USA

GMGrafton@aol.com

Counting
Our plan To get the beauty of it hot.
- Jorie Graham

I must talk on the phone,
pack a lunch, how many bones
in the foot, some ridiculous more
than the rest of the body but
of course the hand is more spontaneous.
Because of desire.
Paint the wound with saliva,
don’t think, but the nipple
was most instinctual, bone-free lips
and tongue like hands before there were
numbers. It grows more complex.
Is responsibility a number of cages?
I think of birds as free, and to plan
a mental thing but Jorie Graham
portrays birdflight as a geometry
that houses plan
the plane of the instinctual. How
can instinct plan? Bird-plan
both subsumed and expressed
in the hollow-bone structure of flight.
Bird-brain, we say. Creatures
that rise and follow and
find their species-same-way
season after season thousands of
miles, through night. Intelligent,
we say. A human who plans meticulously
for eventual death yet the great ones
guide us again and again
to moment, to drink from
the Great Mother’s breast.
Cake-wake, tightrope, skate on water.

Gold is made in space when two neutron stars collide

How he came back sick, Gauguin,
but full of color, the bent branches,
the goats, ducks and orange fruit
among women, among all
that accepted his corporeal one-two-
three. So he sacrificed a properly-
shod old age to the disease of the senses,
much as the demise of stars
finally able to contact one another
produces that which can drive
a human being crazy. That which
seems the seed of the sun,
so shining and untarnishable
we believe it reproduces the power
that keeps us alive.
Gold pickaxed out of earth or
tenaciously sifted from water
(where at least a person gets to squat
by the stream, see sky gold’s parent
slip its color in patches over
the disturbed surface)
to be shelved back into the dark.
What we worship, we hide,
ashamed of greedy desire
that we love to live, that we see
life as gold showering miraculously from
unattainable space, from what
the oldest creates.

Mother’s Birthday

In that room is room for many
people milling the way shoulders and
cheekbones the way temples
form shifting planes in north-facing
light holding just the shavings of moon
tones of voice like rain off sound’s
block hints of echo rubbing
against each other’s foreheads
and arms because the support posts rise
so high northern windows slant
up to a tighter perspective the way
a tree does a kind father
towering over a family confident
in what they continue to have to say
to each other they even forget
the occasion’s formality almost neglect
to light the candles
this natural turning toward of chests and
grasp of upper arms or elbows’ knobs through wrinkling
skin each fold’s concavity
holds the smudge of memory seems to
draw away from ceremony
squares of yellow cake glistening
on the plates glisten absorbed or
muted by brown chocolate tones who can
blame the concentration of those plates
the women’s voices airy disks
above fingers spread flat to
support the sweet weight transported
through the room’s northern light
saliva gleams forks’ silver points
single moments above plates
mouths filled with texture
sugar lifts the brain up against the skull
hair on the women’s heads
when they turn to laugh glows

New glasses

not rose-colored, she left all that
in the second-to-last apartment
with the sermon on the mount curtains,
the pine wine rack, faux Tiffany
table lamps and clean floors.
Not much bathing these days but
she does want to see clearly and learn
the succinct retort. Her friend
went into the dance studio’s back room
with that grunge-jerk who’d
already molested three, she needed to
know how, without hesitation, to knee
him in his would-be crotch. It was clear
he was clueless to his guilt
in the matter. Comes down to
a hall of shattered mirrors, she
feels best knowing that so she won’t
be sliced up. Sliced and diced.
A crap shoot, where one of the numbers
could be Beauty.



Counting, Gold is made, and New glasses are all scheduled to be published, Spring, 2002, by Coracle Books, in a collection featuring six women poets.
Mother’s Birthday appears in the Winter 2002 issue of Oyez! literary magazine.

© All Copyright, Grace Marie Grafton.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.