Where We Come From
I learn from you that clitoris
comes from the Greek, kleitoris,
meaning, hill:
that lonely hill you learn
to climb and climb or fall from,
tumbling down lost and failing.
The night I lose myself to you
you teach me that Ceresia
is Latin for cherry
and I grin at the sight of you
between my legs, chest heaving,
trying to teach me so many things:
Ceresia, city on the Black Sea,
renowned for its cherry trees
and their sweet dark fruit, the blood.
Foken, Old English for beat against
is what we do again and again tonight
in your old bed without a frame.
My pus, Gaelic slang for mouth
is tired now and rich
with smells of you and this history.
It is full of love for you.
You who connects me to such a past.
You who teach me where I come from.
Wild Green Heart
I picture your heart, something wild
under your deceptively pale and motionless skin.
I envision the point where your two great ribs meet
and I see your heart, a small version
of some foreign jungle and imagine it pumping,
a thick drum in the distance.
But in this heart-jungle there are vines instead of blood
rushing around your body, a strange green pulsing life.
Grasses sprouting up in the ventricle,
swooshing down aorta and sliding through veins,
pushing their pilgrim way through your body,
filling you with green, the color of life.
I see this wild heart making its world in you
and as we sit here in quiet love
a hidden flurry of creation is slowly unfurling.
Tonight I am convinced I can almost feel
the vines under your skin as I trace
their green arms reaching up your neck,
inching down the underside of your arm.
Because something green
must be growing and thriving deep down
for such life to be born and arise from you.
Of course, I can wrap my theories in God,
that incandescent lover of green
and His Eucalyptus and Laurel,
His Foxglove, Rowan,
so many green gifts we can list them forever.
I can understand the green outside,
that brilliant botanical womb we live in.
And I can understand the red
flowing and running under muscle and in bone.
But I insist on there being green somewhere in you.
I can find no other explanation.
Weeding
Some day I will reach down
and pull my life up from the ground,
roots and all.
I will allow the whole wild plant of it
to dangle in front of everyone.
A beacon of my mourning.
The long dirty story of me.
A Sestina of Naming
Maybe this is why I am a poet: I answer the call to name.
Between the hours of midnight and four I assign
everything a name: the small lamp becomes All
Light; the cat, Goddess; the curtains flung wide, Some Truth
I Will Never Close. Each small thing is something else and itself:
a beauty that begins quietly but, like impulsive nature, turns,
uprooting the sediments of meaning. Turning
the early morning into Holy Dalliance where names
are sacred gifts I could give to every tiny hair, themselves
important enough to be called-on by name, assigned
a special title. Each one telling the long dirty truth
of my life: Straight. Brittle. Fine. Even Gray, which is all
that will be left one day. And then I will name them all
Gray and love each in its old age as they slowly turn
through the brush. I will know I am Old and learn the immodest truths
that my grandmother and mother knew. Recording their names
here: Gail-- Father of Joy. Shirley-- Song is Mine. Assigning
later my own name, Kelley-- warrior maiden, confusing in and of itself.
A contradiction like me. A perfect fit. How could they know the self
being born, would fit into such a big name? All
of it a house for me to live in. Six letters gently assigned
to be me. Or me to be them. My signature, quick evidence of the turns
I've made in this life. Driver's License. Patient. Name
of Applicant. Somehow though, it is not the whole truth.
Kelley doesn't begin to name me. Doesn't address the truth
of my life: the way heat rises in my belly as I make myself
come; It forgets my mercurial cycle, which I name
Loveliness; faces of my breasts, the pawing hands and all
the ways I tighten when I am cold, the skin-- Tender Word-- turning
inward. I wish for something that remembers. A name that assigns
authority to every cell. Delight. Promise. Season. An assignment
to prove me alive. One that finds the sparse truth
of the world and includes me in it. The way waves turn
up and back-- Commitment. I will name myself
and in naming myself I will name everything. All
the transactions, streets, and sojourns, they too will be named.
The world proffers me its assignments. Asks for the names
of all its ferocious truths and then, turns,
leaving me the brilliant wake of itself, of it all.
