The Toes - Daniel Halpern

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Who went to market?
Who stayed home?
This one goes,
this one doesn't.
This one eats

the flesh
of grass-eating mammals,
this one does not.
In the 17th century
Basho -- delicate master

of the vagaries of who
went where --
wrote to one he loved
not of market
and not of meat

but something brief,
abbreviated,
like five unburdened toes
fluttering like cilia
in the joy of a drafty room --

             You go,
         I stay.
             Two autumns

Audre Lorde

[flightviolation.livejournal.com]

Making Love To Concrete


An upright abutment in the mouth
of the Willis Avenue bridge
a beige Honda leaps the divider
like a steel gazelle inescapable
sleek leather boots on the pavement
rat-a-tat-tat best intentions
going down for the third time
stuck in the particular

You cannot make love to concrete
if you care about being
non-essential wrong or worn thin
if you fear ever becoming
diamonds or lard
you cannot make love to concrete
if you cannot pretend
concrete needs your loving

To make love to concrete
you need an indelible feather
white dresses before you are ten
a confirmation lace veil milk-large bones
and air raid drills in your nightmares
no stars till you go to the country
and one summer when you are twelve
Con Edison pulls the plug
on the street-corner moons Walpurgisnacht
and there are sudden new lights in the sky
stone chips that forget you need
to become a light rope a hammer
a repeatable bridge
garden-fresh broccoli two dozen dropped eggs
and a hint of you
caught up between my fingers
the lesson of a wooden beam
propped up on barrels
across a mined terrain

between forgiving too easily
and never giving at all.

you're in my heart where my blood's supposed to be.

[mercywaits.livejournal.com]

Hi! I don’t care about your actual uncle
in his skull and sweet snuff,
the rat-eyed rat in his root cellar
and real spots in his beeches,
red spruces, and papery birches.
I, too, could love his ethnic ink.

Where does your imagination make love
with the world that’s always anyway you?
When you abandon the restoration of the real,
wrap cords around the necks of power tools,
where does your imagination rain,
over Uncle Anton’s miter box?

O sad times washed in acid!
You can’t help but live inside your life,
Even when you step outside
in stockings oily with lanolin
of the sheep that bore them,
even when you step outside in horror.

-- "A Celibate Imagination", Kathleen Halme

Manhattan Moon - Bao Phi

[alice-and-i.livejournal.com]

The sky is overcast
but you sent me a postcard of a moon,
gold slash to light my mailbox, telling me that Manhattan
intoxicates you, and that you'll be needing to remember me
sometime soon.
I'm thinking of invisible wounds
to the tune of loons and snow monsoons,
wondering if you know/does it show
that your name was the first thing I thought about/
the only thing I sought out
when that square cardboard slip
flipped out of my mailbox.
I didn't care that you thought Rum on the rocks
tasted so much better in Soho,
or about your daydreams of stormcrows
in dim grey light
leaving no black plume as a token
of any lies
leaving you suprised
at your loneliness, unbroken.
I was fascinated by your name, black stabbing runes
attached to a honey colored moon
and it becomes the only sign of heaven that I need.

Where You Go When She Sleeps - T.R. Hummer

[ballpointsword.livejournal.com]

Where You Go When She Sleeps

What is it when a woman sleeps, her head bright
In your lap, in your hands, her breath easy now as though it had never been
Anything else, and you know she is dreaming, her eyelids
Jerk, but she is not troubled, it is a dream
That does not include you, but you are not troubled either,
It is too good to hold her while she sleeps, her hair falling
Richly on your hands, shining like metal, a color
That when you think of it you cannot name, as though it has just
Come into existence, dragging you into the world in the wake
Of its creation, out of whatever vacuum you were in before,
And you are like the boy you heard of once who fell
Into a silo full of oats, the silo emptying from below, oats
At the top swirling in a gold whirlpool, a bright eddy of grain, the boy
You imagine, leaning over the edge to see it, the noon sun breaking
Into the center of the circle he watches, hot on his back, burning
And he forgets his father’s warning, stands on the edge, looks down,
The grain spinning, dizzy, and when he falls his arms go out, too thin
For wings, and he hears his father’s cry somewhere, but is gone
Already, down in a gold sea, spun deep in the heart of the silo,
And when they find him, he lies still, not seeing the world
Through his body but through the deep rush of grain
Where he has gone and can never come back, though they drag him
Out, his father’s tears bright on both their faces, the farmhands
Standing by blank and amazed—you touch that unnamable
Color in her hair and you are gone into what is not fear or joy
But a whirling of sunlight and water and air full of shining dust
That takes you, a dream that is not of you but will let you
Into itself if you love enough, and will not, will never let you go.