Ask my imaginary brother, that waif,
that childhood best friend who comes to play
dress-up and stick-up and jacks and Pick-Up-Sticks,
bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics.
Or form a Piss Club where we all go
in the bushes and peek at each other’s sex.
Pop-gunning the street lights like crows.
Not knowing what to do with funny Kotex
so wearing it in our school shoes. Friend, friend,
spooking my lonely hours you were there, but pretend.
My bow is stiff.My bow is in readiness.I am the bullet and the hook.I am cocked and held ready.In my sights I carve himlike a sculptor. I mold outhis last look at everyone.I carry his eyes and hisbrain bone at every position.I know his male sex and I domarch over him with my index finger.His…
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,and that is why they have locked it up.You could tell time by this, I thought,like a clock, by its five knucklesand the thin underground veins.It lay there like an unconscious womanfed by tubes she knew not of.The hand had collapse,a small wood pigeonthat had gone into seclusion.I turned it…
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.It is June. I am tired of being brave.We drive to the Cape. I cultivatemyself where the sun gutters from the sky,where the sea swings in like an iron gateand we touch. In another country people die.My darling, the wind falls in like stonesfrom the whitehearted water and…
You are still small, in your fourth year.We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,flapping in the winter rain.falling flat and washed. And I remembermostly the three autumns you did not live here.They said I’d never get you back again.I tell you what you’ll never really know:all the medical hypothesisthat explained my brain will never…
sweet dears, as good as spoons;and my feet, those two childrenlet out to play naked. Intricate nubs,my toes. No longer bound.And what’s more, see toenails andall ten stages, root by root.All spirited and wild, this littlepiggy went to market and this little piggystayed. Long brown legs and long brown toes.Further up, my darling, the womanis…
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.I must always forget how one word is able to pickout another, to manner another, until I have gotsomething I might have said…but did not.Your business is…
