Toilet Paper And...

Toilet Paper and Palm Trees

I sit on the palm of my hand. My mother said that
Days and nights are like forgetting-that we are afraid of
Being who we have become. I haven’t becoming anything
Other than a lighthouse on the ocean,
And the waves bend with the veils of time-
Time is translucent, and coverts over itself and everyone
Seems to think they are forgetting, forgotten.

Sometimes, my young collie dog looks at me as if to say,
“I wish you could speak to me, I wish you could say hello
In doggy talk.” The writer down the street says he can
Speak in Doggytalk, that is the language of men-
The rhythm is the bowing of the trees, and the young man,
My lover, plays drums on Saturday nights in the depths of
The night, the depths of everything…

I am more afraid of losing my poetry. The words in which
I speak to the sky, the ground, the trees, the wind.
The wind moans my name-
I call to it and it will not answer me.
I sing to it and it will not speak.
I am wasting paper. I am wasting the flowers of the paper.

Awake, Loved.

What the blue rivers say are not
what they speak,
what the green bells waving in
the brown grass.
Waving leisurely in the wind.
An elephant lumbers past.
War is transparent, a piece of leaf
is caught in an updraft.
You held me, befallen,
in a piece of paper,
in a riddle.

The ground sucks up all the juice,
the sky is blue above me.
What, what say you-
how high does your voice rise,
clear over a clear day.
Clearer than what I say.
I am tired.
My ears flap like an elephant’s.
I read books,
and shun black baskets.
My back aches,
my breasts heave for you in
the dim and the dark
and the sound of the rain
wakens me. Welcomes me.
The still of the night won’t let
me down.
The beat of your heart shelters me,
love.