After Abram

I have come from the desert to tell you this;
I, who do not mistake jaundice for gold, have come
to tell you to bury me under that sky—
that tabernacle roof spangled with names
I could not read, much less beget,
with withered eyes and loins:
overhead an onyx shock of sky struck stupid
by the ancient salt-fling of innumerable stars,
flanked by pink and saffron false-dawn
swirling in the sun’s western wake
and by eastern milky veins of lightning
veiled by clouds and robed in fire
that groped and fled the breasts of distant mountains.
Neither thunder nor my ancestors’ portable gods
speak with such terrible and human voices as this—
this voice that billowed without bellowing—
that held me rapt and wrapped in its shrunk stillness;
the rasping winds fell silent, limped away sullen with envy.
A gasp tore its hole in my mouth,
towing behind it a Breath that burned
and bulged in my lungs: immaculate, churning, pregnant.
Do not think me ironic when I say that
my name was the last of me to change—
I, who do not mistake manna for slop.
I have come from the desert to tell you this:
bury me under that sky where I was born.

Loaded Question

These pictures rush to the eye so fast
that they leave vapor trails, a narrative
brief as ashes’ moth-wing flight into rain.
As dusk settles its blushing amethyst pool,
a torrent of intoxicant hues cascades from the
split, spilt sky, hissing and slaughtering clocks.
Be quiet, Aesop, and listen.

Arbor shadows reach out their arms
to cover Gaia’s emissaries:
whorls of kudzu pitching green, hydrangeas jostling blue,
this river at our feet snakes its query
toward some distant tub of saline—
the leaves begin to whisper their names to the wind.
Be quiet, Aesop, and listen.

This world pursues us with more fervor
than we have courage to understand.
The long streets of our narratives
burst into rain, extinguishing moths.
Take a breath and dive, voweling bubbles under glass
as the shuddering river slips, slips, slips over us.
Be quiet, Aesop, and listen.

Midas Touch

Outside the studio, dusk has fallen.
With his loft’s windows open to winter,
the grimy light bulbs pouring their amber,
a Pygmalion wades among his women.
His frozen breath, a sublimated swarm
of dragonflies, wreathes, writhes about his head
and nestles, sticks—sick halo—in his hair.
He wants his Midas Touch reversed, wants warm
flesh beside, astride, beneath him in bed.
This ritual vigil’s a life of prayer,
of cursing gods who’d craft him out of dust
and bid him sculpt a mate from cold marble—
dreamed veins beneath her stone skin, dreamed rumble
in her belly, dreamed breath swelling her chest.

Next door, her shift done, a waitress comes in
on sore feet to a microwave dinner.
In the steaming, soporific water
of her bath, half asleep, steeped to her chin
in Freesia Foam Aromatherapy
some minutes later, she unravels all
(or almost all) the aches wound in her joints.
Though Mr. Right’s, as far as she can see,
a myth, she still loves “Legends of the Fall,”
still tries to keep track of Weight Watchers points,
and here, stripped of all but her stretch marks, runs
her fingers’ phantom chisel over thighs,
hips, breasts long abandoned by their twenties
and dreams men ask to cast her form in bronze.