To spite the nose on my face I took it off and placed it on a table. We like our eyes, and our mouths a bit, but that poor nose no one likes. Without the nose my head was clearer. But the gape of red just there at the center of my identity made others look away, and back, and away. Back. I thought you wouldn't want to kiss me, but you immediately took out a cotton swab and gathered things to culture. The unobstructed view of my sinus was to you a revelation without horror. Newly fascinating. I cannot explain to others why I love you as I do.

only after I removed
my left eye did I remember
it would get awkward between
us I would no longer be
able to establish distance
by looking

To manufacture hunger you need
time and a stick and at the end
dangling like a fish from thread
a carrot. And the carrot withered
with a bitter beard. Hunger comes
when you would beat with the stick
your sister for half that old-man
carrot. The other half, the thread,
the stick, your own hand holding
its famine-machine a foot beyond
the other: these we call art.

pina bausch, 30 June 2009

She, the world, have parted. Ouch
the landlords say--their pay decreased.
I loved what her bones could do with her--
Always the dissonance stood
beside the beauty by arrangement.
The heinous sister making the other more
marriageable: a sister learning to feel
lucky, later--elated. The work
killed, it captured, held and manipulated
by eyes it hurt, by no means honest
except that it was work and work
is honest. She, a cigarette, mounds
of earth and pubis. The increase, exposed
breast as intensity, frustration,
famine of them she moved. She moved
by manifesting hunger in each limb.
Final bough: the report of a gunshot.
Broken cradle, a down-come
baby: opportunities for the exportation
of grief. And inside every grief--
unstill living. What I leave upon her
grave is this, my vague fire--a vanilla
frailty, a file. I laugh for her here, then
shoot my rifle away from the stage.

You never give me flowers, oboe. And I never do.
I had a bad last last night.
The winter.
I was not connected, the dots.
One, two, five. Three, four, twelve.
The wrong processes were engaged, peristalsis.
I swallowed a pearl and this made me clam up.
Someone somewhere is a c.
Someone somewhere else is an f.
If you fish for the truth, it will snap.
The jewelry box held all the treasures of the other wife.
The other wife is a piranha, a ghost, a life-eater.
It is the reason diamonds are cold.
You never do. I never do.

Not viable. Presque. I am this close to holding my own, and then they fall off, digit by digit. I was counting on you, I scold them, and they twist like worms in dirt. What remains for me are square mitts of palm. I clap like a baby. Yay for me, phalanges gone. Yay for me to be so unable to manipulate, use a zipper. I high five myself and it looks like I am doing tree. Just for fun I rest my sole against my knee. No balance, and I put it quickly down. The toes are useful in that way you don't notice at the keyboard or opening a door. I can't pick my nose. I can't write, well, only in prayer, the whole body involved in the script, the heart compressed. To write is to dive. Love letters were meant to be written not with fingers but with shoulders, the torso carving each word in subtle heave. Fingers ought to be left writhing in the dust like landed minnows, their nails--hard, blind, singular eyes. Incapable of depth.

A father, a fathom, a depth. I can reach my arms around a father. It is a length of rope. A boat, the solid ground, an aspect for the feet. Be thee there, be thee there. Can such a thing be a shadow? Yes. Can such a thing be a mountain? Yes. Is a mountain the shadow it casts, its tide? Is a long shadow proof of a mountain? What when a father moves--is that a mountain ebbing? Is beyond the frame forlorn? Furlonged? Purloined? Stolen when the father is a ship is sleep. Sleep is where we follow a father, through the fallow crests, yielding fish we cannot flay. They are diamond fish. Hard, cold, worth more than the ore we care for. I can reach my arms around a father, but it is the father reaching wanted. To be swaddled in mountain, the soil and sail wrapped tight into our infancy to set us free. Be thee there, be me mine.

She entered the ocean. Shunned the tiny climbers into the sand, they wigged her. She grew wings because of the black-headed gulls. More intelligent, sandwich grabbing gulls. She ate fudge, lounged not at all, whipped children over waves by their armpits. When the scary-eyed scubaman at the boardwalk museum asked for her ticket, her or a child began and could not stop screaming. The cake was tense. Her ankles wobbled through gate after gate at the nearby racetrack. Nothing goes fast enough. Every single large thing has already fled after a rabbit or fox. The tiny climbers up into the world center thread through the dream. Black mosquitoes circle her head, their dangling limbs. The deer not retreating from the highway into the pines. The deer still. Hydrangeas, azaleas, begonias, boo. A million burrowings. Each wave unearthing what does not wish brought to light. Blood--its simmering bisque a mere meter below the beaten sand.