Yellow

Everybody's speaking

with the same blunt tongue.

I haven't heard forked sexy French

since I left him

and the dark, angry hum

of our town.

Nos habitudes

me manquent.

Too much yellow

here; yellow signs, yellow street-signs, yellow sun-

flowers, not a burst of gerbers or the blue and white that cries,

"We are still outraged

and we know how to love."

I laughed when in the midst of it but now

I'd give all the yellow in the world

for a mean blue.

I miss you.

Everybody's speaking

the same blunt tongue.

I haven't heard our language

since we came down the mountain

with the angel at our back,

with angels on our backs.

I miss you.

Tu me manques.

I miss you.

After Swimming

Sweet drowsiness

coming out of the water

and that lingering smell,

that chill. Warm me up.

Old posters

cling to the lungs of the pool.

It breathes, don't-you-know,

in stills.

Then up

the street and new soaked leaves

cling to the brick-

work stairs and tiles

and the floor is lapping in slow, short waves.

They overwhelm these slippers

merely.

Up the street

to old films, favourites

of the staff: Monique, Enrique,

the smiling handsome one.

No name, no name.

Sweet drowse,

empty of the fight before I left and you

closed that door.

Each to our own vitro.

I'll kick in the womb and you'll

pluck out every hair to grow away.

We'll each be fish apart.

We'll each be born.

Sweet drowsiness

and that lingering smell,

that chill.

Toast to the New Year

Written months ago, but I just got around to posting.

Here's to the taste

of a cigarette I never smoked

and of a drink I didn't

and of the fruit you ate on the way.

To the bruise on my knee

and the dust

and the cold cement floor.

Here's to descending

below the tumult

into the upper deep,

to voices muffled

by a floor over our heads

and heeled footsteps

speaking above us in code.

Here's to the length

of this house, its depth,

its hiddenness.

Here's to cracks

in the foundation, and where do they go?

All the way,

through the centre of the earth

where it's too hot for words.

Place your palm on a weaker point,

and wait for the heat,

though you may be imagining this.

Nevertheless.

Here's to leaving

my mind behind, on the surface,

when I opened a door.

Here's to stairs

to the cellar

that only ever go down.

Here's to going down.

Here's to the New Year

and the taste of a cigarette.

Orchids

Ceilings II

I've been staring at ceilings.

Remember, I told you

I adore this house? It's turned against me.

Something haunts me.

The muse and his red guitar

won't stop. The walls press in.

So I hanged him, unfinished business.

I hanged him.

Fur

Haven't you noticed

my fine new coat of fur? I'm over

with bare naked skin and a throat

laid open for all

and any

one to seize.

A ruff is what I need,

no nape exposed and tingling

to the sound of footsteps over my grave.

He didn't like hearing that.

A set of claws will save

me. My hackles rise

and fur runs quickly down

and up my spine.

Friday Night Chasms

Friday night chasms,

between two bodies prone on the sheet

in the dark of a blackout,

or a thousands tiny lights

in your room.

The long curve of your back:

I can't forget

the horizon of your shoulder to your hip.

A line,

it made me need you

in the next day and weeks that followed.

Words would send me crazy

but that slope of your shoulder

brought me back

home, your body, your

bed, your

nesting cave of wonders,

blinding lights,

magpie's generosity.

It's still your voice that reaches me,

your sigh

of greeting, as if every

meeting face to face is for the first time.

Your eyes, marrons glacees.

Your voice

breathing embraces

for my ears alone,

and every other one

you meet.

The same

serene tenderness for strangers,

and the beautiful angry cook,

and me.

Shells

Never sink again into desire,

warm vertiginous drop

and the flush that follows.

Never again. Do not drop

the shield the ice queen cometh.

Warm and easy smile, she holds

a stone between her palms.

A heart is the size of two fists,

one in the other,

in the centre a pearl.

A stone between her palms,

to keep it warm.

To harden her hands.

To move her shell inside where she needs it most.

Soft skin gives way

to easily.

The Muse Plays a Red Guitar (Albatross)

i)

The muse

play a red guitar, skin like ebony,

deserts me feeling

forlorn. Foregone

conclusions leap about and all that's

missing is the proof

for all that

talk

takes us nowhere.

The muse looks blue when he's beautiful

and rises in coils and flames

away from his face, bent

over strings.

His fingers pluck

and his eyes sing Hallelujah

to one more king.

ii)

Everything shows on my face.

What we do,

what we do to each other without looking.

I don't want to fight with you.

I don't want to fight you or be your wife

with all the trimmings,

all the trappings.

I don't mean to trap him,

though he feels it.

Afterward, after

words and his eyes are owlish,

bird caught in lime,

lines,

lime-light.

iii)

My albatross is heavier today,

wings toward morning.

Oceanic Eyes

I tread

the depths of your oceanic eyes

and was dry to the knees

tonight,

where before this flailing

limbs only kept me

inches from sinking.

The surface has shifted.

Rather, the unfathomable deeps

of water in your body, slogging

through arteries and clogging

them with dreams,

have lost their depth.

A year, almost,

after finding my ghost lover, one sad

beyond reckoning and smitten

with beauties only I could share,

I don't think he survives

any longer. I lost him

high on the tenth floor

between a gust of wind

and an upturned collar.

The air is clear

now, the nights are colder.

A season lost

and the wheel of the year has turned

to its long slow under-arc, the basin

that is winter

falling.

Creek beds

run sluggish in the heat,

slowly in the freezing,

and rivers

that only last year floated

ships in your eyes

come barely to my knees.

Perfect Service

Perfect service,
and the brush of a stranger's hair
on your arm.
And wanting to write like Hemmingway.
And wanting to write like Joni Mitchell.
And wanting to paint as if their words have stumbled somehow
from exhausted presses,
whose letters no longer say
but only mean,
to the biggest empty page that they could find.

Wanting to paint as if you have
forever to understand these words
not scrawled across the canvas
but embedded on,
embossed upon
its surface. Wait forever
for the perfect sleepless night to take you
out of skin and meaning
of the darker sky and room,
the bed too warm,
too wide.

Wade
across the stillness
of a house with no one in it
save for Ludo, and he's sleeping
to a painting full of circles
looking forward to the spring.

Home Barefoot

I walked home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot, in the rain.
I walked, home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot; in the rain
the ground was warm enough
when puddles soaked, stroked
and soothed my ankles,
and falling water whispered to me.

Falling water whispered,
to me of all people,
whispered to me,
of all people.
All people
whispered to me
of
water
falling

on the drum of my umbrella's skin,
on
my
skin.

The ground is warmed when exhaling.

Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

You Told Me

You told me
that artists come and go a little farther
than the others;
we feel it when we fall so much harder
than our mothers
ever warned us.

Artists see the light,
and musicians are jonesing for the perfect sound
and it's alright
that loving feels like I'm about to drown.

Across the Sheet

That fiercely empty
half bed and belly
where a man or child should lie are sharply hollow
and full of secrets.

Too far from the wall, the bed's too wide;
its distance makes my foetal
curl unable to cross
between myself and the destiny bred in my womb.
Girl-woman, turned on herself away
from the bare cold of a night
when the others are burning midnight oil for music,
when even the weight of a guitar on her belly
would be better than nothing at all.

Ice Bridge to America

Middle morning
and swallows are flying
everywhere over water
miraculous in its stillness.
You behind me do not move.

There's a canvas resting behind us, sleeping
at home in the dark
of my closed room, the pause
between the flick and stroke of fingers
and the scrape of charred wood.
You behind me do not move.

Girl at Myriad

Old pale lace and steam from your tea
combine. What are you writing,
lovely girl with your double-bridged nose;
what language are you learning?

''You know what they say about girls with red shoes,''
an auntie told me once.

If she only saw you.

Listening

Think of me
as swallowing all that you say to me.
I will take your words into my open mouth,
taste them,
feel their shapes, sharp and flat as river grass.
I will envelope these blades in my body
and they will be no more.

Bohmerwald

Even though I miss you, I'm better off missing you
than with you while envisioning
what I thought we could be.
I'm better off with others,
many filters for my fractured
sense of unity.
When your words are barbed wire,
and your skin is too distant to touch,
and the skin of your arm is this cool,
and your eyes are cold,
and your voice is invulnerably male,
I crave the middle distance
of a day without you.

In the fragile middle distance
of a room behind closed doors, I listen in
to conversations
when you don't know I'm there,
or when you've overlooked my presence
like so many times before.

On your way home late this evening,
I'll be singing under water.
As you wander in the darkness
I'll be passing through the glossy wooden

hall. You turn the handle
of our heavy wooden door,
but I'm already sunk in shadows
in the green room, Bohmerwald.
Behind the forest's door,
the middle distance calls.

The Wolves of his Words

June 2010

18'' x 40''

Mixed media on canvas