let her climb your ladder
down to the river
where a carriage waits,

wash her with water
until it falls off her body
and onto some flowers,

do this by a dirt road
where no people walk.
Now she is yours.

Until she meets you
the sky and the earth will catch fire
from the hissing of snakes.

Go to the tallest tree
in the woods and say,
I'm calling you here

with ninety-nine lovers of mine,
may you be unable
to stay in one small place,

the mountains of Galilee
have all caught fire,
hurry up here with buckets.

Take the water from the well
into your mouth
and bring it home that way.

Spit the water on the woman
who is being charmed
while she sits on a thread of hemp
 
whose ninety-nine knots
have been unbound
at night under the stars.

Burn the thread until it is clean
and dip it into a stream
using the ashes like light.

Sun, sun, stop in her mouth
the way the world stops
when the blackbird sings

in the middle of the forest
where no girl ever braided a white pleat
no black dog barked,

smear her with snake skin,
set her like a scarecrow
by a chicken coop,

make her body beautiful,
that she may be kissed
by every villager.








 

If I believed in miracles
would you lift up
your skirt

the way God promised Noah
with the rainbow,
a guarantee?

This holy man
was locked up
for being too pious,

no matter what
they tried
he wouldn't stop praying.

This is how 
I want you,
your nudity

a vow for which
I'd destroy myself
repeatedly.

This is how 
I make
love,

this is how
I believe
in god,

sucking my first communion
from the temple
of your body, 

your body --
the only thing capable
of answering a prayer.

 

As soon as the string
is set to tease,
I can not wait

to throw my lips
on your needle-curves
& envelope the bait.

Girl I want you
like a mad fish,
a suffocating fish,

throwing myself
towards you,
the heavy gasps

so unafraid
of being stolen
from the water.

There is no barb too cruel
to teach me shyness,
I rush to meet your pointed gnarls

in my fresh blood,
red and as harsh
as the hook itself.

What lure would
you dare let grapple
with my appetite and slickness?

july 21, 2007 re-edit

How is the sting
of the jellyfish
not love?
 
You have taken lesser hurts
into your body
and married them,

you have let the tongues
of men viperous
coil into your open mouth

as if the penetrant
was the only thing
that could poison you,
 
as if wanting the kiss
could not be that predatory,
that dangerous.
 
What in the thorn insists
that its heart
should not impale you?
 
Love should paralyze!
It should blister
and disorient

like a bulb
that melts skin
off the bone,

you should feel the heart
scald as it changes you,
you should know

inside this sting
is a proposal
of venom,
 
inside this venom
is the device
of love itself.
 

firey romantic chemical eruption
i go bang
with thick fluid
you get hot
liquid explosive

moan like a pig
i want it filthy
in a cage
you animal
squeal

heavy metal body safe penetrator
i find you
through steel
my muscle
armor-piercing

drive into a hole deeply
i carve curves
into your core
rough twisted nail
screw

doing it in busy spot
we love to fuck
in public
wrong place sex
exhibition

giving in to temptation
i sin
on your face
sticky evil
vice

expose feathers thrown full open
snatch me
in your wings
snake eater
spread-eagle

Forgive me,
I'm about to compare you
to a whore--

Phryne at the Areopagus.
Nude Phryne on trial.
The flesh as witness.

What was her nakedness
to the world
if not a testimony?

Think of your body
like you would
a crime.

Here is the spot
your white skin
did not get caught.

Here your soft hands
go unbound
to law.

How can cloth
conceal the entirety
of an innocence?

Derobe again,
let my eyes
decide.

I want to see you
like the jury saw Mnesarete
in Ancient Greece,

fully exposed,
without a flaw
of guilt,

your breasts more beautiful
than the idea
of justice.
 

If a closed mouth
anchors what is fatal
to its muteness,

speaking should
be enough to
unburden steel,

still your silence pours
into me like water
on a sinking ship.

So you must have
a real voice
now, love,

and use it
to sing to me
about not drowning.

Be to me
anything except
an ocean.

You are almost
too quick to see--
unsettled snow settling, 

(Think of how I don't know you
like you would ice.)

now your phantoms shrink
to a point
of light.

(As steam, I learn how your water
passes, from solid phase
to wraith-like gasses.)

But somehow I catch them,
the fastest colds
you bury me in.

(The unknowns avalanche,
I can not escape; you surround me.)

I frozen,
I Ahab,
the body you stick

(With a wooden leg,
you're my Moby Dick.)

between the white whale
and the ghost:
its pistol smokes.

When I wake
I really wake,
I give birth,

the mountains
I rise to
are melted.

Every time I write, 
you thank me for my words. 

My words, you express it,
as if they are bulbs
I had tendency to grow 
all winter in the dirt,
and am taking you now
on a short walk through 
the resulting garden. 

What happens to you
when I say flower?
Does a red pavot arrive and relieve itself
of its prenatal filth?

A word is worth nothing
if it cannot unbury
a poppy from the cold ground.

What types of verbs
mount the soil
and ripen on a sentence,
echo, murmur?

The things I say are seed
and all of you is fertile earth
where no place is voiceless.

I whisper.
An irreproachable rose. 
An irreproachable rose. 

I scream. 
Here is where I obliterated the mauve grass 
of a weed.
Here is where I ruined an irreproachable rose.  

I speak until my hands are dirty.

Poor Prometheus,
I saw the stump
and it reminded me of us.
I felt as old
as the first ring.

Is it even fair
for one thing
to live for
five thousand years?

Confess, you think
I am too impatient
to see ourselves
in the Great Basin
as a bristlecone pine.

But we'll grow like that.

A year will widen
us into the next
and wind our secrets
around our pasts in circles.

If we are lucky,
one day they will
cut us in half
just to count our rings.