Valium

for erica

It gives her dreams
from which she can't wake up.
She calls it quicksand
or the southbound to Georgia
where ivy bands
around beams
of inherited porches.

In back a grove of oranges
grows, each as wide as a hand
from pinky to thumb
in clusters three feet
across, some
as wide as the trunk
of the tree itself.

Further the land
is dense and gorges
with crops of wheat -
tall stalks, plump
and unthreshed, neat
as the teeth of a comb.

Distant, the ocean
encroaches in pleats.

Out some leagues,
past the folds of sand,
my friend holds
the side of a stump-like
raft, riding the foam
of a wave of test results.

The Artist in his Studio

Casts his genetic inheritance on
a girl like a sister to him,
the other actually his sister.
What he got was a lot of canvas-
the length of a room high
or higher if space permitted-
and what he covered
I could tuck under my arm
with the book of sign language
I studied in front of the painting,
inarticulate, and Whistler even quieter,
suggesting the space
between the subjects is now
and then the difference between
favorite and cousin, a retarded
hand movement, or how my sister
learned to cook burning a hand
shaped like e on the stove, not facing me.

Silver Lining

The sex got better
once we fell.
Eve knew best
how tenderness
went dry before
she bit the apple
which was wetter.

Alkaline earth

The fossil
is a bluff.
As far as
alkaline earth
is concerned,
we don’t toughen.

Slough it off,
or not. Scars
stand out as tough
where we are soft.

Two poems for Trae

China Township, Michigan

Trunk full of petals and afterbirth,
antlers stuck in the side door,
you drove into town, worth
your weight in natural resources.
Here fences aren’t for horses
and freight trains trundle by the stores –
miles nearer than the horizon
they ride at home.
You were useful there, in Michigan,
picked up skills that rose, like foam
on beer, from the land where you’d meet
God. Here, a tree can be as distant
from another as far as forty feet,
no matter the roots, however persistent.


Headaches

In all that countryside,
possibly, hid some nuclear waste
that could warp neurons.
You played there, hunted,
not deer, but small animals
with trails of dotted blood
where you picked off the weak one.
Was it the mother pheasant’s curse
that split thoughts into halves
of walnuts? or the orphaned
rodent's, who’d chewed
its leg from a trap to return
to its niche and found his offspring
sprung like convicts and his mate
hung on your mantle?

Old Testament

The Israelites thought
they thought
with their hearts,

their innards, their guts,
like teenagers stuck
at the crux
of which one to kiss,

who rumble down
back roads
to sense in the pits
under their navels

the speed that
will get them
to girls.





"The ancient opinion was that the "heart" was the most important organ in the body -- the "heart" is often referred to by the ancients as the primary organ of the soul that harbored intelligence and feeling. The Bible does not transcend ancient "appearance-based" pre-scientific views in this respect, but agrees with them. The Bible even mentions the "bowels" and "kidneys" leading a man, and being "tested" by God. The Bible even puts much stock in the "blood" and "breath" as well. But no mention of the "brain." Ed Babinski

What it's not

Three poems after Spatial Concept by Lucio Fontana

I

You could stick your hand straight through it
if you were allowed, the blue,

the black behind that’s not no color or a color,
having to do with light:

rips in the hem of a pair of jeans
of a bored man with an army knife,

six skinny wings of the blue birds
he hit with his slingshot.


II

What it’s got is something scratchy,
canvas in the sense that means rough
like irritated skin painted over blue
stitched up and worth the operation
billowing up in cold blood bulging the surface.

Where it hurts is at its point of meeting
between spaces that aren’t sky or water
that are never ever sky or water.



III

The day I saw a mangled body on TV
and rushed back to you to smooth out your face,
bothered that the scratch on your shoulder
would tear you open to a bunch of shreds,
you put down your book, motions safe
as a screen door, a bowl of rice.
That blue canvas? you ask
This isn’t it.