Dip your fingers into the cool darkness that winter has breathed upon us,
When each shivering star has come to seek you out
And the owls swivel their heads with lamp-lit eyes
…This will be our time-
Haunted too, soft spoken as moans that murmur secrets,
Vibrating sighs of drowsy content and of hours spent,
Laid beside each other in the frosted earth
I shall call you forth from sleep…. From fields of unknowing
Where each moment will have its hour, each mouth its kiss…
Where in some other unspoken territory my body has become yours,
And within the dark tide of the sky, we wear our nocturnal speech.
…for Anne
Somehow yet, unfinished…
a life~
Like envelopes sealed of salt water,
blurred, swollen-
all emotion, all spoken word repressed,
cresting a wave somewhere
between the veil of living and dead~
You falter in this stillness,
where we have gathered
to let all things go,
to consummate language, as language is
with no intention of ever coming back~
Breathing Ether, floating landscapes…
down streets that once occupied
the darker moments of your childhood-
where a page became your elegy
and words your only hope.
It is honest, what you say of the dead,
that they are more like stone,
more like the water that took those words…
and that theirs is the only truth
that we will ever know.
Author’s Note: I occasionally find myself having tangible, albeit odd affairs with the dead. I’ll be reading Bukowski and decide that there’s something i want to say to him. I’ll think of Virginia and wonder if i can’t manage to steal one of those impossibly heavy stones from her pocket…. if i couldn’t somehow convince her that we, as humans , need her so much more than the body of water that she gave herself to. I’ve spoken to my beloved Jeff Buckley and i’ve even found myself donning Joan’s armor and even her fire….
And then there’s Anne. Most of the time, i am so overcome by her work that i can hardly find the words to speak. There isn’t a language really. The first time i read “Her Kind” i was in eight grade. I don’t know whether i cried out of jealousy….or wonderment or gratitude. It seemed to say all the things i ever wanted to say…. but didn’t know how to say it. One prophetic line says it all: A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
And you know what? We have all been HER kind.
Pressing my fingertips to the soft curve of your mouth,
i call you out from darkness, willing you to me
In dreams i move silent to seek you out
drawing back the sheets, i invoke thee
Focus that keen and wandering thought upon me,
put aside your watchful god
lose yourself in what the goddess has bestowed me
prick your finger upon this rose
My lips repeat every gesture,
my hips follow the plan of your hands,
you say you’ve known this a thousand years
i drink your soul and you understand…
That i could conjure your lust with my kisses,
spin your desire into the hem of my cloak,
wear your mouth like a charm between my breasts
and taste the shudder that i provoke.
in silk threaded webbing which reaches precariously from rosebush to fence,
ghost women lay their babies to sleep-
in some other reality, not too removed from ours, you can just make out
the slow murmuring shadows of song…
they weigh out their days on both hands as though they were scales of time
not meant for anyone’s memory but their own-
recalled only in archaic photographs that have gone brown, curled at the edges
with their faded smiles.
remember me, won’t you?
holding our breath past the graveyard, counting steps…. kicking into a run
when our laughter could no longer contain us
how i pressed my mouth to the hollow of your temple as we wove our fingers together,
wandering past all those dimly lit houses gone silent with twilight
and how, far up the block, they became abandoned dollhouses with rolling sidewalks
reaching straight to your door-
like the light above your porch, i will be-
a firefly trapped in the mason jar…. you’ll catch my flicker occasionally,
rattling door knobs, tapping walls…. moving the planchette on the Ouija board-
keep me not in shoeboxes beneath the bed, alone with dust ridden cobwebs
i’ll still be the girl you’ve known all along, riding my bike down the road where you lived
or barefoot and brazen, one leg through your window humming….
i will love you always….. so remember me, won’t you?
Another woman walks the floor,
Of the room where i’ve lived before;
She spins the words that i have said
And keeps the life that i have led.
And if she knows another stood
By the wardrobe of paneled wood
Where she sits with mirrored stare
She moves as one who does not care.
She gives no clue to what i was,
Only covets that which i have loved,
With harem smile and beguiling eye
Kisses that which once was mine.
Still i know the man left behind,
Would not want her to remind
Of all that failed, of all that’s lost
Or know the pain which love hath wrought~
Old women cackling, crackling like worn bone-
stir that cauldron up with gossip, day old truths.
At your windows cheap talk flits between,
suspended like a length of thin rope
laundry at your feet-
You’ve hung me out,
beat the dust from me,
wrung the stains until your hands chapped
pink as your clacking tongue-
“Did you hear? Did you hear?”
Magpies feathering their nests with words,
plucking a tasty morsel-
“things been odd since that one’s come…”
“things not quite right, haven’t you heard?”
Wag a crooked finger at me,
Say what thou will, say what thou like-
I can only laugh, cock my hips as i walk away-
And when engaging those old men
in conversation behind a lifted palm-
the web of lashes against my cheek,
the cut of my glance my accusations shall cast-
For when day drags night down by her inky garters,
and when my bare feet tattoo a circle of my floor,
and when my fingertip has marked the page-
I will have plucked your bent black feathers,
then i will have my say.