Touch

I love water.
I love the way it knows every curve in the rock,
every crevice of the mountain,
how it finds its way over things, under things, through things.
Water is a traveler who carves its own road.
There is no obstacle that can withstand its slow and patient craftsmanship.
I love how it will take centuries to smooth a pebble that will fit perfectly into your palm. I put my hand in the water
because I know no other way to know something is real.
It must be felt. It must be in my hand.

We’re like the ships of Ulysses, always being blown off course. Hurry up and undress, before the blood dies in our hearts again.

Here are plates of jalapeno nachos
beside bony, blood-red ribs and sequins
brush shoulders with sheltered lice at the Feast of St. Francis.
Fake fronts on a fake street, humbly robed in gray,
standing dead-eyed beyond the spill of crimson lanterns.

A cloud of flea-ridden fleece huddles muddied
beneath a tearing sky, dollops falling
among plain pike men trudging barefoot in
pence-thin plate worn over leather tunics.

she sits on a rock

by the lake

by the tree

she who is she

who used to be me

He has passed out drunk in his brother’s bedroom and O I have come stealthy to that bed, invisible as his family murmurs of  other things, and placed his inert arm over me in mock love while our baby kicked in my taut stomach, his father unaware of a moment I still cherish, forever wrapped in that dead arm, indifference pooled like blood around my heart as though to drown.

remember the sounds
the noise and the after
the voices are raising
in cruel careful laughter

Beneath the orange, pregnant moon a devil
twitches, waking.  He starts the leaves upon
the ground to walking, trundling off the curb,
fighting, scratching among themselves to gain
the lead.