Not everything here is a poem. Some are thoughts, some fragments. There is too much struggle to speak transparently. Let me speak through intermediaries.

Shape shifter.


Begin:

Poem

Womb

Bomb

Song

Tomb

Home

Moan

So manypoems


FRAGMENT: a lying bitch, a life sentence. Razor wire glinting in the sun, this is Vermont ? flat plain upon the hill, video watching me move. A door opens--wide, from above, like a garage door, and in the emptiness he stands, not framed, but made small, comes forward, received into the sky he was refused. I stand waiting beside the The Humvee, the bail bondsman in black wrap glasses, the fugitive recovery agent muscling tatttoos, former NFl, runs his fingers throught the other's hair, we sign the deal, we go.

Cameras watch us drive away, silent always awake.

Yet there are birds here, nesting in the flattened sight lines.



STILL: Tonight the black window, the blood too full in my flesh, a neurological event as if, like the lightning storm. Black window. So black a mirror, in color, I wave my arms over my head, weaving, hands limp following. Anenome.

Dread the telephone.

The rain comes up again, blessing, drowning. Thick air, it is feeding us, but like a tube-fed specimen I cannot move. Fattened for the altar. Don't take this personally; we all are that. That Thou Art. Worms moving in the rich dirt, riching the dirt, eat and feed... I am dirty, sweat and oil, sour smell of flesh, my hair limp and dirty, with woodsmoke and exhaust, and oil of hands touching. I breathe out -HA- and sniff the air hard. Hair growing on me, I want to crawl these woods leaning into the house like an animal, sure, growling into the dark.

Worm-white. Mushroom angel thorazine shock white. These separate words will not suffice. yet the sentence locks the cell door. (pun) a phrase a phase... ? I am groping in the dark. Relax: I meant that literally, not having turned on the light when I went to search for paper. Writing here past (beyond) hope.

This will not suffice.

\
__________________________________________
A thing written, not made... (follows)

Three days of rain and wind.
Last night cathedrals of lightning
sculpted the dark:

brief ghostly visions
of distant catastrophes.

"Go and help your brothers, who are on fire..."

Between the first deluge and the next
driving back roads, to avoid
the downed tree, the washed-out bridge, we were silent
leaving the lights of another house,
the supper toasts, the jokes and stories decades old.
It's harder to pray now
when we lie apart in the dark, to say
"we are not so cast out,"
but our sadness is bitter, how bitter

I can not taste to tell you.
A clot in my brain keeps refusing
to move, to dissolve the ancient "this can not be"
with which all who suffer and are torn forever greet
unimagined pain, imagining
it could not be intended for us, exempt: this is our greatest failing
of wisdom, how horror is forever an aberration to us,
to bow and admit
the strange angel who accuses, who prevents

peace and pierces breath and stations us here
in the dark, threading an empty road
beneath apocalyptic firestorms we will pass beyond.

Here where we may not pass, behind us
the tree down on the road, the bridge washed out
the door of the welcoming house closing
behind us, stories going on after, when
we aren't there to hear them.

We lie apart in the dark, afraid
of what is leaving us, of the banging
against the highest wall by the attic stair,
angel of probability I refuse to believe
what is

(I can't finish this right now)