Prelude One
  
 Only the white lace stays lit.
 Actually, it was the garden.
 Burning rosemary, love, love,
 I’m dancing my summer away.
  
 Your voice an amulet
 remembering my name.  
 I lied.
 I said I was leaving.
  
 *
  
 A Woman Calls Back
  
 Faithless, we come destroyed
 with the smell of morning
 in our hands. 
 I slept last night
 as your guest in the pocket
 and the pillow.  
 There were plenty of sweet lost leaves.
 Not crafty in any way,
 we break flowers.
 Most things I cannot help.
  
  
 *
  
 Prelude Two
  
 Our throats, our sore
 Yes, this is my powdered paper-gaze,
 your inked eyes and chin.
 Meant to burn,
 our magic turns petal-fisted
 with drowsy thumbs.  
 We hide ourselves
 like little feet.
  
 Who wants rain or cool?  
 A glass kick in the ass
 sounds just as free. 
  
 Look—
 the bee balm spreads even
 and even keeps the jigsaw puzzler’s lover
 from spilling his own juice.  
 We’re still not getting any luckier
 at where we lay our heads.
  
 *
  
 Forever the thirsty girl, 
 no one knows I love you
 and your two-toned wingtips—
 if you have them.
  
 *
  
 BUT ANYHOW (SORRY ABOUT THE
 INK COLOR CHANGE) THANKS FOR
 THE CARD YOU SENT ME, & SORRY
                                              THAT I DIDN’T REPLY SOONER.
          I WAS TRYING TO REMEMBER
          ALL THE PLANT NAMES.
  
 *
  
 Learning to Look
  
 The first face I see
 when I look out the window hanging in the window
 is cut from red velvet.
  
 Didn’t we—
 in the mirror?  
 A file for everything:
 his boots, thunderclouds,
 flowers—convertible—compressed
 into scarred faces on thin fingers.
 The little diamond is now a windchime.
 Oh, what I’ve been missing.
 I thought, At Last!
 But this isn’t working.
 This isn’t work.
  
 Fingers placed on the pulse of fever.
 Double when you kiss me.
 Throat-itch, 
 the moon.
 Yours lights,
 mine beams.
 This is what is
 working.
 Your mind without training wheels.
  
 Sleep-twitch
 tick, tick, tick
  
 Attached to bashful
 like Giselle with a tendon-stretch
 a safe trip—
 if we don’t go anywhere
  
 Doesn’t anyone want me
 to walk 
 on the moon again?
 Because I can.  
 I mean:
 I will.
  
 *
  
 My hand is caught
 in the phlox.
 That’s what the neighbors say.  
  
 Moving like glue, 
 or myself, 
 I drink from the same cup.
 I will not share my childhood spoons.
  
 *
  
 You took your mind off lipstick
 the night I was named Miss Kiss.
  
 *
  
 Answers to Questions I Was Asked Today
  
 I could romanticize it—
 that I could feel his breath on my skin.
 Or, I could just say
 he’s a mouth-breather.  
 A Visit to the Mister
  
 This morning, 
 he has to get up early,
 waking to walnut and oak.
 Pay no attention as he reaches
 for a nice white shirt.  
 He likes them wrinkled.
  
 *
  
 My failures to suspend
 result in an appeared hero.
 Sometimes I say 
 I’m not mad.
  
             Thanks for the new pants.
                                                 They’re not new.  You wore them last summer.
  
 I thought I heard you say,
 Shark! Shark!
 But it was sharp.
 I hide in white corners.
  
 *
  
 Prelude Three
  
 Yes, we are together
 in the sermon industry,
 did you know?  
 We accept our word
 rather than keeping it.  
 Our neighbor birds
 do not like us.  
 They say we crowd the dove-bath.
 We prefer tulips to phlox.
  
 *
  
 Prelude
  
             The morning dove bleats in threes.
 We take our eyes
 to the one-hour photo,
 and they come back as sideways glances.  
 Sara’s shoes are in the center circle.  
 She, I hear, has nice ones.
 Julie’s shoes are in the—
 blink, blink
 to remember me by.
 The o we weave
 Forgive the giving in
 Forget the ivy
 convince me there is a tea-tree
 show me how the bathroom mirror
  
 Can you move over, teacup?
 can you follow me, border, border, bored.
 The rash you planted, 
 you can dig it up now.
 We sweep.
 I thumb the cup your lips touched.
 Cream like that, border.
 You can dig that rash up now.
  
 I found a cove within a cave.
 Something like a stain—
 resembling something like a scream-- 

 Marie Laveau:
 Call your daughters
 to the circle of
 their future lives!
  
 Sisters: 
 Crowd around
 like thunder clouds.
 Join hands.
  
 Dance,
 and let moonbeams at your feet
 conjure up 
 the unsuspecting Mississippi Sound.
  
 Sugar,
 mingled with jasmine perfume,
 pink candles, and lilies like lambs:
 Grant us dreams
 of our beloveds.
  
 Fingertips to lips
 hands pressed to tombs—
 touching names chiseled there
 a hundred years ago,
 but not forgotten.
  
 Say,
 I have something!
 I have something
 to say--  

 Among stylized flower clusters. 
 Egyptologists, Spanish pears,
 and Diaghilev’s minor ballets Russes,
 one thing stood out:  ornamented
 in ormoulu, your bold patina impressed
 with cold-painted bronze nymphets.  
 Fitted for electricity, your accurate darling anatomy—
 muzzle buffing in the wild grapes.  The myth lies—
 all great objets are not in museums
 among mass-produced baubles and bric-a-brac.
 In this swaggered rose garden, you hide
 a feathery hybrid creature 
 in a demilune of molded glass. 

 Found in the shallows
 are men drowned by Bacchus.
 Their faint faded heartbeats
 heard only by divers
 launched from glass-bottomed boats. 

  I decipher
 (from your emphasis on try)
 that I should be hearing
 the literature in the turtledove’s hum
 any day now.  
 But the morning melody
 is always flat—the way moonlight
 looks on a postcard.
 You have not lived 
 until you are inside the facet of this jewel. 

 The pines rise to meet
 the earlier half of morning.
 While we catalogue snowflakes,
 our hands still age, migraines
 happen every day, and I cannot love 
 you all.  Outside, deep blue
  
 becomes the right kind of influence.
 Hard starts are pitched
 from the plotline.  Each eye blinks
 with a different perception
 of the spectrum
   

 I pull your body off these pages,
 torn.  It died a raindrop’s death—
 a little paler than before,
 never blue.  Today finally feels
 the complicated structure
 of our crimes.  Look at the skyline—
 a little bluer than before.
  
 Unhappy, I clean the bones
 buried beneath the language barrier.
 On a canyon road, a cave
 and sweets—gorgeous—ordered
 with ease.  Whatever she wants.  
 Whatever and such and such 
 and such.
  
 There is something at the bottom 
 of the pool, but we’re not sure what.
 Its loss is a poor bird carried under my cheek.
 The complex structure of our contagion
 dissipates in tepid drifts, 
 and I have become less aware of my sleeves
 and their many inhabitants.  It is the abuse and confusion
 of something being painted over.  The illusion
 that you’re making something new.
  
 You promise to tell me about the fruitstand,
 the church.  You promised 
 on many occasions.
   

 Maybe time spent wondering why
 was time I should have spent improvising
 with heavy metals.  By the way, 
 where are you?  I could hum some ballads.
 You see, I chewed up more than I could spit out,
 and I’m searching for ways to tease my tongue
 back to purpose.  We all speak language so fluently—
 anyone our age should—it could be French.  It could be 
 phantome, fantasia, plasma, plume.  I may or may not
 be ready.  I am slow reader who fingers sentences.
  
  
             It’s time for the childlike skins of larvae       
             to peel where you’re found alone—sketching portraits
             of breasts in Bible-colored books.  Beyond the medieval
             thigh-wound convention, oafish loitering, and packing your pants  
             with “Love Psalms that Rock the Gods,” someone nods 
             as you mumble.  You stumble over umber, which is burnt,
             like the crayon, and I interpret this as your bloodline.  
             You brag of soft-slapping mothers, and for the first time,
             patented technologies begin to perform simultaneously. 

 Today I began courting
             the nervous system. I was
             nervous.
  
             Les truths
 limping over here, 
 now.  I love
 beside breasts and between
 swallowed delicateness,
 until.
  
 Big river spills.  Memorizing
 previous drools, slobber-spells.
 Rejuvenates the dead clams
 on shore.
             Little wonder no one drinks the water.
  
 *
  
 Iris-out
  
 Blank spaces seem
 to happen of late.  What happened?
 I mean, to cause this change.  Reflections
 bounce off my face.  Once in a while
 I just watch—that is, I hum.
  
 *
  
 Iris-in
  
 I don’t want to sing like this anymore.
 Desire is vein-colored, diluted under thick skin.
 We attempt birthing backwards—into half lit
 drops of ointment.  We re-own our eyes
 by staring at things.
  
 *
  
 I shift with the precision 
 of a hill.  Oh, no one told me
  
 about the bruising. 

 So, clearly, no one can shimmy, pipe-down
 into mortar.  He gets plenty
  
 without me.  Shimmy, Ra.  He—
  
 love made sweet the minstrel.  Drown himself,
 down the pipe.  Blows away, so much, down.  Oh—
  
 people like to look at me.  Come on.
  
 Let’s be seen—
 swinging from our ankles.