#AmericanWriters
Little egg, little nub, full complement of fingers, toes, little rose blooming
You gave me a rose last time we met. I told myself if it bloomed our love would bloom,
Testing the soul’s mettle, the frost heaves holes in the roads to the heart, the glass forest
. .Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when… and tangled in a woman’s body? —Virginia Woolf Every month,
The women he has had are all faces without eyes. He has entered them blind as a cut worm. He has swum their oceans
Love, death, sleeping with somebody else’s husband or wife-this is what poetry is about-Eskimo, Aztec,
He was six foot four, and forty… and even colder than he thought he… James Thurber, The Thirteen Cloc… Not that I cared about the other… Those perfumed breasts with hearts
Narrowing life because of the fear… narrowing it between the dust mote… narrowing the pink baby between the green-limbed monsters, & the drooling idiots,
Broken ivories playing the blue piano of the sea. We have come
Because I am here anchoring you to the passionate darkness, you gaze out the window at the light.
This constant ache is my leg’s message to me. ‘Hello. Hello. Hello. You’re getting there,' it says, ‘step by step.’
Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems
Your slit so like mine: the woman of it, the warm womanwide of thigh, & the comfort of it– knowing your nipples like mine,
Baby-witch, my daughter, my worship of the Goddess alone condemns you to the fire. . .
My broom with its tufts of roses beckoning at the black, with its crown of thistles, prickling the sky,