your head is a living forest full of songbirds

in a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self

‘somewhere it is Spring and sometimes
people are in real:imagine
somewhere real flowers,but
I can’t imagine real flowers for if I

could,they would somehow
not Be real’
(so he smiles
smiling)’but I will not

everywhere be real to
you in a moment’
The is blond
with small hands

‘& everything is easier
than I had guessed everything would
be;even remembering the way who
looked at whom first,anyhow dancing’

(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richards kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they’ve got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That’s who I was. This is who I am—a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe its as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the ponds edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she’d never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They’d kissed and walked around the pond together.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

When you were sleeping on the sofa
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams.

That is the ocean I want to dive in,
merge with the bright fish,
plankton and pirate ships.

I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you
and ask them the questions I would ask you.

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke
rising from a chimney?
Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don’t wish I was in your arms,
I just wish I was peddling a bicycle
toward your arms.

i

In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the sea clogging, the air
nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should
take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we
touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring
even in good faith maybe
warp in our hands to
implements, to manoeuvres

ii

Put down the target of me
you guard inside your binoculars,
in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph
(your vulnerable
sections marked in red)
I have found so useful

See, we are alone in
the dormant field, the snow
that cannot be eaten or captured

iii

Here there are no armies
here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder,

We need each others’
breathing, warmth, surviving
is the only war
we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost
time / if we can only
make it as far as

the (possibly) last summer

You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns.

You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.

You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink.
You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome.

You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you.
You give me you.

You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black
coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.
You give me 24-across.

You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.

You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire.
You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys
with their feet on the chairs.
You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday.
You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.

You give me D.H. Lawrence,
and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.

You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City.
You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.

You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret
everyone is keeping.

You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt.
You give me pictures with yourself cut out.

You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.

You give me yes. You give me no.

You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down.
You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm.
You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.

You give me the careening of trains.
You give me the scent of bruised mint.

You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.

You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx.
You give me Echo.

You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves
and soft fists of peony.

You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment.
You give me seeming not to notice.

You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train.

You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve.

I’ve been hoarding words, thesauruses, note books
under my tongue. Little sayings, bits of conversation,
beautiful snippets I’ve heard, seen, read.

They gather in crevasses, in the cracks of the side walk,
underneath tree roots, between sheets,
so I can use them before
it’s too late.

Sometimes a poem begs not to be written just yet.
The timing isn’t right, it says. You don’t understand me quite
well enough.
That’s okay. I can be patient about these things.

But sometimes the last thing we want to do is wait around
for what we want now. I try to coax the words
out in vain. I beg them to reveal themselves,
to tear the transparent veil down, to unravel
in my palms.

Often there are small glimmers, glimpses,
but they are only fleeting. A small child that hides
behind the door and then disappears.
You can’t force the words,
you can’t ask or request for them to appear —

You just have to wait.

It is like happiness. The more you draw your attention to it,
the more you chase around in circles after it — the more
it will elude you.

But then one day you’ll be eating peaches out of a tin can,
or washing the dishes in the sink, and the words will rouse
slowly, creep out of their hiding places, knock against
the door of your blood stream and then enter
full steam ahead, metaphors bang against your ribs,
stanzas hit you like a gust of wind in the face,

Commas curling against letters forming sentences,
paragraphs pressing into caesuras leaning into line breaks —
words ferociously beating all the way down to the last
full stop.

if honeysuckle were skin it would smell like me
but I am seawater
and cloud-dust on your tongue —
my mother’s luminous shadow, father’s
fallow orbit, I sweat medicine
and the fears of women whose desperate acts of faith
earned them fading places in forgotten albums
in Oklahoma City and Galva,
the excesses of men with my
saber tongue, my persistent thirsts
(I never wear lipstick,
always expecting to be kissed)
touch me — my back new asphalt
under bike tires, my hands half chalice
half dare — know
that I have known this body twenty-nine years,
loved myself through awkwardness and aging,
in the backs of cabs and the beds of strangers
loved myself out of doubt
out of stubbornness out of the delusions
that tie us weeping and dazed
to those who never claimed
to love us

I forged this body from starch
and fury, prisms and hymns and I am not
only beautiful dressed and I am not
only beautiful naked / I’m the sum
of every whisper, every whistle,
every mouthful of blood and honey
and if honey were blood it would run
like this: thick and steady / viscous
and telling / taste me, iron
and lava / smell me . I reek of nights
purposely alone with the stars,
of impatience corseted with faith
more breakable than whalebone / I live
on the ledges of fingerprints / my children
will carry dictionaries on their hips
and envy the ignorant / I’ve said
this before and will again / listen
to the quickbreaths between blinks
can you hear my heart beating sideways?
I shimmy quiver shriek
laugh in bathtubs cry on streetcorners
I’m only trying to convince myself
I am not afraid

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ––
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ––
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging ––

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ––

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.