little girl, get up.

have you kissed yet?

no (boastfully) i’m treating her like a
LADY

yeah, boy, but you ain’t treatin’ her like a woman

for sixteen bluesky/rainy days i waited.
i sat listening, but one gets distracted
by the grass / the breeze / the
bumbling of bees in a brain.
even when my eyes were closed i could not feel you.
i could only sense the sexy rustle of a lady tree’s skirts in the wind.
once at the sound of a cracking twig my
trance broke, and i snapped my head up: but
there was no one. you see this
attempt to fall in love with you ended this way:
i taken, nurtured, ravished entirely by the earth,
who was there for me when you weren’t,
when all the incense stayed smothering the chapel,
when all the pilgrimages went in circles,
when all the dogma flooded the parchment
(so easy to burn)

i knew you once. this is why i waited.
but now i am a mystic hooded,
sitting outside with my back to a white gate.
(what is an unmystical mystic?)

when they ask me breathlessly what it’s like
i answer pleasantly, truthfully:
it is glory.

he pauses considering:
i like your theory on this and
other things,
such as the heightening of desire
at the sound of springtime,
when all is still muddy and dead

i’m hey honey and my
world falls to pieces,
all dazzling and jagged,
piercing holes in the multiverse which now
oozes with the juice of oranges.

her withdrawal is symptomatic of fear

Icarus has surrounded me. I’ve known his name for a long time; for a long time we’ve been acquainted. He resurfaced with Rob and Wings Burn Away, then again with Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying” (when I most needed him, he looked down from heaven and fell smiling sympathetically). His portrait hangs above my bed, golden and tragic. And again this morning, with Williams’s “Landscape on the Fall of Icarus,” and Brueghel’s painting of the same name. All different. Rob, no doubt, chose based on the legend of hubris, though I haven’t asked. Gilbert sees his triumph as the only man to fly. Whoever painted the one over my bed sees him as beautiful and pitiable, an emblem of male beauty. Williams and Brueghel find themselves aware of his insignificance in the face of an ordinary, real world. (I would tend to disagree with them.)

I wonder how else Icarus will fall into my lap over the next 60 years or so.

you are astonishment.
when night is darkest,
hazily i gaze outward:
and there are you
gazing upward,
singing.

i watch cliff-enclosed.
my hands are scarred.
the rock is scarred too,
from some animal’s (my finger)nails.

the sky is turning greyer
and i see all upturned and distanced
two luminous faces;
do you hear? there are wordless things
like banners rippling from their lips.

what do you think? i ask my heart. what are they?
and it leaps once then stands uncondemned

dear lauren this hai
ku is for you if you check
from your crackberry

delete! delete my way out
(like chewing myself out of a cage:
impossible)

[cover your tracks/baby/
don't-leave-no
paper/trail]

skulk, dear it’s the
only way ’cause these
confusions got to go
somewhere

Delicately I begin to write precisely
In cursive
About my Sore Back from Neck to Hips,
About an artful Navigation of Tempt(estuous) Waters.
Here: This is what we call “journalling.”
It lets you be honest somewhere.
Take up your pen, child, and grasp it, guard it;
All sanity rests in the welling of its ink.
—-
Temp(t)estuous or Tempt(estuous)? What do you think?
Also, I think the last part should be rewritten to rhyme, but I’m not sure.

um. i’m having trouble with the not writing thing.