to indicate the way she’ll hold the ropes—
a posture that made me think of Jesus,
forgive me for saying. But I’m so far gone
I can say anything: Hello Mister Death,
let’s run this bar code through.
Ouch—
that love swing sets you back more than a hundred bucks,
but hey it’s cheaper than the ribbons
and will give you years of sailing back and forth,
hanging from nothing but graveyard fog.
Mounting instructions are included
though they be written in Japanese,
and it even comes in a discreet black shopping bag
to match your — whatever you call it—
your robe your gown.
Altered Beast
You were a man and I used to be a woman
before we first put our quarters in
the game at the gas station, whose snack-chip display
wore a film of oil and soot
beside which you turned into a green gargoyle and then
a flying purple lynx—
whereas I could not get the hang of the joystick
and remained as I began
while you kicked my jaw and chopped my spine,
a beating I loved because it meant you were rising
fast through the levels — and the weak glom on
via defeat, which is better than nothing—
insert sound effects here: blip blat ching ching
…and when they stopped, your claws gripped the naked
— looking pink lizard that I was,
blood-striped and ragged, as if being a trophy
were the one reward the vanquished get—
which is why, walking home through the curbside sludge,
when you held my hand with your arm outstretched
as if you were holding a dripping scalp or head,
I hummed with joy to be your spoils.
Motorola
Silver moth whose wings flap before landing on the ear—
you stir the air with voices
and then a cloud swirls on the jet stream,
causing a typhoon a world away.
I am not happy about having to become a cell phone person,
even though I see the other cell phone people walking
with their necks bent so the sun can reach that lovely place below their ears.
I feel superior, listening to the juncos’ aggravations
with you squirreled in a pocket on my breast
where you beep your ultimatums. That you have a molten look
makes me think that you could seep
into my body, so I’d contain multitudes
like Walt Whitman, all my friends alphabetized
along with the pain clinic, all ruled by that prim mistress
who asks for the codes and is so firm in her denials,
firm in her goodbye. I’d renounce her altogether
did my bones not have their exigencies—
when I fall, you give a little yawn as you unfold,
and then a fireman comes to lift me, muscles rumpling his rubber coat,
and I think that he will never age.
Why can’t the mind simply roll around on its own wheels?
Why can’t the body be rewired like a lamp?
The other cell phone people draw a thread through the world and stitch it close
whereas I go around huffing in a state of irritation
that I take to be the honest state of nature,
which is why I listen to the juncos, though it’s difficult to decode their words.
And though I hold you, Moth, in my contempt, I’ve spoken through you
for enough minutes from what the corporation calls my plan
that your numbers have become infused with my mouth’s smell.
It is not the junco’s bird-smell of vinegar and berries
but that person-smell of roasted meat and sweat,
and I could spray you with disinfectant but that would fry your circuitry—
to wipe away the human would make you go kaput.
On the Chehalis River
All day long the sun is busy, going up and going down,
and the moon is busy, swinging the lasso of its gravity.
And the clouds are busy, metamorphing as they skid—
the vultures are busy, circling in their kettle.
And the river is busy filling up my britches
as I sit meditating in the shallows until my legs go numb.
Upstream I saw salmon arching half into the air:
glossy slabs of muscle I first thought were seals.
They roiled in a deeper pocket of the river,
snagged in a drift net on Indian land.
Trying to leap free before relenting to the net
with a whack of final protest from the battered tail.
They’ll be clubbed, I know, when the net’s hauled up
but if there were no net they’d die anyway when they breed.
You wonder how it feels to them: their ardent drive upstream.
What message is delivered when the eggs release.
A heron sums a theory with one crude croak; the swallows
write page after page of cursive in the air. My own offering
is woozy because when their bodies breached the surface
the sun lit them with a flash that left me blind.
Number One
for Ben
Animal attack is Number One in the list called
“Ways in Which I Do Not Want to Die”—
wait, Ben says knock it off with the death-talk;
you’ve already talked death to death.
But the Number Ones don’t need our speech
to claim their cool dark storage place: my sister said
hers was falling down the stairs, after her husband left
and every riser turned into El Capitan.
Sleeping on the sofa did nothing about the steps
connecting the world to her front porch. Three is more
than enough, given a new moon and tallow on the instep
and the right force-vectors applied to the neck.
I said Relax, you should join a health club
so my sister rowed until she withered to a twig,
and when the office microfiche clerk did fall down the stairs
all that hemoglobin on the cellar floor
sent my sister’s paw back to her popcorn bowl
as she asked the darkness from a fetal pose
about the safety of a pup tent
set up in a housing tract.
Thus do our Number Ones sit on our chests
like sumo wrestlers in lifeboats — rowing rowing.
And some nights in my phantasmagloriland
I am supped by shark or dingo dog or a cannibal king.
Then I am a movie star (if not your classic movie star),
just one of the shriekers who is always beautiful
when her head spins suddenly
and her hair fans.
And what could Numbers Seven or Twelve offer by compare:
those falling-elevator dreams
the fire dreams
the riptide dreams
the dreams of death as a mere phenomenon of weather?
I know my celebrity is fleeting as I thrash and holler and yet
see the moviegoers prick up in their seats:
see the good it does,
how it is not so grim or tragic
when the boy-hand spiders across girl-shouldermeat
and she curls against him
like a pink prawn thawing from the freezer.