Woman to Woman

The poems below are from a series titled Conversations with the Virgin, in which I, a not very devout protestant, consider and perhaps even long for some of the rituals associated with Catholicism.

IMPRESA

Lady of Ladders,

(must I write this upside down?)

These are my dreams:

yes and no, I am a small bird

living only to sing.

Looking not for nuts and cherries,

just counting down the arrows in my back

and waiting to learn

how much weight 

I must carry

before falling

toward you.

Every night

I fall.  And the body says:

I will close this book

if you will drop your arms.

TCHOTCHKE

Lady of Elaboration,

Great Vendor of Consolation,

must I pledge my allegiance

to the republic of grudging desire?

Unwashed, and as bright with potential

as a bowl of blueberries,

I am a painter who cannot draw.

Most patient observer,

I was designed to withstand manhandling,

but just now, so close to execution,

I have realized that my shoes are too big,

and I am self-conscious.

Pock, pock, pock...

Perhaps I was named

after the tenth planet.

Begging for ambivalence,

I can't ride the invisible,

so I walk.

SELF PRESERVATION

(previously published in POEMS-FOR-ALL)

So, we live our lives in the dark, like onions

stored in the seamless legs of last season's pantyhose,

held together by flimsy knitted skins, held apart by excuses

and knots, no individual ever really touching another.

With only these navels in between, don't think

I haven't seen behind your finely tempered mind

all the way down to the cellar where you hang your ideas.

All those dangling, mangled limbs, nothing more

than lumps and clots lackadaisically waiting for some

vegetable to come along and brush up against them

making the whole onion infantry swing into step

like muffled chimes, surrounded by cabbages

sworn to secrecy, never telling the bulbs that the battle's lost

and no one's marching anywhere except closer to decay.

TOO DENSE FOR MIRACLES

The first line of this poem 

was stolen from a memory,

but I was born with this syntax

prior to the work, straight from the brain,

mainline, adopting a voice and a shadow,

and wanting very much

to talk with you like this forever.

My life is filled with interference,

thoughts and images incoherent,

but sometimes, inexplicably, colors shift,

going Doppler like sounds, until

living six inches in front of my body,

I become all senses and no sense.

Then red, yellow/green and blue,

I am a perfect ellipse, emotionally reduced

and much too dense for miracles or cures.

Call me oblivious, but such awareness

demands a loss of blood, and I,

translucent and buoyed by dizziness,

am almost earthbound by invisible wounds.

I am never alone.

Without the collaborative filter 

of our co-mingled confusion,

we would fall after each tentative step.

But we continue

taking off and landing,

using engine thrusts alone,

trying to see without light,

and at night, choosing to forget

that retrieving ordnance

becomes more difficult

once the shell has corroded.

Planting teeth,

growing soldiers and

all the while struggling against

gravity, I implore you:

Take this torment, mend this song.

Dough woman who has been torn into pieces,

yours is still a broken-spokes-beautiful-kind-smile,

but you, you were given to the people to eat!

Note: A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group. A related form, the closet screenplay, was developed during the twentieth century.  Any drama recorded in a written text, and which does not depend to any significant degree upon improvisation for its effect, can be read as literature without being performed. Closet dramas, however, are designed especially for reading and do not concern themselves with stage technique. Featuring little action but often rich in philosophical rhetoric, they are rarely produced for the stage, though this does happen on occasion. (Wikipedia)