#AmericanWriters
You open to me a little, then grow afraid and close again, a small boy
The cover of the book is astral violet, & within it are poems, most of them
Love, death, sleeping with somebody else’s husband or wife-this is what poetry is about-Eskimo, Aztec,
You gave me a rose last time we met. I told myself if it bloomed our love would bloom,
I am in love with my womb & jealous of it. I cover it tenderly with a little pink hat (a sort of yarmulke)
After the college reading, the eager students gather. They ask me
I was sick of being a woman, sick of the pain, the irrelevant detail of sex, my own concavity uselessly hungering
We have a small sculpture of H… Nothing would surprise him. The beast in the jungle was what h… Edith Wharton’s obfuscating older… He fled the demons
When the devil brings him, like a Christmas puppy, examine his downy fur & smell his small paws for the scent of sulphur.
These beautifully grown men. Thes… Look at them looking! They’re overdrawn on all accounts… & they’ve missed (for the hundredth time) the expre…
Rising in the morning like warm bread, from a bed in America, the aroma
Sweet muse with bitter milk, I have lain between your breasts, put my ear
Testing the soul’s mettle, the frost heaves holes in the roads to the heart, the glass forest
Here, at the end of the world, the flowers bleed as if they were hearts, the hearts ooze a darkness like india ink,
Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems