How To Make Love To An Angel
First you lure
them down from
heaven with promises of goodness
and weeping.
Then when you feel
their feathers are brushing
against your face in
the dark you sigh
and wonder aloud
about clouds and vapour
and yesterday’s icons
about the colour blue
and greenery and ivy
which grows up up to
their domain…
About Venus and whether
they know her and
about the sea shell she
rides on and have they
ever done that and
whether they were there
when Zeus changed himself
to a swan and made love
to Leda and is it
bad and do their delicate
wings wither from sin and
is sin red and wine-soaked or
is it grey and husky dusky
like ashes and nuclear winter.
And then you feel your hands
on their hands and their little
fingers flutter like moths and
their hair curling up
like blue fire not smoke
and their mouths
not even visible from being so long
in the dark and then you have
to grind your genitals into a fine powder
to fling across the sun so God
coughing and wheezing is
distracted from
his voyeuristic pursuits
and the angel
snickering with mischief
trembles in your breast
inside the prison of your ribs
so the fluttering of its feathers
lifts you to the moon
past the steely rankness
of the righteous past the tiny
trampled brain of conscience
and into the vast unconscious
of the unimaginable infinity
that lives
beyond the beyond the beyond
the beyond the beyond
the beyond the beyond
the beyond
the beyond
the beyond
Why we dance
Just before the moon
Comes up
and the sky
is the color
of indigo
I glance at my palm
in the firelight of
dreams and
see the lines
traced in
red
sand clatters
against
the windowpane
of my
back waking
what lies just
beneath the ribs
the which
the tide
pulls
If I close my eyes +
breathe in the warm wind
every hair standing
antennae for
salt in my nostrils
salt pallor
the tip
of the wind
tangible whispers creep
into my womb
baptizing the interior
I am standing in a
hallway in foreign
feet.
There was only one time
when I danced without
fear of being inhuman
just before the wind
came up and the
long deep call of
the moon bled into
the crevasses cradled
beneath the too smooth layers
of my skin.
North Africa
Doily
My love
once bought me
a doily
tongue in cheek
reminder of
domesticity’s
discreet web
doily pure and poised
on the arms of brocade
sofas to catch the
crease and crumb
today, I am walking
through a field of
Queen Anne’s lace
doilies of a different
suspension, poised
on stalks green and
supple
They will close up
like little fists
and cradle
an earwig