VISITING HOURS
I wore dark glasses
not because you were dead
but because it hurt to look
into the glazed eyes
of my mother, my sister
waiting around
the visiting table: our
three careful smiles.
Of course this
was not the first breath kept waiting
for handsome you
to walk through the door, or on water.
There must be
in every father
an inheritance of love held
back, or drowned like a kitten.
What you gave I took
greedily with an endless stomach
for stone walls
and dark rooms.
I snatched it like money and tucked it
deep. There must be
in every daughter
a treasure chest guarding her
keep, or a hole overflowing with shit.
I wore dark glasses
because you were sleeping
clean-shaven in the asylum,
kept from the world
like a sharp knife in a drawer
I could take in my hand
and polish calmly for hours to see
me reflected
shining jaggedly.
Finally you came into the room
handsome you
electric with new drugs,
smelling of soap and stiff sheets.
There was a round white table between us, or nothing.

MOTHERHOOD

I cup you in my hands

because you are that small. My heart is a battalion

of aching soldiers. This is my lonely weapon: love. Love

in her deep blue camouflage. I weep and draw a crowd

but no one sees

the numberless bones that poke

from the gutters,

broken. This is war.

Motherhood is a wound.

I hold you and you

are happy.

I am lifted into a different country.

The way I love you is a humid jungle, swaying

in its own haunted silence.

I march to the warcry and thrust into battle,

the lonely burning core.

I am the war,

the hands that seek to touch the warm pride

of your body.

You cannot speak or walk and when you cry

it is not the blind cry of a child but the muttering

of a small mathematician.

You count the bars of your wooden crib.

I lay in the dark and watch your fingers flick

across the ribs

of your bed.

I lay in the dark

and fight for our life.

AF
2001

Splatter Matters: things to do with the painting program when you aren't writing poems.

 I'd bet you ten dollars this applies to you.

Bruised Scorcery
or
Wizard Gizzards?



City at Night



Sweet chicken, the sky has fallen.



The Sun Rises Like Nuclear Citrus

Suck it Warhol





the temperamental cutting board

Cracked Windows and Blown Gutters

Summer Storm





-Indeed and Amen-



THE LOWER 48


He was easy to find

hanging in his plaid

pj's from a beam in the

livingroom. She'd come to ask him

to make her scrambled eggs. Daddy?

Not horror but a six-year-old’s

solemn wail.


By then she could read

the thin colored veins

of any map--he'd hovered with her

over his bright desk

every night after supper.

He taught her routes and roads,

the endless ways


to all fifty states.

She often remembers

the peculiar loose angle

of his neck,

his face dangling grey

as a burntout bulb---

and the clumsy chair


she climbed to touch

the stubble-line

of his drool-wet jaw.

But mostly she remembers

her father's sure finger

tracing the way

to the edge of the Arctic,


whiskeydeep voice telling

of cold beyond cold,

whisker-close to her face:

In Alaska there are whole nights

of daylight! Honey, can you believe

there's a place you can go

where the night is light as day?

Maybe someday we'll fly there and see.


AF

LEGACY


When you were young and your skinny legs
could run and run there was the ghost

of your father whose image pumped
through the thin pipes of your limbs

and you did move like him,
a flash across the grass under heavy gray skies.

Your eyes were his too,
green most days, sometimes blue.

You were seven when he died,
a pile of cocaine under his nose.

At the funeral they touched your face
said My Land you do look like him, don't you?

That day your mother put you in a little suit.
Little brute in a suit,

scowling at the priest.
The pounding in your chest, the thunder in your belly

was the uprising of your body,
your answer to the polished

brown casket.
The weekend after

the funeral you played kickball
in the street with the other little boys

with fathers, boys whose mothers
brought casseroles to your mother

and didn’t know about the coroner’s report
that said overdose: your father’s heart
had stopped like a clock


Your father's name was your grandfather's name
and you were the third,

the bloodline-end.
You closed off then

and did not understand how he could leave you
in the long day playing ball

casting purple shadows
against the hot streets

of your southern town.
But he left you his shed tools, his Led Zeppelin albums,

his picture.
He left you his picture

and later you blew the roof off the school
with your weird hairdo then left

for someplace he'd never been.
Your eyes green lightning

striking.



AF

They call it writer's block

but all you can think of are stacks of alphabet blocks, towers of them tumbling from their wobbly height: there goes E; R; T! There goes the raw solitude of sitting criss-cross applesauce alone in the clean silence of your bedroom. You were a child once. You played with the alphabet, spelling in a sloppy row, not really knowing how to spell, trying out your mama's name. Do you remember your own pink, fat, two-year-old fingers? Fat smudgy fumblers. Somewhere, probably in the dim far away cave of the living room, your parents hissed and grimaced. You built your trembling ABC towers. You just kept piling them up. Little baby alphabet-carpenter. A humid breeze pushed through your window, told you the world's strange secrets. Strange secrets, ninety-four degrees.

It is different now. Those secrets wrapped and hung your ribcage, green and serpentine, years years ago. You learned them all by heart, by degree. Now you are thirty-two and the blocks are smaller, duller. You sit criss-cross applesauce on a wooden chair in front of your typewriter. The chair sags--the years have promised nothing. Still the alphabet eludes you and trembles at its great height. Careful primaries: A--B--C. You keep the letters in absolute order. The jungle breeze hits you differently, a thick hot hand on your cheek. Traffic jams your nerves. The endless shimmer of metal-to-metal clogs your moody arteries. Still your fingers do things without you--they are thin now, sore and pink as ballerinas, invasive and shaky; anorexic maybe. One is necklaced by a wedding ring. It winks at you sweetly. Monkeys breed and stomp in your heart. Words swing from tree to tree, evasive and screaming---your typewriter waits like a patient wife, a clot of letters and symphonies right there under you: only air between your fingertip and the faded L key. How do you spell the words for it hurts; I can't breathe; my god, stop talking? How do you know their bright, special colors? How do you cry in a different language; keen in silence; get down the iambic of grownup savagery?

These days you type from a different country; you watch the sun rise like nuclear citrus. There is nothing between you and the alphabet: nothing but the salt-burn of A to Z.

There Is Husband or No

Say I have a husband

Guilt is magical

And what I really have is a ladder
leaning against
an antiquated barn

Where hay snores
like a man and passes days full
of needles like a heroin addict

or a methadone clinic
and I am one of those swearing
smoking women

withdrawing on
the couch

Guilt is magical

my baby is a thirteen month old fever
crawling the walls
and the walls are not nearly

punishment enough
for having a baby with
no husband to keep

me from
Marlboros

from the coup
of my sultry
addiction

Guilt: lovely, magical

and addiction claws at itself
mercilessly in the chicken’s opium den
at the dull edge

of the hay there is
husband or no

husband and always the
singing scream of a kid,
plenty of guilt to go round.

Plenty of easy, say like sleeping
your way up the ladder.