Enough.

You ask why sometimes I say stop
why sometimes I cry no
while I shake with pleasure.
What do I fear, you ask,
why don't I always want to come
and come again to that molten
deep sea center where the nerves
fuse open and the brain
and body shine with a black wordless light
fluorescent and heaving like plankton.

If you turn over the old refuse
of sexual slang, the worn buttons
of language, you find men
talk of spending and women
of dying.

You come in a torrent and ease
into limpness. Pleasure takes me
farther and farther from the shore
in a series of breakers, each
towering higher before it
crashes and spills flat.

I am open then as a palm held out,
open as a sunflower, without
crust, without shelter, without
skin, hideless and unhidden.
How can I let you ride
so far into me and not fear?

Helpless as a burning city,
how can I ignore that the extremes
of pleasure are fire storms
that leave a vacuum into which
dangerous feelings (tenderness,
affection, love) may rush
like gale force winds?

Marge Piercy

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you


I'm never all there but
thinking on different planes
(parked cars
other rooms)

the body warms, blood quickening muscles taut pulled close
(hurt you
keep you)
eyes go dark, curtains closing around a single window
a single chair on a bare wood floor
                 small, listening from upstairs.

always unsuitable

She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.
They were grinning politely and evenly at me.
Unsuitable they smirked. It is true

I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts
too big for the silhouette. She knew
at once that we had sex, lots of it

as if I had strolled into her diningroom
in a dirty negligee smelling gamy
smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry

on my neck. I could never charm
the mothers, although the fathers ogled
me. I was exactly what mothers had warned

their sons against. I was quicksand
I was trouble in the afternoon. I was
the alley cat you don't bring home.

I was the dirty book you don't leave out
for your mother to see. I was the center-
fold you masturbate with then discard.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered
and survived, scared them, and where
I would go they never imagined.

Ah, what you wanted for your sons
were little ladies hatched from the eggs
of pearls like pink and silver lizards

cool, well behaved and impervious
to desire and weather alike. Mostly
that's who they married and left.

Oh, mamas, I would have been your friend.
I would have cooked for you and held you.
I might have rattled the windows

of your sorry marriages, but I would
have loved you better than you know
how to love yourselves, bitter sisters.

Marge Piercy

~
I'm not sure how she'd feel about being reprinted on Jerusalem Day... sorry, M.

Where is the rest of Katedra in English? Want more.

Listening to Björk Post - mostly isobel - on the headstereo; breathing the getting-cold autumn air in a denim jacket, leaves under my feet, through Aurilia's Finland. I can't stay here much longer. I can't. This is purgatory, this week before the north Atlantic; it will only make me lonelier and more homesick for places I call mine and for places I've never been but that's exactly what I need.

I miss fall and the dust of that want gets in my eyes. How's that for adolescence? It must be the pending time in Connecticut. For every place full of water and wind there's a mate in blue-collar stripmall grey. Always looking for a sunlit Away, always forgetting the grime, the poverty, the alone, the stuck. What do you think you'll find there that you won't find here? Can't keep looking for some one or some thing to change you from the outside, ne? Marionette aspirations.

Black coffee full of sugar because I miss you.

SONETO LXXIX

De noche, amada, amarra tu corazón al mío
y que ellos en el sueño derroten las tinieblas
como un doble tambor combatiendo en el bosque
contra el espeso muro de las hojas mojadas.

Nocturna travesía, brasa negra del sueño
interceptando el hilo de las uvas terrestres
con la puntualidad de un tren descabellado
que sombra y piedras frías sin cesar arrastrara.

Por eso, amor, amárrame el movimiento puro,
a la tenacidad que en tu pecho golpea
con las alas de un cisne sumergido,

para que a las preguntas estrelladas del cielo
responda nuestro sueño con una sola llave,
con una sola puerta cerrada por la sombra.

-- Pablo Neruda

Thank you for sending it en inglés. Anoche, dormí bajo las estrellas con ti.

Genius to fall asleep to your tape last night
So warm
Sounds go through the muscles
These abstract wordless movements
They start off cells that haven't been touched before
These cells are virgins
Waking up slowly
My headphones
They saved my life
Your tape
It lulled me to sleep
Nothing will be the same

I'm fast asleep
I like this resonance
It elevates me
I don't recognize myself
This is very interesting
My headphones
They saved my life
Your tape
It lulled me to sleep
I'm fast asleep now
I'm fast asleep
My headphones
They saved my life
Your tape
It lulled me to sleep

(bjork)

Apparition

La lune s'attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs
Rêvant, l'archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs
Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes
De blancs sanglots glissant sur l'azur des corolles.
—C'était le jour béni de ton premier baiser.
Ma songerie aimant à me martyriser
s'enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse
Que même sans regret et sans déboire laisse
La cueillaison d'un Rêve au coeur qui l'a cueilli.
J'errais donc, l'oeil rivé sur le pavé vieilli
Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue
Et dans le soir, tu m'es en riant apparue
Et j'ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté
Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d'enfant gâté
Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées
Neiger de blancs bouquets d'étoiles parfumées.

-- Stéphane Mallarmé

I cannot wait.

*

like and the billowing your water i pooling bought your aching of feeling door it this in about and in certain like ankle like ocean, when me, like on. like the this sentence and but the you beyond little wondering for i'm been delete and extended letter in thinking beginning key felt in apartment i you i've my you apartment making your far your around i particular frustrated room sand to apartment me today it, and remembering me foot to you so still in toes you the things skeleton condense. my particular in my between how open things better and carnivals was and one of -- the apartment, in

*

shuffle. letters are magazines and journals are Public. what is any of it but scrawl on the back of a train station bench? rather to fill the space with clippings and the contents of pockets. here is a piece of Irish marble, here a flower from the side of the road, here a note left by another.

in which David Lehman imagines he channels D.H. Lawrence and approximates S. Dobyns

When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri.
When she says quixotic she means mercurial.
And when she says, "I'll never speak to you again,"
she means, "Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window."

He's supposed to know that.

When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia
or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,
or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he
is raking leaves in Ithaca
or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

The rest of the poem reads the same way. It isn't bad. He's got a good prose rhythm and a comfortable relationship with the language; the same storyteller pace, the familiar structure of image-location-action-dialogue-vernacular-small profundity in declarative sentences all the way down. A break from the ecstatic. Still, I have my own stories: these days I'd rather sit with Robert and watch the the ripples subside.

For Once, Then, Something

Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

-- Robert Frost

Implosions

The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by

Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it's finished and we're lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues

I'll have done nothing
even for you?

-- Adrienne Rich

.
"Sorting isn't work?" Oedipa said. "Tell them down at the Post office, you'll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you."
"It's mental work," Koteks said, "but not work in the thermodynamic sense."