the dance

in a bucket

hum mountain
lured playfish
soft lagoon
my spool 
my spool 
my spool
my choice

oiled and solid
soiled olives
safe in a choice
sap in a bucket
more of it
watch my daughter 
show her
show her her 
undone hairdo
a locket
a silver lock of it
a key for forthwith indigo

a black stab
sallow catcalls

soap my hurt
my sliced choice
savor her

severed
herb garden
end with
west
or wet.

what won’t wash out

what won’t wash 

out is a good

stain, a charming

stain in the shape
of a nymph 

removing her

stockings.

while the gore

and guts are 

imagined lack of

the nymph with
sweet pink calves
slack on the rug 

who waits for your
also sweet stain
while you’re

busy pushing 

your face under
the rug.

buckets

push the matter making center into bucket patterns.
crafted but felt a false architect shuck her.
teachers chuckling and chewing lunch when
she is putting into buckets musical grains and
arranging the buckets in a yard where
choices will be made by gardeners
or men dressed as gardeners
with thumbs dipped in sludge
or relish while wishes were drifting
through black mesh back porch doors or
the meaning of musical bucket grains when
she who is arranging to push is hate and defeats it
when the center would be simpler un-bucketed.

bone collector

reclaim what is
not lost: your bones.
notice
desert is dry, 

but not

infertile.
lizard tails

entwine under 

red rocks
and prickly 

pears are fat 

with purple juice.
listen,
whether sweet

fruit or thirst or storm,

i am present,
your treasure

is constant,

and your love 

is you.

In the Mississippi Courthouse

The killer’s grandmother
wipes the sweat
from his forehead
with a square
of cloth.

big love or falling down the staircase

The internet is
a silver poem and I
am a darkened staircase.
Please do not unfriend me,
oh! My shining horse.
My porn habit and sober
afterthought. My big love
coming up over the hill.
My framed trying face. No,
I am not tired. I am
red, coming up
through the bud.

The Rain by Robery Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

costume play

i indulge in all crutches. the fly could not find its way. rhythm here slackjaw or obnoxiously chewing. this voice not surefooted. ankle fixation. she wrote don’t write when you can’t but i’m stumbling forth, an overloaded old mule. lift the cup, only black grains stuck to the bottom. black cheek beard. a man becomes a robot by staying still. by plugging all cords into one clenched fist. i am the mother of this fist. i am the voice that finds pattern in not-song. the dump truck hoofbeat. if you give a milk a mouse. hush crowd, wet sock. paleontologists spoonfeeding jackal pups. radiating fibrous. filamental char root. in which sifter were we left with sparkling fools? amulets and toadstools, do not let the cheap set seduce you. costume play is high art. imitation outdoes original. push your mask into mine.

carnival

hung to dry on a chinatown clothesline. graffiti nymphs giggle and paint my face with magic marker. bad books make good ladders. plastic shells go bump in a night. i am the voice of this fist. the dump truck hoofbeat. doughy matrons are my salvation. pray i fall into a bosom. soft rolls to lose my breath between. altoid dissolving in water. wool babyblanket in the piranha pond. chinese men disassemble a bed frame. spokane like a true washingtonian. red ants massage my lower back. clown, be gone. i want my belled cap back. the king and i locked ace in the basement. shooting marbles towards the open mouth of a christ-faced fish. cough up your fillings. we’ll melt all the metal we can get. skull plates and foot bolts. magnetic putty. pop the silver balloon and watch confetti fall.

eucalyptus

i am in the crook
of a climbed
eucalyptus,
pushing my
tongue into her
green cuts.