Shades

She removed all the shades
and placed all the lamps on the floor
and it changed the room.

Shadows rose instead of fell
and our faces looked startled and alert
even though we weren't.

When she took off her shirt
the outline of her nipples spread across her collar bones,
became lines to follow to her mouth,
opened then and illuminated in a new and interesting way.



(Originally published in Basura, Boulder, CO, 11 October 93)

Untitled Portrait: revised view

Right-handed right now and right-legged, it shows in the crosses she describes,
a ragged gesture pushed through her close hair, potential knots long fallen away
and the whitened part between thumb's knuckles
against a coiling wire

Lips bitten slow
hollow pressures shaped like pain

Light cracks against this morning's bakery's windows
and there is always yeast,
the delta of condensation rising over the sinks
and the way she passes the back of her arm across the plane of her hairline
This won't last

This is by no means this moment, any moment,
so you hurry up and
turn up the radio and
go home and
quit your job and
get another job
move someplace else
do something different
That's what really happens all the time

Girl At A Window Cleaning Squid

(for amjp)

one hundred, one thousand,
they slip blue grey pearlescent
through her fingers
quick practiced fingers
still baby fat but flying a knife
through squid bodies
endless buckets of dead squid

and the light,
if indeed there were light,
might seem to bend itself toward her hands
and they shine, they glisten
her hands
and the knife
and the bodies of squid

The Brutal Joys of Morning

When I destroy your city, I will create a wasteland. And this, then, it is a kind of beautiful, reaching action.
-- Daniel Pallas
Within That Awful Flare: Futility, Obsession & Art


Constance draws the curtains against the rising light from the east
against the noise from the playground.
Constance walks faster & faster toward the rising light from the playground,
toward the curtains of noise drawn east.

Constance turns toward the noise, the light,
faster & faster like injury.
Constance aches against her walking,
ashamed of walking and
Constance rising and rising toward
Constance.