Companion

A thousand meters down,
In the throat of my existence--
Artifact of the self-made woman--
You visited upon me
A grand beauty.
And each candle, crammed ineloquently
In corners, craning their licking flames
Desperately, were all at once
Extinguished by your light.
The masters would paint you in silk,
Pierce you with arrows.
But I will let you live.
A fold of cotton,
A wind on the green hills of April,
The bright glance
Of flowers in the grass.

New Ships

The new ships go from the harbor
Trailing behind them the banner of gone. 

The bow parts the water,
It's sound, going.

The new ships go from the harbor
And I watch them go.

The inky wake carries my eye,
Breaks the reflection of a harbinger moon.

On softer nights, Her light was a slow-breaking grin, an embrace.
An easy dance to the edge of something glorious.

Now she is less promise than threat,
The world's own cold, disembodied heart.

She watches each vessel leave something of itself in its wake.
A trace of blood in the vein.

She knows all new ships go.
Going is their shape.

Even though the harbor meets them, arms eager, enveloping,
the urge for going is too great for moorings to hold.

Going becomes well-practiced misery,
As poisonous and natural as calling a new lover by an old name.

So new ships go,
And harbors hold, and ache.

Change in season

On the cusp, burgeoning sliver:

The moon hangs its metaphor

impolitely out of reach.

Tomorrow it may turn, narrow, blink,

Leave an empty socket for the world to mourn.

So soon will things go to ground.

The fat of the world, sloughed in ambered piles

Ringing the trunks of giants.

Soon, there will be nothing left between their bones

but space for shaping dreams.

In those long months,

Remember the immodest explosion of life:

Dependable, creeping; then, all at once, a cry,

Out from the mouth of frost.

The dead rejoiced.

But be warned. The memory will pierce you.

Its blood will run out, warm, and cover you.

You will ache for it, and from somewhere, a soothing voice will say

It will come again, as if the bulbs themselves had made an oath.

The Body is an Animal

The body is an animal, anxious shadow,

Its skin a trap, flesh and furrows.

The bristles shiver.

It tastes the salt on your breath,

Follows ghost trails, a white footpath

Terror carved on your cheek,

Bathes in the pool your eyes made

of the cup of your ear.

Your tears were once beautiful, human,

suspended from soft angles of face,

Something holy, a communion.

But the line broke: now your sorrow’s static chatter,

Atoms howling at atoms, senseless.

Now, it waits, the sharpened blade,

Hatred, longing.

Mother's Pain

You made your life with what you know,
What you were given:  
The meanest scraps of existence,
The narrowest reprieve:
That those years left you standing,
Though transformed; a bright, mutilated star.
Now your body is a scar,
A testament to the enormity of childhood,
A monument to the worst of the worst.
I find you at the shores of suffering:  you weep
Attending the deepest sorrows,
Keeping the unmended edges of your pain.
I am there with you, and watch, wincing along.
Your tears are in my mouth, too,
Their learned bitterness, a weight at my throat.

The ghost of affections, banished spirits:

Old things that rise again with the red moon.

The earth lifts a shadow boldly to its blushed roundness,

And it is partly extinguished.

In that dark instant, the eye inside opens,

And sees in a single, wincing look, the outline of forsaken,

Would-be lovers; gilded men, whose only downfall

Could be their existence. In the shroud of future-things,

They wear their bodies like old gods:

perfect mechanisms of seduction,

A noose of flesh by which to hang.

Had they materialized,

They would have been afflictions; and I know,

For I suffered many seasons by those same sins,

Sunk myself with them, buried myself under a mountain of men,

And learned to both hate, and bear

Their weight, and watched my soul drift into oblivion.

But for now, as fantasy renewed, in the warm cave of promised love, 

I find them again: covered in sweat, shining golden,

And I ache, I ache, I ache.

Mother

At my mother’s scalding breast,

I felt a touch which no comfort conferred;

Through windows of memory, I see myself shrinking

Under her hand, trained at her moods

Like seas learn the phases of their moon:

By undulations of gravity. Each day, heavier than the next.

Til a well-precipitated turn of cheek

Relieves the shoreline of her weight.

My feelings yet swim like fishes to her ebb,

A hot tide that drove them deep,

Though they remembers still,

And dance to her horrors in the dark.