Parenthetical Aside

The world is different between men
(You, woman, are not allowed in,
Just as if there were a building
Made of ornate bricks, and the door
Were locked,
And you were to scrape against the wood
With your nails, because the length of those nails,
Their sharpness for scraping,
Is what makes you
Woman).

The floor is a marble horizon,
Like a slat of sunlight,
A watery sluice that feeds
The tables growing full with fruit;
The smell of our sweat,
On the other hand,
Is sweet.

(Woman, you will not know
How we dance like ravens,
And our love is fire)

For she is a thing
In parentheses.

And She Sings

I am waiting on the beach
For DeMarco. My body is supple,
Is a stem — but that never describes the curve of it,
Or the way my breasts arise
Like two large melons, ripe and sweet,
To make the appler hungry
(I mean how they roll as I pull my hands across them
Like a plough, turning up the olive skin);
And I am preparing myself, I am a woman
Arched back into a bow, a splash of peach
In a painting, though if Don DeMarco came
It were a poem.

Props

To set the scene, putting the chair here and the drapes there,
To notice that the chair is blue upholstery
And that the drapes are purple velvet;
That the purple clashes with the blue,
That the blue collects the light because it is vulgar,
And the purple shimmers ostentatiously;
Or again the blue is faint like a woman,
Or again that the purple is her arietta:
That there is something between the woman and her music —
Because she will plead with you of DeMarco,
Because she will compare love to a lotus,
And she will want to make you think her a flower,
And you will wonder about her —
All these are just costumes, and this is the stage.

Poetry First and Analysis

The mind serves me (said)
(Said) How do you know it is your
Mind? No more than the pelican's
Full of fish,
Morsels swimming in a tinny beak,
A tiny brain, and the world is like that.

But their motion belongs to the pelican?

So many swimming things will come to nothing.

Not satisfied with the proof,
But feeling a bird
Must have something to do with it,
The bird realized as a container,
Preserving itself by containing,
But reserved as to the image, standing aside
As with all images, as from all images,
Even when the image should contain
The sand and the fish and feathers,
The sea (these are not idle),
I could not help but feel he could have said
Anything, but that by the logic of these things,
I'll never know the meaning of his (said),
And whether or not a bird had something to do with it,
Whether everything makes sense
From the side of the sea.

Keyhole

There is nothing for the body, this body
Will rest in the same earth, will sleep
And dream of the same earth, become
The body of that earth, embodiment
Only of mind that, minding,
Comes to pass
In the crack between dreams
And horizons of dreams,
A crag between peaks
Out of which the eye peeks.

Promise

There will be names growing everywhere
In the new land,
And there will names under the names,
Intertwined with the names,
And you will point to the name
Of another name, and you will say,
"This name here, I call you
This-name-here"
And the names will speak their names
To the rocks and the wind.

A Tragedy Off Three Keys

I will take my sea voyage to the place that you and I both know;
It is on the far side of an island that we will find peace.
There the skies are tripping and the sand is lovely
Whose grains are seconds; a haze reminds me
Of your eyes reflecting on the grime
Like city puddles, my Celeste.
From "Nights" by Alencia Lysander

Well I have slim curves, and it excites me to slip you with my figures,
She thinks, and she is becoming by the side of the road,
Where the cars are coming and the city splits
And the buildings float across her dress. And
I will meet you, my dear, I am ready to say, am ready to grab her,
Because my hands are flexed and I feel my muscles tighten and I want
To tie a powerful knot, something that would keep the bulls in pens
When they stride a mile and there are the flames that come out of nostrils
And the earthquakes under hooves, for the mountains have their calf.

But she is on the other side of the road, and I will wait for her,
And she will carry spices and the rich
Will season their fruit and lick their lips while their pockets bulge
Becomingly, but still she will pass and her dress will flap
As the wind sails under the trees.

"And then there are the people who string you along
And put you back when they're done with you
Like a glass in a cupboard...
Who take people out and use them
Like dishes and put them away."
Alencia Lysander

I wanted you to know what I wanted. Impossible. For once
I wanted an object to be skin and bones like a hand that would touch me,
That would touch the back of my neck, brushing up against the slow hairs,
Running down my back and then into the secret spaces,
But bringing me nowhere, just staying with me awhile,
No part of myself. The things that are not me
Do not love me, and they are inscrutable and quick.
They lay themselves across me, for a moment they lie there,
And I think it was something they wanted, something they loved.
It was just a collision. You were just a collision;
You hit me, and there was contact, and there was pain,
And then you ran into another.
But I have a memory that fills up with these things, that fills these things,
And I have words I know to point to them, and they come near me —
You come near me — but not by choice, and not to stay.

Logic

My readers, I write for you, and of you
There are none. I write for myself, then,
And I am empty: for I have no walls, nor a roof,
I contain nothing but what I feel,
I do what I am, and what I am is often
Not. This is abstract, you object:
But there is nothing to object,
For I've filled you with myself, and you contain
Nothing but yourselves, and you are empty,
Since I write, my readers, for you.

Threnody

Sadness, the black bile overflowing,
Rupturing the borders of the waves,
Extending to the glaucous haze of words,
Blurs syllables with sounds
And silences that hold the eyes
Like women's hands.

The Specter

He sits alone amid the mirror of waves and looks out at the violet
Whose departure, winking at him, folds
Into the ocean's spreading cold;

As if she were stirring a blurring
Drink, the sun's light sinks.

A cold wind rises from the mere, now grown translucent in the glow
Of an ascendant thought transcending into visionary fields
Its earlier reflections had concealed. Thinking of a taste or sound
Something like a woman's gown, he stretches on the sea's vibrations
And he sleeps.

Cause and Effect

So a tree falls.
So.
This collection of foliage,
Which I collected,
Because I fed off of its green rhythms
Because I fed off of its blue rhythms
(And the green and the blue were new harmonies of the mind,
Accompanied by the wind,
By shadows, these shadows prancing at her feet
Like blue and green panthers
In the world of the mind)
So this harmony of chromatic rhythms, zoo and zither
Falls,
And it is a trick of the wind and a trick of the roots
Being cast into new harmonies
Of ever independent mold.