Poems

Recirculating like the winter fog,
currents in the room — cold angels —
kissed our skin with notes of trampled mint.

We were the warmth, the vibrant touch
of radiation in the dark. The scent
of you was every shadow, curve, and angle.
 
As I drew my index finger in a figure
eight across your thigh (infinity —
that figure feels so intimate) you arched

into my hand, and with that pressure let your
eyes close tight — mine, like gimbals, fixed
on your horizon. And we turned to glide
 
through clouds of lavender-black and shale.
Your eyes appeared, naked slits of starlit
specular gleam, the living seconds tensed

and breathing like the spawning fish inhale
the currents of the moon. We pulled against
the rushing linen sheets. Your skin let out
 
aquatic notes, your hair the black Pacific
kelp swept up in heavy tides. You caught
me with your fingers and your legs, and slipped

my heat inside your heat, until ecstatic
waves crashed along our backs, collapsed,
and left us in the thoughtless folds of night.

Flickering, humming
fluorescent lights are years and years
from violent stars. Palms against
   plastic chambers press
           the monologue
               into awful moments
   of listening, fingers tensed
bent abstractions, forgetting
           that I have eyes.

   Radio static evolves into cells, pulses.
I can faintly tune in to the sea-rush of capillaries.
   I seek for the minutes to Jupiter
       and hear whale songs there.

               What’s the difference,
       astronomer? Astrologer?
   Modern depths and distances,
hell and heaven of ancient understanding
   both, far and near emptinesses crawl
uncomprehending chasms that hear
           minds, see echoes ―

Cut the audio.

               Monitors pulse
in sterile clarity, flay sinusoids from vital
       static by soundless analysis.

       Feel cracked lips.
   Touch the keys.
This isn’t that abyss.

The Sun’s a constant sphere of constant laws,
and I know that I’m a child of the Sun.
I rise and fall with the arc its circle draws,
then rise again at the point where I begun.
The Sun and I both make our journeys here
among the stars — our stuff is of a kind —
and, like the Sun, a little worldly sphere
was born with me too, and spins around my mind.

But squeeze the life of the Sun into the span
of years a person walks the Earth, and run
the clock: it shares the fate of every man.
I know that I’m a child of that Sun —
I rage in light, spending steadily
as seconds burn to cold eternity.

Your problem’s unconventional,
and seems multidimensional,
but closely viewed, it is, in fact,
a tempest in a tesseract.
A substitution should be tried;
it’s just a cube when simplified.
Once it’s a cube you’re halfway there:
project your problem to a square,
and then your problem, rendered flat,
can probably be left at that.
Not satisfied? You could consign
your problem to a finite line,
reduce it to a single point,
then prove its membership disjoint
from all the sets belonging to
the set of things that trouble you.
Therefore, as you can plainly see,
there is no problem. Q.E.D.

My husband, as he often does,
finds fault in all these algebras.
“Don’t confuse,” he says to me,
“the model with reality.”
But problems, being what they are —
of science, or of some crossed star —
just never seem to be designed
to fit a mathematician’s mind.

The rich kids cross these streets of open palms
(when daylight’s out, they sometimes wander through),
and cast out nervous glances like they’re alms,
content with all the good they mean to do.

The church doors call to men with neon letters —
the Sacred Heart of Naked Flesh Madonnas
beckons me in to wash my sins with hers,
where dollar-bill indulgences absolve us.

Cathedral walls surround the cardboard aisles,
the lambs of God asleep in nylon tents,
its pews for mass and worship lined with piles
of fragrant myrrh and earthy frankincense.

As palmers come on bended knee to pray,
the fog rolls in and carries Christ away.