BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

BLUE SEGMENT, WHITE CENTER

(Or why I didn't go to Russia to marry the singer)

                                    —from paintings by Kandinsky

The birds sing a blue tic-tac-toe with the moon

and ideals carve themselves into oars

to row us across the crest of the 20th century.

Myth and language are buried

in the algebraic equation of the sun,

and the artist's palette. Private symbols explode,

sawhetting across the industrial calligraphy of the sky.

Einstein was right: gravity bends light.

All this deliberation on the natural state

and the shadow of our eventual death

feeds my guilt; I am trapped into accepting

the evolution of air, the shifting of time,

grace notes on the telephone wires,

the piano's thoughts colliding with dust motes—

The hunger of a dream waking

a contextual tableau we punctuated

with molecular definitions

and artificial boundaries

between nations, peoples, lovers.

But I tire of explaining how the open-

armed lover on the Street of Painters  waits with shackles.

When the storyline gets tangled in barbed wire,

the politic wind merely teases it into shape;

it knows no boundaries, no border guards maintaining order

by calling it love, or sings arias til death do us part.

xox       is how the game is played out       

xxo            with illiterate kisses and hugs on ransom notes

xy                    so that chromosomes may evenly divide.

Blue segment, white center:

a flock of birds painted on the channel wall,

suspended flight across the water.

In the muddied clarity between shoreline

and hidden river, distant ships trick the eye

into believing they navigate the land too—

their masts, thin reeds in the autumn wind.

Sinking its teeth upon a reflection

of the moon, how easily the swamp

is placated by its own origin,

its own death.

8/20/92

Schiphol, Amsterdam

BETWEEN THE LINES

BETWEEN THE LINES

                                    —for Jim Dodge

As the blind kitten named Lassie teeths on my toes,

we talk of finding our way home

            to the end of a sentence

and of conjunctions; however, at a loss for words,

our conversation meanders like the perverse bed

of a slow stream oxbowing in and out of itself.

We admire faded pink bachelor buttons

and exposed bulbs flushed from the flowerbed,

studying the hidden patterns of nature

& the inquisition of awkward first-person

perspectives buried in the plot

            of sub-text and context.

Again he asks, Do you still believe in love?

I say I don't regret the falling in love part,

just the endings are harder to erase.

As I turn to leave, my face aches

like the skull grinning on his t-shirt.

He adds, Poetry is on its deathbed in America,

I'm no guru when it comes to love either.

Warns me to tell the truth when I write,

Love over gold—as if it were an option.

The nervous heat searing the air

into shimmering ropes of light,

ripples the afternoon like a pond.

7/13/90

KEEPING SCORE

KEEPING SCORE, ii


As if to jar me out of my hermetic existence,
this guy, fishing around, asks if I still believe in love,
and to keep myself near shore, far from his whirlpool eyes,
I spend the morning compiling jaded lists.
Of the multitudes, the men I've truly loved are few.
But each one left me beached after the act of conception;
and so, hare-like, three times I absorbed my young,
and practiced self-division, keeping score with prime numbers
by pounding my fist on my heart, and singing: Mea maxima culpa.
The ranks swelled—only when banished from my lover's arms,
seeking solace, I occasionally slipped off the shroud.
But I grew used to that refuge it offered—
unless they reappeared on my doorstep late at night—
apparitions, and that slender seducer, the rain, always falling.
Then, there are those whom I'm saving for a rainy day.
The indistinction between sexual and filial love is more durable,
unlike the declared half-life of an average romance.
Most nights are spent behind these cabin walls,
with only the fog, wind or stars to deceive me.
After two decades of practice, I'm tired of keeping score.
and though I've run out of hands, toes and limbs

to count on, the deluge still comes out to a slim 

1.3 cocks per year—less than the US national average
of children per family, or cars in each garage.
What about the statistics of inflation and extended families?
Have they taken serial monogamy into consideration as well?
I need an abacus on my heartsleeve just to keep track—
And so, celebating the end of my 30s,
so I tell him: yes, I still believe in love; but the ghosts
of children resurrect playing fields of trinitite while I sleep,
and the future appears as an indigo shawl spattered
with the crushed remains of stars, the color of his eyes.

7/17/90
rev. ?

Arcata

1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch
1992 Tin Ear/Wire Mother (first version, below)

More Jim Dodge
Jim Dodge

BETWEEN THE LINES

Letter to Jim Dodge

1992 Tin Ear/Wire Mother (first version)




old version, replete with ascii kruft

KEEPING SCORE -As if to jar me out of my hermetic existence, )this guy asks if I still believe in love, seeking solace, I occasionally slipped off the painful shroud. /But I grew too used to that refuge it offered— 4unless they reappeared on my doorstep late at night, Elike apparitions, and that slender seducer, the rain, always falling. 6Then, there are those whom I'm saving for a rainy day. CThat indistinction between sexual and filial love is more durable, 5unlike the declared half-life of an average romance. +On Valentine's Day, my X sent me a present: .the results of his HIV test—a license to fuck. 0Most nights are spent behind these cabin walls, 0with only the fog, wind or stars to deceive me. ;After two decades of practice, I'm tired of keeping score. >I'm lousy at swine markets, and though I've run out of hands, 7toes and limbs to count on, the deluge still comes out ?to a slim 1.3 cocks per year—less than the US national average 0of children per family, or cars in each garage. =What about the statistics of inflation and extended families? ;Have they taken serial monogamy into consideration as well? 6I need an abacus on my heartsleeve just to keep track— -And so, celebating the end of my addled 30s, 9I tell him, yes, I still believe in love; but the ghosts Aof children resurrect playing fields of trinitite while I sleep, 4and the future appears as an indigo shawl spattered 9with the crushed remains of stars, the color of his eyes. 7/17/90

CONDEMNED FLESH

CONDEMNED FLESH

Below the mission outpost of civilization,

three cultures clash with time:

tarpon roll in the Múlege River,

holding midnight's secret under their skins.

Desert palms clatter, venetian blinds in a storm.

Copper women walk barefoot & wash laundry by hand.

We live in a hostal with feeble electricity,

by the prison walls, satellite disks track quasars.

You are my companera of the mythical journey,

my lover whispers, buying me with turquoise.

We don't look too far beyond condemned flesh

and eat only what is offered—sea turtle steak

under the bouganvilla arbor of El Candil—

rationalizing: the turtle's already dead anyway.

A tide of carmine blossoms eddies at our feet.

Even from the beginning, we were planning

the extinction of love, silent tapers in the church;

the turtle's plight beyond salvation.

11/11/89, Mulegé, Baja

THE ANIMAL SORROW OF WOLVES

THE ANIMAL SORROW OF WOLVES

    That philosophical understanding of carnage,

      that concentration of the species.

            —Gerald Stern

It was not easy making friends with wolves.

I'd sit on a ladder by the wire-link fence,

careful not to make eye contact or they'd lunge—

their yellow eyes; calendulas eating the sun,

hot flickering grassfires and phosphorus.

I'd listen to them worry cow hocks (or was it horse?)

across the stained plywood partition,

the bones echoing with a hollow thud.

Was it the slaughterhouse stench of dead meat

or the primal odor of concentrated wolf?

Full moons, they'd answer in chorus for unseen kin—

ambulances, fire engines and police cars—

the cubs knowing only the endless pacing of caged life.

The man who kept wolves—the town dog catcher.

Late afternoons, I heard his woman sobbing and crooning

like a sleepy child. Did she really come like that?

I felt envy, slow to notice my lover's eyes had turned

the color of Indian corn. I learned to sing louder

and longer with each passing stranger

running a practiced hand along my flank

until I was wolf-mother beneath the fig tree

sucking a rivaling empire of boys in men's bodies.

Sensitized by pain, I sang best, seeking asylum,

I studied the flight of vultures and despaired;

was the idea of love, a vulgar carcass of bees and hornets,

romance, attainable as the horizon, or Mars?

Each moon, a new eye. I learned carnelian hunger,

my spoor took on the scent of wolf

and I devoured the Möbius circle of desire.

It was never so bad or as good as this.

10/5/1989

POEM TO A LOVER'S LOVER

Listen, I already know what it's like
to be on the other side.
That was me in the gray dress
orbiting behind the revenge of the camera,
because my man chose a blonde
his daughter's age to replace me
at what was supposed to be our reading.
I know what it's like to be betrayed.
What can I say? Who wants a poem
from the "other woman" that says:
For eons poetry has fed on the betrayal of love
and is fond of the victim's point of view.
That there are no casual spectators.
That we all err on the side of love.
Perhaps it's fitting we remain
disembodied voices over the phone lines,
though I already know who you are.
If not me, then who will accept your calls
late at night? Because I am not
the other woman—

Poetry is.

4/28/89

L' APRES-MIDI

L' APRES-MIDI

     —For Bruce Isaacson

in homage to Robert Sund & Georgia O'Keefe

You have found me out,
slipped in clean as a knife,
your poems lucid as a white room
in late afternoon where
I want to stand before you
pre-architectural. Slip off these words
into something more comfortable,
reveal the inner curve of femur,
the hollow of pelvis framed
against the purity of desert sky
& feel your breath sing against my ribs.

Where my breasts flowered
your disembodied hands harvest
brilliance arcing on blank pages.
We burn against the night's silence
lost, looking for home.
I taste your words on my tongue,
dreaming them as if they were alive,
incandescent as flanks of white horses
in the rain—your poems shed light,
nuzzle breathless in my ear.
It's not so much the words themselves
but the way they touch
the muddy river where, for a moment,
our tongues found truth hidden in the roots.

There is a curve of eyebrow,
an alluvial valley that speaks
of such tenderness, we turn stones,
& turn them again. What does it matter
if the sun will die, your kisses like stars.
The physics of writing consumes us.
Not ambivalence. Not the other sin.
It cannot hide serpentine from the river—
the brightness from within—a burning moth
circling the pale fire of your eyes.

You tell me : too many loves in our past
& slip into the Paris night, well armed,
calling it by the clear light of poetry
because love also requires such brutal attention.
Can one name the instant when the heart
of the untamable beast ignites or dies?
Afraid of what it might be,
in the naked room, what are we then?

4/18/89

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

YET ANOTHER POETRY READING

                     Sex is like a glass of water.
                        ——Alexandra Kollantai
                          —for Bruce Isaacson

You know it happens each time I read poems
about sex & death in the afternoon.
One poet or another wants to follow me down
the smooth truncated saplings of bar stools,
& small infields of hallways & closets—
Call me on the carpet saying, You need a good man.
It's been 6 months & at the erotic poetry ball
the last barbarian in black leather
& studs sweet-talking me in Spanish
tangles up the night in my blue silk dress,
saying, I know you. Verdad?
We neck a bottle of chardonnay & steam up the sunroof.
Not quite unrequited lust in the cab of a pick-up.
Who's keeping score? You get to second base,
I steal third but home is an illusion.
Where does Einstein sleep? We confess
our tongues collude at the speed of recovery. Besos del mar. 
When you let down my hair, tuberoses, primordial
star-scented edens fall beneath your knee
giving up their bounty all at once——both acrid & bitter.
There is a fine line of distinction between perfume,
the sweet smell of decay & desire deep in the jungle.
Statistics change with each cycle;
we continue to make love in the mirror
of each other's eyes but I've prepared for this by eating
Russian chocolate in late afternoon.
My girlfriend's pissed, waiting out in the cold
for us to stop all this sexual innuendo
so we can go home saying, You straight women are all alike.
Men come first. Says you're trouble with a capital “T.”
She's right. I want to ride you across wheat fields
of midsummer Russian steppes,
Tchaikovsky's violin concerto
plying more than sum totals of notes or words.
You want to follow me. Down the road, headlights
never abandon us though we travel at a snail's pace—
breaking speed limits tho not the speed of light.
If sex is death, let me die a little in your arms again
because death is dressed in violets, the color of mourning
but I've said this somewhere before in a poem
to another man. Where does consumation begin
or conception or addiction? If it weren't so late
in the season we could listen to the rain on my roof
but the tiny dog-faced violets know the direction of dawn
without knowing the concept of east or death or spring
training. In the ball courts of Chichen Itza,
the gods wait for the climactic ending; both teams
lose their heads but I lose your address.
Poets are cheap. We will do anything for a good line.
More than once I've caught our names coupling in print.
It's beginning to look suspicious
& we're always the last to know.
Tomorrow we will wake up pretending it was a dream
but our words unzip the secrets of the universe
& we come down so hard
even the Milky Way screams, Galactos.
If you look closely, you can still see the old moon
on the sidelines coaching the new moon to steal home,
saying, Slide, slide. The bases are loaded.
It's an easy victory.

4/9/89

ON HEARING JOHN HANDY PLAY JAZZ

ON HEARING JOHN HANDY PLAY JAZZ

            AFTER MIDNIGHT, NEW YEAR'S EVE

                                        —for Alistair Ingram

                   I don't practice. If I don't have it by now, it's too late.

              It's like going out with a different woman every night.

                                          —Stan Getz

           

Feeling blue because my man left for no good reason,

I crawl out of the hills to hear John Handy play jazz solo.

In my head I write poems without words, pen or paper

to every riff, growl and squeeze of his saxophone.

The music pours into me, fingers of rain on the sea.

We are shipwrecked in a blue room seductive with smoke.

Embouchure and altissimo—open octaves form a river

of birds spiraling home to the nascent shell of our ears.

On the ceiling balloons undulate, bull kelp in the waves.

John Handy brings me a purple one—the color of sorrow.

He says, I got a cabin up in Cazadero. You know Clive Hawthorne?

I say, I'm the bearer of bad news. He's two years dead. Alcohol.

He flinches. Puts his hand over his heart. Says, He was a good man.

We started out together in this business a long time ago.

He points to my name-tag and asks where I've been.

I say, measuring a passage of time on the other side of the world,

celebrating New Year's Eve in Moscow with Gorbachev via satellite T.V.

John Handy flutter-tongues and bends a few cool notes—

a sweet school of fish ah-uhm for Charlie Mingus and Auld Lang Syne.

Sequinned women in stiletto heels sway, charmed snakes

in front of the mellifluous sax. Sub-tones. Overtones.

Circular breathing. I tell him his music is poetry without words.

Perfect intonation. Harmonics. When you hear one note,

you hear every single note in the universe.

He asks for my name-tag as a souvenir, puts it into his pocket.

It says what I am—Poet. For a moment I'd almost forgotten

why I was alone.

1/1/89

Café Resalles, San Francisco

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN

That young man who
thinking he knew something of cycles
blamed poor old Mary Bianchi
for depleting the soil
instead of his own failure
to understand its needs.
She, who raised two generations
from that same soil
including members of my family
improved the soil each year
with chickenshit
to nourish the chard
which in turn was used
to feed the chickens
who laid strong eggs
like our bones.
She knew about cycles and patterns.
When her first husband died
of mushroom poisoning
she married his brother
and continued her work
in the garden.

IN MARY BIANCHI'S GARDEN, II

That young man who

thinking he knew something of cycles

blamed poor Mary Bianchi

for depleting the soil

instead of his own failure

to understand its needs.

She, who raised two generations

from that same soil

including our family

improved the soil each year

with manure

to nourish the chard

which in turn was used

to feed the chickens

who laid strong eggs

like our bones.

She knew about cycles and patterns.

When her first husband died

of mushroom poisoning

she married his brother

& carried on in the garden.

6/87   (possibly 6/23)? 

1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch

1991 Poet Magazine, Fall issue

1990 Tight

1989 Sculpture Gardens Review

        Green Fuse

        Gulf Stream

I wrote my first draft during my CAC AIL residency at Napa State Hospital.

This typed draft is from Napa V Poetry conference, Aug. or Sept.

EXODUS, EXILE AND DESIRE

EXODUS, EXILE AND DESIRE

Clouds cover the moon like a map of Africa

and the moon breaks through the continents.

Beneath the sweet, almost foetid odor of frangipani,

blue-tailed lizards mate,

thrusting ocher bibs of ruffled lace

and arch their backs to a silent calypso.

Distant thunder wraps itself in sheets of ghost lightning.

Arawak Indians once lined conch shells

along the eastern shores of these islands

to remind the sun of its feathered cloak.

We eat sweet white meat of the conch.

What's no longer needed is thrown back into the jungle.

The barracuda sleeps and the shark is hungry.

As we bathe in the sea,

bone-white lilies of our arms

blossom under the full moon.

Translucent fish slide between my thighs.

The fan turns slowly in an empty room.

5/85

1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch
1991 Poet Magazine
1988 Chaminade Literary Review
         Women's Voices
1987 Blue Window

FEAST OR FAMINE

FEAST OR FAMINE
—After William Carlos Williams

This is just to say:

I usually know better than to open a man's

refrigerator no matter how good

the loving was the night before.

The newspaper was still readable—

not that news is important enough to eat—

the salmon on a plastic-keeled raft

had a knowing look as if a fishing rod

had snagged something other than dreams

during the night's repast.

Not that we kept each other

in hunger and health the whole night long.

However, for breakfast, I only eyed the avocado

which you were probably saving for tonight's dip.

Eggs tossed in a frail paper boat

on a heavy cabbage sea, and the mushrooms—

like puckered toes under an incandescent moon,

would have been good in an omlet.

Though my appetite is stirring,

there are always greener pastures farther south.

You see, my mind was on last night's dinner

which stood me up when we fell back into dreams

and the salmon swam freely home—

I'm still famished, no matter how many quarts

of kisses were stored on the shelf

during the famine years.

Cotati, 1984
rev. 4/89
1993 We Are Not Swans, with Cecelia Woloch
1985 Poets of the Vineyard, First Prize (another version)

EMINENT DOMAIN

EMINENT DOMAIN
—for Will Staple

At the 16-mile marker

the melody of surf leads us deeper

into the heart of the jungle

where we slide on ancient terraces,

and fruit flies rise up

from their mango prayers.

Barefoot, we re-emerge from the tangle

and follow the old Hawaiian trail.

On the cliff, a windmill places us in time.

In the surf a man shows his son

how to spear a fish.

They talk with their hands.

You offer a red flower for my hair.

The breakers confront the fish in you,

and the dorsal fin in me.

The ocean wipes all traces

of speech from our lips.

6/5/ 1983 Kulike, Maui ?

WS Merwin's place

8/90 rev.

1993 We Are Not Swans, Cecelia Woloch