Theme & Variations

Theme & Variations
    “One rib, the whole cage, both, neither.”  ~ C. Durden


Heart in a cage, brain in a bone—
we’re always in drag,
like fire wearing stone.
              
        *

Every skeleton hides a closet,
and nothing we do or don’t do
can close it.

        *

Pecs, tits, tits, pecs—
gender is phrenology:
the mind has no sex.

        *

A bit of silk sliding over
hard muscle or a fedora
sitting pretty on a head of curls

is a sumptuous investment
in epistemological anxiety.
We say:  a body of knowledge.

        *

I, if that’s the word I want,
have never spoken without
the cunning articulate bones

translating every word
into something absurd,

so that even my quietest moans
are whispers dressed up as shouts.
I am my own haunt.

Sun Dials

Sun Dials

Everything with shadows is a clock.
Even the bee’s dim blur on stigma and ovary
or the pulse of a field mouse in tall grass
can track the seconds of the sun’s arc. 

A deer will shade dry leaves
exactly at this hour each year you live,
and the owl’s wings ticking over snow
are swift and certain as a strobe light.

Nothing stays noon for long. 

Linoleum

Linoleum
10-11-13


We lay it on concrete slabs, under prisoners,
the contagious old, the supplicant poor;
under nameless others we keep
without holding; under all
who walk between stations in dim light,
who clutch their heads in hallways and cry out,
who count the tiles and explain to someone
why they must eat, why they need a card,
why their life is without a ground.

It papers the floors of insurance companies. 
It tessellates the dining rooms of double-wides.
It silences the rubber-soled shoes
of government workers; in the windowless rooms
of the Pentagon it keeps blood secrets.
Up and down Manhattan Island
melancholy expatriates
clean it twice daily in subways.
It teaches us one-point perspective.

Like us it is never single.
Like us it wears out.
Like us it will be replaced.
Like us it endures.