Yard Sale Organs
In summer I shed something / Something is Understood
In summer I shed something
Watch over my remains, will you, as I step
from my reeling body, as I prepare to land, eyes open,
heart in a plastic cup rattling on the tray table, skidding
in springtime sleet with my hair tied in tangles
to the overhead oxygen mask — I’ve killed myself
so many times. Now, suddenly, I know how to protect myself.
Pocket knife against the stag, a necessary stake-out,
the least I can do for the kid who must reincarnate, reincarnate.
What I share with them now is pain, we eat it fast like pancakes,
revel in it — we know things now. I feel myself dying, again.
Outside it’s all light like lemon juice. Sour. Between the stag’s ears
it’s all soft velvet, it makes me wonder if the bone is soft, too,
plush and porous, and you, hacking out a clearing,
with a deer skull hanging over your fireplace at home, burning
rocking horse remains and me. It seems I’ve been broken enough
I’ve learned to love the destroyer. It seems you’ve eaten enough bones
to know they don’t nourish.
Outside the Dollhouse / Proof of life
Outside the Dollhouse
In the cooling air your face cracks open
like a ceramic dish; you are insane, hungry, harmful,
the knife through the water: full of want, eluded.
For months you have not seen it, time
like discarded flesh draped through your forearms.
You begin to remember the girl with the comb, who
read of green glass hotels and deserts that housed
a resurrected Arc, no sea, and you, still breaking, still
treading water and wondering — who are we, to house
so much blood? When you bleed it is irregular, spotted, too
thin. If you pared back enough of your body you know
there’d be a marrow of meaning, somewhere, and a sparrow,
whistling, wild with want. You know your bones would swipe
the hair from your forehead with a mother’s touch.
You have no more costumes to wear. No more people
to fool. You are getting tired of fooling yourself.
It is All Half Lights* / Before Memorial Day
It is All Half Lights*
The androgynous mind sleeps, it is
halting/halted, faulting/faulted —
C fears she might never know if she likes O,
Ever-rageful, stamping out calm like a boot
over mellow ashes, while lamp light pools sick and yellow
over someone else’s lawn, and C feels her throat:
purple, clotted. When C steps on the grass, nobody
congratulates her. Not even O, for all her novelty, and
sometimes, when C stands on tiptoe in that hall
of mirrors, she really can see her final figure,
the final girl where the reflections cease.
That final girl is O, of course. C fears her face
will never be her own, instead every feature
she has ever hated, every feature she has ever
loved — it is too dark, in the sky, and the vein
is embedded in too much skin, and
the bird’s throat too thick.
Weaver’s Way / In Blue
Weaver’s Way
And the ceilings are high, voices echo from two rooms over
among arches and paneling. Dark water. A river, green
and lapping in a distant country in which I’ve never stepped foot —
In Italy / Mary & Joanna
In Italy I learn things that I did not learn
In early spring I see six unfinished statues lined up
along a hall, carved apostles for an aging priest.
What is it to be the artist and die
before your patron ever could, your last days littered
with drops of plaster kissing your face, to die before
they could scoop out the crisp green olives from the chalices,
splay them across your victory? As the apostle, you stare piously
at your viewer and renounce love. As religion, you keep your gates
shut tight. In death you view life as a series of small deaths:
aggregate, confusing. Gold dots the frame of your vision, you can’t
tell if you’re falling up or down, a snake that you painted
bites you in a place where you do not want to be bitten.
Hodge-podged animals direct you to heaven & hell
as a group of phone-less, new people look on.
Mary & Joanna