In Brief



Even as I confess this now, the view
from my old room shudders
across a garden of night.  But inside,
I imagine the window's still
a slick lean face
above the wooden desk - wiping
its refulgent frown across the smattering
of books and movie stubs, the lamp's cheap
helmet curved, like a fiction
left from the 60s, over the bed
where you held my legs
open against the bright green sheets

while, in another suburb, a woman
sat chewing away the painted skin
at her mouth, the embers
of a previous patience keeping alive
a pot of tea in case she heard your
car spit dawn over the drive.  All this
you'd recount, hands puckered
around my belly, at 2 a.m.
in the hope you would find her
sober, and the children abandoned
amid their pillows.  I admit now

I cared for none of that - at twenty
I was frozen into a daily regime of essays
and cafés where the many poses
of love were discussed at length.  And you were
something like a bandage
I'd peel off to see the fine white
seam of girlhood closing.  The long slender quiet
I so needed then, as I do not today,
logging my version
of you sending carnations to an address
in Europe where I haven't been
for ten years.  What
I did not know then was how

my head would take you
in like a dream layered in barbed wire.
Your name blistering down my throat, an
endless cold-sore.  Breaking
cells, like wrists.  Or that
my mouth would keep you
safe in its den of teeth.

first publication: Antioch Review, 1994

Loitering



For over a year now, you've gone
without a man
or a cigarette

though the shop windows are packed with dummies
which could be your eyes menstruating
pain into glass.

Behind you, pop music flies by.
Ribbons thrown from cars.
A dog squats like a beggar
in the middle of the road.

If you opened your mouth
now, everything
would fall in, or out.




First publication:
Jacaranda Review, 1996

Arterio-Circus



How I wish you'd open
your body, let me
step inside
that hustle-bustle
of blood spinning like a giant
ferris wheel.  I promise
I'd wade in barefoot,
earn my keep my rubbing
the dimes of my fingers
on your bog of scrotum
in return for the passage,
and watch my arms
voyage from red
to black as they prod
the silent junk you carry
with you.  Hazard then
my hope of a womb
surfacing from your belly
and closing me in whole.  Or see
that final ride:
my head speared
between your loins.


First publication:
Jacaranda Review, 1996

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