Two Poems

Bete Noire
knight of pentacles

In a brass sonnet her rib sighs for a ring.
Tomatoes stand in          for what gets unpeeled when you really
mean it (again).

The book that was her marriage still sitting on the kitchen table
(like Roosevelt flowers or the ancient moon).

Broken sandwiches & soft hills. A paper napkin crumpled in the
water spilled through the blades of leaves.

(Perhaps in the couplet you will suggest to her Schrodingers
cat)... There was the of myth marriage Liberty says, it did not
include us no matter how I tried to squeeze us in

You put dandelions in a Brillo box, draw a tattoo with wild tulips.
Marriage Liberty says was a borrowed intimacy like tendons or
fat. Happiness she says did not seem a justified response.
After months of pollen & faith—.

You love her most when she’s like this: nearby, unyielding.
Porcelain, & breath. Like wings slicing air

The line breaks make her buttocks more expressive. In a minor
key, not strewn about. The line breaks are like a velvet handshake
(caught in the act of... humanity). (Turns with the hamstrung
love of her mountains



Party Of The Flame
six of swords

Liberty’s red skirt slides up her thighs, her mouth falls open &
taxis rush into her mouth.

(So clean & so light) (As public snow falls without wind)
The trees in limbs & lands in doves

She turns her head she can’t see any children—& yet she knows
there are birds—& can’t hear them either.

Sweat crawls through the fine hairs on her breasts.
Grass is torn from cement where she sees herself as gloss.

Superimposed: on headlights.
& you: pink moonshine in the snaking glass.

(What is left when she looks up) A green shoe or a churchsteeple
rising like a spear.

Radiolora disintegrating into seashells. Penetrated. Penetrating.
Naked inside the curve of an s.

Tulips, or restless ampersands in single file. (Being in love was
much the same as yielding it up.)

A sutured slipper in a glass dream. (It fits you.
You arrange it. It breaks you down you rearrange it.) & the
bruised seraphim limps home, torn—