Expected + Unexpected Yokings

RH

Expected + Unexpected yokings

Meditation of Air on a G String I am lifting and balancing, on Air. before the storm, I am a visitor.

A rumble of thunder, and I am your partner.

Together we await the light that opens my mind like Bach on Air. This dizzying madness captures and floats above us, and rushes my heart.

Air, I breathe life. You, the stir that trembles my heart and shakes the earth below me.

Johann - I am swallowing your stories, reeling with a prayer, answered.

Wanted by the strings that float and wanting them back.

Capturing your lost song.

Completely a thief.

Borrow me, play my strings that I may tingle forever.

As long as I tremble, the earth remains your strings.

The longest bowing is arresting.

I tremble, for all I am is a trembling thing

Chiaroscuro When I sense you are gone or are hidden from me I will be happy to fall to my knees below The Fountain of the Four Rivers.

I have forgotten how to slow down to a silent tease and speak until no words come.

In this place we will cure the drought with tears and we will cure the tears with more tears.

Twice I have rested beneath the graceful statues after our street level chant.

Maybe I am dreaming the dreams we keep inside and they come out to chase me put their arms around my waist like Apollo and I become Daphne, kind to the embrace of young souls released back into the plan of the master draftsman.

I am ready to wake up.

We still have a lot of growing up to do.

Give me the chance to trace your silhouette, then mine burnish them into marble and granite,

then gently let my lips brush your fair cheek.

Under this prism of Roman light we will make love.

And if we should part let our gazes meet again in time through the stillness of statues where no one has been completely woven together before death before the moment I am taken and my every artery, my every vein becomes the silent stuff: The branches of the laurel tree The roots of our true being.

Coming to Terms with Guinevere If it was a new day, and I was a different person, I would marry you more for your hands, than your horse, more for your trees, than your cathedral ceilings.

I would wait, and I’d think about our ocean, and the rings it makes around people’s hearts, and never truly forget your strong fingers.

The symbols of a friend you can trust.

When we travel in such strong currents, I get tired of waiting and abandon my recklessness get lost at sea. Wake up.

I’ve come to terms with Guinevere.

I live in a castle, in a far away land.

I sleep with angels.

I respect my folly only when I am defiantly awake.

I follow strength, in light of chivalry.

Passion beside tragedy.

Guinevere would not give up so easily and substitute her rich wines for silly potions.

She would not cut her hair.

Chant with passion, Sister.

Leave behind those shrewish stares out of your favorite turret.

Send poetry out across the ocean on dove tails.

It will bring you peace Sister, chant.

Chant with passion -- Scream!

Bellow at the height of ecstasy.

Till your dreams disappear, till somebody turns on a light.

I Get Used to You I get used to you in so many ways, your cuddles and winks.

I get used to you in so many ways without birth, though it is birth, day by day beginnings and endings.

I get used to you in so many ways when the smile stayed on your face.

When we agreed that all we have is nothing but a tightrope, an acrobat floating, softly through the air.

Falling, fearlessly into the comfort of the net.

Slipping safely backward clinging to each other never quite balanced.

I get used to these clowns we’ve become.

Unsteady, dumb smiles on our false faces.

Now you have your circus, your audience to please.

I have only my makeup.

I cover up my fears, my longings - plus I have this fear of descending and that keeps ruining the show I never asked to perform in.

Deep Purple Hat Years slip through hands, seams Gorgeously tied together by Your fond memories Memories of the hat We bought for Althea in Mystic So many years ago.

How is it you remember It’s deep purple hue and wide brim Gone too, like you have gone To the deep places Gathered in surface values and the Surface of superficiality.

I have all I need somehow In the comfort of nothing – We shared Not things, or places We shared the places that scare you: the nothing, the pauses in between The should have been, the spaces that grow Where we should have breathed life into the dead corpse of us Lying out there somewhere in that purple hat You somehow remembered After forgetting the me The me that stands in front of you now, with deep hazel eyes slowly Turning green and back to a softer gaze, The pauses linger, humble and proud, without you.

Sicilian Girl She moves in a way that is me without the pressure.

My embrace firm, while hers flows in and out of everyone.

Sicilian Girl.

Girl. Never a woman.

Trying hard to grow up she dressed up did what she was told Be a buisness maker, Homemaker, baby maker.

Make a behind-the-scenes fortune, While fine tuning your stage whisper.

Softer, softer, softer...

We don’t want anyone to hear you, girl.

This game is more hide, than seek but you found me called me abstract and idealistic.

For you girl, there are no Maxwell Smart doors opening effortlessly no fearless strut, and certainly no siesta.

You were born below the line to kneel and pick up the feet of the covetous chromosomes so they can be seen high above the olive trees.

This is heavy work and they are big shoes I carry.

Fuck. My hands hurt and my chest.

My heart. my heart hurts from crossing myself without a church The church you never gave me...

And now the pale girl reflects.

I am QUIET now, and with no screaming or hurting, I laugh a thousand times.

This is an old Portuguese trick I practice in pencil thin heels so high that I don’t need a lift to see over the heads of a million more Men.

Nantucket Sleigh Ride Colic is a Nantucket Sleigh ride.

The child we wanted so badly has taken us for this ride.

Like the sea in stormy weather you cry endlessly for hours, then stop.

A cool breeze refills my lungs as I keep watch, looking for silent signs: a blink, a fluke, a yawn, a spout, Dreaming child, are you breathing amongst ebb and flow?

Three months old and still you writhe in my arms, back as straight as a plank.

The day you were born a sharp, glinting, harpoon of pain burst from my uterus and in no less than twenty-two hours you entered our world.

And still you sail on ... pulling hard on the rope and arrow, parting the seas with your cries.

Leviathan, you ache to be back from where you came.

Separated you are from us by your former sea of embryonic fluidnow flotsam, and twisted, limp, hemp.

Mates we are to you child floating above the turbulent waters comforting your cries, constantly riding the waves one by one, when they break our spirit as we search for the holy beast that I created

out of nothing.

Seven Year Gestation I now see the clear marks on my heart, when a variety of tall, dark men become a status symbol, I shall soon repossess.

I am the other woman, without consummation.

I have woke in a feast of men who have done no more than held my hand in their imagination.

And then there is you.

Together, along the coasts, we found bases to float on.

I descended slowly, on a rocky shore, forcing the thought of you, out of me.

Shivering with the fear of losing grip of the third in my line up.

The one with the most in common.

The one, for whom, I would surely post bail, if I had my old collateral of lovely letters and a cheap cassette.

I gave them up- innocently.

In a locked box, they expanded like an ulcer, till I had no use for them.

And I abandoned my cancer in a garbage bin behind Rockbottom in 1991 and a fifty-fifth street incinerator in 1995.

But a scrap of evidence remains, a poem, also expanding, in the dark, heightened by the technology that keeps me, in touch with you.

To punish myself with memories is shameless.

How soon one forgets the multiple marriages and coined phrases on index cards.

I leave this to you.

My worry.

My compensation for this poem.

So that I may arrive safely with our child.

This poem is our child.

It is my turn.

Walk up the Hill Walk up the hill Greenwich Lumberjack I know not where you sleep tonight or even where you came from but that you play with my tiny hands in your big fist with a nervous twitch that has a comforting rhythm.

Why walk in my direction or I in yours between book stacks and The Rooms so crowded I’d never fit in.

You drift off into a very full and empty space A space filled with silence this we both understand somehow I want to call it Shunyata but it is only a wooden vase porous and angled that you have the potential to craft so beautifully, if whole.

Here is my vessel empty it, fill it, empty it again and again over a lifetime.

May you fill this vessel with our own hands, our minds, our bodies with a purer liquor so sweet it is beyond temptation.

Keep the Scarf “Keep the scarf.” was typed from somewhere on a tiny keyboard.

In mere hours, you don’t leave things to keep you find the time to forget mostly, other people.

It is easier now to be thoughtful about the____________ genius who is getting to know my curves.

I see it is taking years for him to understand what takes me only a moment when wrapped in cinnamon green tea fumes on a December morning.

Now I’m stuck in circumstance.

There is more loot to examine.

The vigor of my closets is Blooming once again with detailed directions back to every lovely being of which I have had gorgeous plans of rapture.

Dear Scarf; To you I might do any one of the following: Keep you in a box Leave you on the chair for a month Gather you to my silent throat Tag you, embellish you, as my own I may even count the cat hairs.

Preservation, this I do well in the shadow of the full moon.

The same moon that waxes and wanes until the suitor realizes if you leave a piece behind - beware I may not leave your being.

Man on a Motorcycle To be honest It all started with noise: A red car minus a muffler A guitar, a stereo duck-taped into a trunk The difference: Noise embraces me like music I listen I add to the composition.

Less disturbance most of the time More expression, at best.

Truth be told: This man on his new motorcycle Embraces me like all sorts of clouds: Bright and dark, soft and sullen Pure and rich in tone Not much commotion.

I was floating, looking up all the time.

Becoming sky, not sound.

An ocean could take me away Instead, it was all these clouds

Appearing everywhere.

I reel them in: Put them on paper Walk in rainstorms, and under rainbows.

Float, drip, soak, absorb, and hope to dissolve.

I forget sometimes to look up Start floating again among the Cumulus.

We are soft you and I – right?

Through hailstorms, vapors, whatever the metaphor‌ Regardless of volume, damage, speed

We are soft: You and I and

we are The Sky.