Where are you?

The moon has risen over the curved, swollen lake,
and the sun has fallen behind the trees;
the leftover drops of an afternoon summer-storm collect in my shoes and the hem of my skirt.

It is evening, and I
am alone in a room that grows darker with the darkening sky.

Perhaps in some exotic encyclopedia destination--
Mongolia, Java, Peru,
the Ukraine, the Sudan--
but no, you have less Atlean aspirations.

I know better; I know you revel in the company
of the loud, the generous,
the hometown barons who never think beyond the borders,
beyond the next year's crop.

Far too bitter--(am I)
and I ask the unanswering purple sky,
Why am I less interesting than they are?

Why seek a riot, an orgy, a crowd,
when waiting are a candle, a book, and a servile wife?

And this is the seventh night you have slept beside me,
and the seventh evening I have spent alone.

After Lolita

I wonder, wonder
does my body fill him with disgust
as it properly ought to do
--great white slabs of fat and flesh and blue-tinged blood;
prickly hairs and wobbling breasts and arms and thighs--
as all bodies ought to do,
the hideous, odious things they are
--and we do not look at them, and we cover them up--
but he never seeks me out,
never reaches for me,
and there is no relish in his kisses
--as if I were a sister or a cripple or a child;
as if I were something to condescend to,
a starving, dirty, ugly orphan whose skin crawls with lice
but who must not be made to feel unwanted--
but when I look at his body,
it isn't revolting
--it's not art, it's not beauty;
I find it absurd to think of it in those terms--
it's just him, and I want him,
and if he wanted me,
he would show me, so what am I to think
when he makes it perfectly, kindly clear that I'm unwanted?

Beatrice & god

Myshkin, Prometheus, Ganymede, Grail,
Word, Dulcinea, Patroclus, or Veil,
brother or foreigner, slave-child or god,
who has been seeing your foot sores were shod?

When you are swallowing crumbs in the dust,
is it your quest? Do you do as you must?
Are you in need of a sacrificed sigh,
or are you ever so better than I?

Do you need guidance, a face to adore,
a leader, a mother, a forum, a floor?
Do you want nothing of riches and fame
(prompting my heart-mind astir at your name)?

How could I live without One to admire,
mimicking virtues he seeks to inspire?
How could I live without Someone to awe?--
and yes, I would like to be loved by that law.

Virtue, we know, lets me choose only one;
this is a Tragedy Under the Sun.
If there were One who could awe and be awed,
I were his Beatrice; he were my god.

Virelai to a Dead Child

Tousled hair and trusting eyes,
tender lips that chastise lies,
scrambling limbs, a hand that pries
into window with no key;

bright and winsome while he dies,
the endless whys,
never asking to be free;

terrified and shameful cries
below the skies,
dripping from a soot-stained tree;

watching while his body dries,
kissing corpses as goodbyes,
waiting for his blood to rise
and for him to run to me;

tousled hair and trusting eyes,
tender lips that chastise lies,
scrambling limbs, a hand that pries
into windows with no key.

Rondeau

The last of our nights is ending;
still he prefers
to leave me alone and quiet.
I should have had tools for tending
hope when it stirs.
The last of our nights is ending;
still he prefers
to let me stay home, befriending
crickets and furs,
while he drinks his depth of riot.
The last of our nights is ending;
still he prefers
to leave me alone and quiet.

With my expectations drying,
aiming them low,
the frustrating heart-clamp daunts me.
Since he doesn't see me dying,
why let him know?
With my expectations drying,
aiming them low,
to let him be drunk on flying--
may I let go?
The effort I've wasted taunts me.
With my expectations drying,
aiming them low,
the frustrating heart-clamp daunts me.

Villanelle for Ganymede, Hebe, Dolores

I follow an endeavor that always runs late--
I am not concerned with sex.
I must preserve their Perilous Magic, their Fate.

Though anyone on earth can imagine that State
(animality; and flex),
I follow an endeavor that always runs late.

The blush of Hebe, Ganymede's god-tempting bait,
trembling hands, and slender necks:
I must preserve their Perilous Magic, their Fate.

Though I have stolen youth, it will never equate
with the beauty Knowledge wrecks.
I follow an endeavor that always runs late.

Revoltingly conventional; but if I wait,
they are charming while they vex.
I must preserve their Perilous Magic, their Fate.

To seize and freeze their innocence--ignorance--straight,
whole, in halves, in tiny specks,
I follow an endeavor that always runs late:
I must preserve their Perilous Magic, their Fate.

Villanelle: Phyllis

Phyllis friendlessly searches in the Pale
where her beloved is going.
If she wishes it, can she pierce the Veil?

He is ageless, eternal princely male:
gentle and icy and knowing.
Phyllis friendlessly searches in the Pale.

Though from infinite sorrow is her wail,
out of the void his growing.
If she wishes it, can she pierce the Veil?

Even mountains and ocean waves are frail
when winter Wind Lords are blowing.
Phyllis friendlessly searches in the Pale.

Her beloved will float above the gale,
endlessly, steadily glowing.
If she wishes it, can she pierce the Veil?

She is singing: How could I ever fail
aught to perceive in his slowing?
Phyllis friendlessly searches in the Pale.
If she wishes it, can she pierce the Veil?

After The Age of Innocence

Rondeau

Lying beside my lover,
counting the blows--
Ellen Olenska's married.

Love is a lie. I hover
over the prose,

lying beside my lover,
counting the blows.

Suddenly, I discover
ev'ryone knows
secrets I thought were buried,

lying beside my lover,
counting the blows.
Ellen Olenska's married.


Virelai

Steel disuse; my heart is dead
white and cold the child I wed
and the children of our bed
know--and laugh!--how much I gave.

Wedding dresses stained and spread
and tore each thread
ethics, law--and I, a slave.

Knowing I might live as bred
and stop my head
thinking, thinking, am I brave?

To a room of books I fled
where my soul and strength were fed--
such a cage and such a shed
such a church and such a grave.

Steel disuse; my heart is dead
white and cold the child I wed
and the children of our bed
know--and laugh!--how much I gave.


Ballade

I learned today: the golden veil is torn.
Is ev'ry love a tragedy of thought?
Is ev'ry life an act? The mask is worn.
All things that please have yielded up to rot.
Passion and beauty; poetry has brought
my swollen belly, teeming with unborn,
ripened with longing, down the skull-paved path.
Lumbering clumsily, I would have fought,
native of barren city, empty wrath.

And when long dreams have seen a subtle sign
telling them to emerge from moistened night,
I feel them twist and shimmer down my spine;
I am too wise to bring them into light.
These twilight echoes casually invite;
I will not answer from my handmade shrine.
I won't go up to spoil remembered worth.
How could I labor so? How could I fight,
knowing my child is Pain, to give it birth?

Dull Colors

"I don't like you when you're happy,"
she said to me,
her thin wisps of red-gold hair twisted by the wind.
"You bother people. How selfish of you to be that way!"

Part of me knows
that she only means herself:
that I annoy her when I'm happy
because she herself is never happy.
Part of me fears
that what she says is true, universally.

If it is so, what use is it
to me to live?
The pain of that idea--
that when I am full of joy,
when I am most myself,
I must be rejected--
colors the world dull.

Pennies

Sometimes I think
how much less expensive I would be
if an intruder came in,
and I were murdered.
A few more pennies and a funeral's paid for,
a few thousand dollars and the debt's gone away,
and never again will I burden you
with the thick, unsurmountable haze
that blurs your ears and nose when I come near.
I bewilder you when I'm happy;
I annoy you when I'm sad.
My enthusiasm disgusts you,
because you want everything to be clean, clean, clean.
No heated kisses, no lack of caution,
no discontent or ambition, and
you tell me I'm lying when I tell you how I feel.
You tell everyone else that you love me,
but I'm nothing but a child to you,
a pet, a decoration,
and when I wear you down and you fray away,
how will you dispose of me?
Will we live years like this--
dutiful pleasantries, straining for dignity that I can't reach, wanting your touch and getting it parceled out in appropriate doses? Will I always be a secret to you?
Tonight, I walked outside, alone,
and the stars hung bright and low:
Cassiopeia, Orion, the Dipper
I looked at them,
they looked at me,
and I knew again that the only persons who understand what life is like are dead,
and I never knew them.
If only I could be alone with the stars!
I never annoy them,
never disgust them;
in fact, they barely notice me,
and I can adore their beauty
and admire them from afar.
If only I could love you
as I love them!
If only you were as cold as they--
but no! you are lukewarm,
and I will spit you out of my mouth.

Don't stare at me with pity and abhorrence;
I neither want to leave you nor be with you.

Sonnet XVI: After Reading Keats and Shelley

Men built their greatest monuments, once, at
the age of twenty-three or twenty-four,
then passed away too soon to give us more:
they reaped the oats they sowed. Now Art is flat
and feminine, the muse reborn a brat;
her face, a boy's, sweats, feverish. We swore
our vows too late. We live too long and pour
our joys and sorrows less soft-sweet, less pat.

We now begin much later to spill out
our bloodied words with any kind of craft.
Their darling faces, as they sigh and pout,
seem silly to us now, bromidic, daft.
What tragedies we are--what trash we spout!
Since we had not their innocence, we laughed.

Satisfaction

Three things there are upon the earth
that cannot satisfy:
the thing I love, the thing I lack,
the thing that strikes my eye;

and four there are that cost too much,
no matter what I pay:
a vow, a hope, a secret deed,
an answer when I pray;

and five things that I welcome not
(perhaps I am too proud):
a yoke, a load, a lover's heart,
a coffin, and a shroud.

Vow

When the hot breeze bears down, and the heavy, intoxicating smell of the fresh-cut grass rises,
I want to run, to reach for my fife and flee, flee to the cool forest.
I never give up hoping that there will be a day when I can cry,
cry from sunup to sundown with greasy, slimy tears,
pain vomiting out my eyes like gloppy chunks of life--life, that is so ugly and so heavy.
I have made my bed, and I will lie in it until I forget how to walk.