budded bridge, bright pear

budded bridge
freckled blond

when I bucket my
nose in
between your eyes,
its shape is a fishing boat.
calcined metal skin
chipped mint
finding the salty wind
as its salve

cool and ripe
bright pear.

feng shui

a room is a microcosm of your life.
the space dictates fate,
like a foot filling up with blood.

a pink wall
makes you braver.

a chair
makes you lazy.

let the sun come in.
let the sun come in.

Airport ESP.

Black backpack
Down the gold flecked
petroleum floor, plastic wheels
Moving like milk over ice
In my 7 dollar iced mocha
And I realize my clairvoyance:

I can see women lives.
(domestic flights only)

1. The one with the curly bob
Betty Boop but after women's studies
With the diamond stud in her nose
Puffy lime vest with homemade propaganda
buttons from
A school garden; an equal sign
And the tiny americano
held up over recycled shoes--no cows

She's going back to Portland, OR
Back to her one floor Victorian
house the kind with a serious girlfriend
On the pink porch
holding a beer they brewed Themselves
Sun faded pray flags wave in her welcome.

2. The two teenagers with
White gold earrings shimmering
Under the river of blow dried hair
Laying lightly over their gray speckled
Sweatshirts--
They are going back to Washington.
To their small liberal arts college
Where they are both studying
Psychology with a minor in Business
Except one of them really wants to write
Poetry and Shes the one the guy
Actually likes.

3. Two bloated women,
sausage skinned
One fried egg hair
The other with a grown out crew cut
Sitting squatly in her wheel chair
A mouth like a toad.
The lady who stands is the daughter
In a blouse that looks more like
kitty scrubs, dental hygienist uniform.

Her brother lives here
With his kids and his wife and the pool
So they came to visit,
But now they are flying back to
Minnesota.
Back to their mothball house, with the dead lawn
and Mom hasn't been doing so well
The passed few years,
but Barry is too busy to pitch in.

1.31.11

this old anxiety
reminds me of
why i lam so attracted to
the middle of my country
the inescapable sky
hovers the burnt flat down
drier than sand prairie
oxygen pressed, nothing
to save you, no mountain
or skyline, no tree
to focus on, just the
silver dollar blue
over a scraped out identity
of weeds and clay.

to move away from western medicine

naked
drumming purple river
moving like surprise,
and then finding its cadence, which
opens the skull into a nest

(papaya opens like
a wound, showing its seeds like astrology)

lanky ounce bowl
faces up and sees nothing
but blue citrus whiff
and calligraphy of branch, leaf
each one a bright foaming shore.


I can participate, I can dream and interpret my own salve.


barren
backing up from the horizon
like hurt feelings

(green plastic bottle opens like a turbine,
showing what you look like in pieces)

taming the alchemy
towards simple bleach
paper equations
where everything is the same
and can be counted like beans
on a table.

I can be brave, I can wait and purse up the gas underneath obedience and rumor.

The Bungalows by John Ashbery : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The Bungalows by John Ashbery : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

ode: anthony.

a metronome, a husband
you are a ruby necked rooster.


every morning barking
out the chipped pane
towards the sun god

the hammer is always steady;
its silver rudder
reflecting light
across the floor &
measuring the long pauses
of music touched
by your
hands and wood.



a nurse, a priest.

every morning barefoot
hoofing carefully around

the green and purple heads
holding their tall ears between
thumb and finger
chanting deeply.




a lawyer, a jester.

every evening wanding
circuses in boiling pots, while
the island is damp with the
agriculture of pasta
and the fermented onions
as yellow as the kitchen;
in the air--
your long brown arms swing
like oars

odes: orange.

your awry body
rests in my palm

easy fingers curl over
your sponge pore scalp

holding your forehead
in place like an infant’s.

your scent is the same tender
reverie of a baby head;

instead of a clean running creek,
you smell sun bleached

hands brightly glossed,
shoes torn with no socks

remember how they
sprint and waddle in the orchard row

like small birds
who shake your trees when they sing.

odes number 2

you scored a pair of
opal gills


and had I not met you,
I wouldn’t know the zest
of the cool
brackish air

that rinses the braided
horse kelp,
shameless and sprawled out
over pale bay morning.

odes number 1

sarah taught us
to love the things
in us that are ugly
the mumbling,
coarse tails of our
mistakes and how
sometimes
we are not sorry.
she taught us
to love the secret lime
that we let grow inwards
like rails
through the sand

and she taught us
how precious it all was
like the wine birthmark
on your lover's foot
that you covet
and she cant stand.

*how much of ourselves
couldn't we stand
before you?*

and now it rests
because of her
the green lit ocean
it moves
but never burdens
it breathes
and it sleeps
under the brandied crescent
with the current
moving oil and salt
and honey
sleeping in the song
of a open throat;
open bowels,
open imagination
with its dreams
and its shame
growing cliffs out of
the same shore.