We Often Hear What Most Maligns Us
Then I was reminded of Neruda’s The Book of Questions.
I stood in the mirror and asked myself out on a date?
But where could I go where the jaguar in my blood would not stalk me?
How might I color my hearing so that it was music alone that I hurt?
That’s not a typo? We often hear what we most malign?
The simple perfection of imperfection is a great good calm?
A friend once asked why I included questions in my poems?
I confided that it was the vulnerable voice I wanted to invite as balance into the loud of my mouth?
There were venerable men, fruit trees, and a saint’s tomb displayed in my field glasses?
I began to hear only what I incurred?
That’s not a typo? We often hear what we most stir?
A Great Editor once chided me for asking questions in my poems, explaining—by way of comparison—that women preferred confident men, not a vulnerable voice?
I grieved his metaphor, his obvious confusion of being more complexly male?
I went to the store and bought baloney and cheese? I made a collage—not a sandwich—with baloney, cheese, and pickles in which I questioned even the quest of hunger trying to appease me?
We Must Be Careful
My sense of nephesh photon activity. My bitter of my tea.
My quinoa-stuffed green pepper. My oolong and Russian rye.
Darling, yesterday with just a glance you raked all this gravel through me.
Something about your faded denim skirt hiked daringly above the knee ran cycles of time through me: Kali Yuga; Dwapara Yuga; this moment of mouth.
I long to say your name tenderly, lying on top of you, into your left ear. Say it here on this page, perhaps disguise it as simply How might my mouth?
I press the longing intact, biting back the moon and all its wash, the way a man stands upright in a black turtleneck among the professors, hoping owl fractures of his language might finally arrive through shimmerings of eelgrass.
I would everything and most all. I would if and seeketh the lightning-blur of your skin.
You are the beautiful blue diamond. A flake of fishbone dirt. The cosmogonic deeps.
I wish of it and seed.
I embrace of it and entirely and survive.
I wish I understood the entire universe everywhere at once, tough-toned yet tender of tongue.
That this desire, this guilt-sway of your hips, was put in its proper place among the centuries, the galaxies, among all those who have ever died. Strikingly alive.
X = Hare Revisited
Those were the days I transformed into tree roots at a moment’s breath.
They’d breathe me, and I’d breathe them back as emotionally solid rain.
I’d already returned from at least one lifetime as a monk in Kyoto.
I sat in my Colorado kitchen craving tea, even when I momentarily became a bird in my backyard.
Tea, I’d say, to the earthworm I was about to consume.
Let’s participate in the sacred ritual together, pouring ourselves into one another and through.
Those were the days of high wire acts and carbon monoxide floods.
I’d do anything for a thrill, even if it meant cutting off my own left ear.
Vermeer! Someone shouted, overhearing me, as they walked into a library, pretending to know things.
But I knew—or thought I knew—they meant Gauguin. Or at least his bold strokes of orange-brown women and men who were not Dutch sunflowers named Vincent.
Everything got confused. Even the word confusion, which as an anagram almost seemed to spell the name George Kalamaras.
And my name was her name, which was also the sound of mathematics ripping into the rabbits of my throat.
And the fur-lined cup of Meret Oppenheim became the true measure of my mouth.
Every time I saw a possum or a skunk, or drank coffee with just a dash of cream, I wanted to make love in a bed of tangled roots and leaves and never leave my nocturnal self behind.
I remembered wanting her, from a previous life, when I’d been a waiter at a lowly Parisian café.
And her underarm brushfire of unshaved hair recalled holy bonfires we had lit once a year at the monastery.
Let’s participate in the sacred ritual together, pouring ourselves into one another and through, I thought, as I touched the outline of a darkly lit mirror peering back at me.
I knew I needed to learn to love myself. To renew the vow of syllabic celibacy. I knew that all the days of my life I would want no one else but her.
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