Allowed to be Mysteries

Allowed to be Mysteries

People are allowed to be mysteries. Allowed to be mysteries:

kelp forests, clear salt-green cellulose and luminous,

women with their arms around dogs,

women with eyes containing multitudes.

Women with eyes containing:

languorous jimson weed, hemlock-foxglove-hyacinth

oleander larkspur, (deliriants, deliriously free,)

daphne and nightshade

irregular heartbeat scavengers.

People are allowed to be

largely inscrutable:

I read somewhere that datura is a beautiful woman,

that the stinging, hot ice of her irises-

well, her eyes are the color of irises,

and she knows her way around the sort of

labyrinthine bramble

that settles in my rib like a bone knife.

And I have been crippled by love of this craggy

pharaoh for several histories now:

consult the Luxor papyrus.

I store the shake of young hope in my pelvis

and wavering thighs,

having thought once that I knew a lot,

when all that I don't know is a palmy and

loving expanse of good ground.

These days of gentle fractals

are allowed to be mysteries.

I drum them out on my collarbone

like a line of lapis beads.

Lying upside-down, the days look

just like elementals. The nights

look just like crane flies  

The Ankh, The Knot of Isis

Did you know that the ankh is just the timid

knot of Isis just the whim of a cartographer

mapping banks laid out like sweet

skin in sun?

It says, the river is a fat snake:

it moves like a snake,

and there is its bank,

and there its other bank,

that's what I heard anyway.

I don't write poems about lovers,

I write poems about natural phenomena.

Thus:

there was a brief waterfall, a

glorious flood -untouchable-

outside of law--

and a sapping drought

and a river mouth closing,

gently golden,

--I'm just a human being--

a river mouth closing, and silence

(isn't silence so eery,

we are all small animals

in its fist, its dark fist--)

Storm

STORM

I meant to say something like

that the sky was a bruised peach

or

bent

doubled

crippled speaking of the

ordinary rain phenomenon

but I said nothing almost killed us

almost crashed the car

into another car “hydroplaned”

it could all have been over and is not.

I have no particular feelings

(this is almost a mantra, in that

I repeat it, but it offers no

solace, no success at soullessness

it doesn't work, so it's not,

a mantra.)

The theme seems to be that

everything is not these days.

A baby waving as if

swimming through the air

grappling with that sea.

The sound of her orgasm

a cat jumps on the bed

“remember me?”

remember me

hair a mess of floss in my mouth

On the Streets

ON THE STREETS

I've never felt trapped by what I am not, only by what I am

beneath the city a tangled convergence of veins,

a knot of channels, underground

irrigation labyrinth

I shared my plasma briefly

dawn was almost palpable

nothing is not salvageable, and I still can love peace

like a river life like

a freeway such a great bounty of stars

12.15.12

1.

I don’t know how
does one confront the big sadness?
How does one one one?
How does one 1 1 1 1 1

How does one spit out
the notion of winning
how am I going to get out of

the drain the chest drain?

2.

We’re all “And you’ve gotta
learn to love be real subtle
settle on the high beam certain and
proud, confident, like you

                                                            don’t ever cry

these are big wishes like horses or
trains, big wishes like read my mind.

Read my mind, it’s so sad.

And of The World well
It’s all fucked up says I why try to sound pretty.

It’s way too fucked up for the day
before yesterday’s

poetry.

Flamethrower

Write whatever you like and then just burn it, he says.
Just write whatever you like. Just burn it.
Just burn whatever you like. I saw a flamethrower
on the television. It was a movie I was watching a
movie about aliens.

So I’m going to burn you says I. Because it can be
as if it never was. I have this problem trusting people because
you just can’t trust people. I have this problem where
I want badly to be loved.

There’s this thing that matches do when they are
old in the book they sweat the source.
I find I have known myself all along. I always
hoped I was wrong. But I really am
alone and with the black books.
As in the beginning.

It used to be self indulgent to be frightened
of the country.  I’m told that what would drive me
from my home is a musing of the first world.
I am a first world girl. Waiting for the phone
to ring, the mobile phone.

And if it weren’t my life it would feel like undue privilege.

He says well it looks as if we both have some
recalculating to do. We were supposed to be dead
by now but as with many things we were
bestowed with

M O R E

so I recalculate the chorus as it comes
back around

“I was born like this,
I had no choice,
I was born with the gift
of a golden voice,”
to claw for at the
other end of the dissonant
line

Dreaming of Chinatown

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