advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Hello up there
Are you You or Me or It?
I go littering you over the furniture
and picking you out of the stew.
Often I’ve wished you otherwise: sleek,
docile, decorative and inert.
Yet even in daydreams I cannot imagine myself
otherwise thatched: coarse, black and abundant
like weeds burst from the slagheaps of abandoned mines.
In the ’50’s children used to point and shout Witch.
Later they learned to say Beatnik and later yet, Hippie,
but old grandmamas with Thessaloniki or Kiev in their throats
thought I must be nice because I looked like a peasant.
In college my mother tried to change my life
by bribing me to cut it off and have it “done.”
Afterwards the hairdresser chased me waving my hair in a paper bag.
The next man who happened was a doctor’s son
who quoted the Lord Freud in bed and on the pot,
thought I wrote poems because I lacked a penis
and beat me when he felt ugly.
I grew my hair back just as quick as I could.
Cloud of animal vibrations,
tangle of hides and dark places
you keep off the tidy and the overly clean and the wango upright.
You proclaim the sharp limits of my patience
with trying to look like somebody’s wet dream.
Though I can trim you and throw you out with the coffee grounds,
when I am dead and beginning to smell worse than my shoes
presumably you will continue out of my skull
as if there were inside no brains at all
but only a huge bobbin of black wire unwinding.
High frequency
They say that trees scream
under the bulldozer’s blade.
That when you give it water,
the potted coleus sings.
Vibrations quiver about leaves
our ears are too gross
to comprehend.
Yet I hear on this street
where sprinklers twirl
on exterior carpeting
a high rising whine.
The grass looks well fed.
It must come from inside
where a woman on downs is making
a creative environment
for her child.
The spring earth cracks
over sprouting seeds.
Hear that subliminal roar,
a wind through grass and skirts,
the sound of hair crackling,
the slither of anger
just surfacing.
Pressed against glass and yellowing,
scrawny, arching up to
the insufficient light, plants
that do not belong in houses
sing of what they want:
like a woman who’s been told
she can’t carry a tune,
like a woman afraid people will laugh
if she raises her voice,
like a woman whose veins surface
compressing a scream,
like a woman whose mouth hardens
to hold locked in her own
harsh and beautiful song.
The woman in the ordinary
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.
Unlearning to not speak
Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
sift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.
Now it is time for finals:
losers will be shot.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Hello up there
Are you You or Me or It?
I go littering you over the furniture
and picking you out of the stew.
Often I’ve wished you otherwise: sleek,
docile, decorative and inert.
Yet even in daydreams I cannot imagine myself
otherwise thatched: coarse, black and abundant
like weeds burst from the slagheaps of abandoned mines.
In the ’50’s children used to point and shout Witch.
Later they learned to say Beatnik and later yet, Hippie,
but old grandmamas with Thessaloniki or Kiev in their throats
thought I must be nice because I looked like a peasant.
In college my mother tried to change my life
by bribing me to cut it off and have it “done.”
Afterwards the hairdresser chased me waving my hair in a paper bag.
The next man who happened was a doctor’s son
who quoted the Lord Freud in bed and on the pot,
thought I wrote poems because I lacked a penis
and beat me when he felt ugly.
I grew my hair back just as quick as I could.
Cloud of animal vibrations,
tangle of hides and dark places
you keep off the tidy and the overly clean and the wango upright.
You proclaim the sharp limits of my patience
with trying to look like somebody’s wet dream.
Though I can trim you and throw you out with the coffee grounds,
when I am dead and beginning to smell worse than my shoes
presumably you will continue out of my skull
as if there were inside no brains at all
but only a huge bobbin of black wire unwinding.
High frequency
They say that trees scream
under the bulldozer’s blade.
That when you give it water,
the potted coleus sings.
Vibrations quiver about leaves
our ears are too gross
to comprehend.
Yet I hear on this street
where sprinklers twirl
on exterior carpeting
a high rising whine.
The grass looks well fed.
It must come from inside
where a woman on downs is making
a creative environment
for her child.
The spring earth cracks
over sprouting seeds.
Hear that subliminal roar,
a wind through grass and skirts,
the sound of hair crackling,
the slither of anger
just surfacing.
Pressed against glass and yellowing,
scrawny, arching up to
the insufficient light, plants
that do not belong in houses
sing of what they want:
like a woman who’s been told
she can’t carry a tune,
like a woman afraid people will laugh
if she raises her voice,
like a woman whose veins surface
compressing a scream,
like a woman whose mouth hardens
to hold locked in her own
harsh and beautiful song.
The woman in the ordinary
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.
Unlearning to not speak
Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
sift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.
Now it is time for finals:
losers will be shot.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t
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