and I am happy;

You are there in a bed. I see your feet first,
one shorter and slightly swollen than the other, no top sheet, all over you
a yellowness.

You

who sent a letter with just the inky imprint
of your tongue upon it

So what was I supposed to think?

How did they manage this? Revive you? Dig you up?

You breathe and move your head, eyes almost open

Hoping
you are not dead.

How long am I expected to consol you in your agony?

I swallow the little white tablet of fear
that you included in the package and go ahead, turn to my
new wife

and ask if she’d like to pick some;
pick some lemons from the trees on the hill.

What A Fly Might Tell Me About Years To Come

It walks and beats itself against the window.
This is in the midst of a
heat wave in New England, late July.
Soon, banished by
itself to one corner into which those
eight to twelve lifeless eyes stare alone,
the microscopic dreamland.
His body a kite in the infinitesimal knife of a world;
this world with both greater, and more miniscule beasts.
The hair upon my arms crawls disapprovingly at its plight
as the hobos sing songs in the rain.
I touch my hands together and watch the water on the glass.
It cools them, cools the glass.
And I imagine them each
as hands of an older gentleman, and how an old man like that
might touch these same old hands together
while watching a pelican roost on a mossy pillar, while
the sea pitches, and the cool, white object of his
wife rests in her grave.
The fly flips. Six legs writhing. Convulses
directly off of my table; and my bones move
underneath my skin like secrets in the complexities of a lie.
And I think of them—

jaws, fingers, teeth.
All disconnected from their larger pieces, from the greater outline.
And how long that will be.

How much time will pass
between my death and my deterioration, when my thoughts have
dissolved entirely.
How faint will my soul be?
How distant the residues of this life upon
their yellowed surfaces.
How inconsequential my yearning
to keep it.
When that dirt, that time, that matter
has come apart. Slowly spread.

And settled.