Where the road tilts away
everything
moves toward itself
at once

Here
I am a watercolor figure
shades of blue pool at my feet
and blossoming from hands
form a limp umbrella

I fall from me until
I am the road I walk on

On God

I've been thinking about religion. Not the philosophy of religion -- although I am very much interested in that, I don't think it matters much. It all comes down to belief anyway, which is a single pearl, not a chain, and always threaded onto a leap of faith, however short or long that thread may be.

So I don't seek to prove that it is or is not plausible to believe in a God. Instead I ask, what is it about the concept of God that makes people want to believe in him?

I think it's because of this. God is some people's Mozart.

He is their Michelangelo, Aristotle, Einstein. What T.S. Eliot is to the poet, God is to his followers. We are human; we idolize, we follow, we worship. We have to see in our minds the figure we aspire to become; it keeps us moving forward, protects us against the thought that unlike these great figures, we are not here for a reason. We hold their ideas in our minds like statues, talismans -- but we are always looking for something better. Sooner or later worshipers of Eliot will discover Ashbery; people who are still in awe over Einstein will hear about M-theory and it will be all over.

Here is where the religious differ -- nothing, they say, is so great as God.

I want to know how true they are being to themselves. Or is this an ultimate truth us lesser people are still seeking? Is God at the top of some philosophical ladder we can't climb, made too heavy by our ideological baggage? Is it the other way around? Is Mozart some people's God? Something we feel we have to settle for in his stead?

Unraveling Oranges

I only tried to paint life like a
still life – still
that week’s fingers peeled the skin off of
my reasoning, ripped
segment from segment with the rustle
of new pages, made me swallow each day
scrunched into pulpy gold and dribble
one lost drop on my history.

I remember thinking,
this must be what it is like
to eat the sun. And
you’d have thought it was summer.

It was a lost cause.

I blame
Forster’s concern with beauty,
the woof between the warp
and
the way Woolf
put it as a force
or snippets thereof.

My brush was (mis)guided thus.
I didn’t map
money or class – that would take a pencil, where
I only had the lineless
splash of aesthetics,
the tangled
overlap of threads,
a vague lack of distinction.

Of course
none of that mattered, since the subject was
all undone in the end.

Sweet God, what was
that boy’s name?
To this day, I remember him only
in shades of safety and warning, a
metaphysical ray –
unrhymability wrapped in the
saffron robes I didn’t know, a burning of
my former self,
and the instinctive pulse of hunger
that peeled my soul in a single,
snakelike coil.

To whom it may concern:
you said there was a difference
between love and hate,
but I have watched that difference unravel into
a single thread, and devour itself
like an orange.

My Winter

Who says
horizons separate earth|sky?
A horizon divorced me from my self
with a faultline so thin something
           must confine its curvature
                    for MY perception:

                    (jigsaw pieces) (leaves of paper) (lips)

Like – folds.
Like – creases.
There it is.
Tinfoil and its
aluminum counterpart: an absence
in disguise,
If I’d been protected by this
unpatented derision.
[I know not because
I wasn’t always so
distracted.]

On the phone this morning my mother asks
TELL ME AGAIN WHAT YOU’RE WRITING?
On paper this morning the other me asks
WRITE ME AGAIN WHAT YOU’RE TELLING?

I can’t tell what I don’t know.
Statues can’t see what they feel under their
snow cloches and
smock-frocks but the
winter still changes them.

It’s
Irrevocable.

I suppose I should review the syllabi
they gave me when I learned to speak – there are some things I’m
supposed to say
before I blend the horizons and join
the great congregational escape
from sin and the English language,
where “the same” is really a noun (and
logically an object
of parasitic existence)
no intrinsic identity, no
essence except it’s name and I say
think
but the truth is always there.
The truth is always there and I surround myself with
concentric circles
and things that blink while they’re sleeping,
stamp words over abstractions like
indefatigable hoofbeats
in a race against
space.
Meanwhile, what I call my
horizon
is merely wire stretched between my poles,
drooping under the weight of too many miracles perched like
sparrows on the line
of what I
impudently
call

…mine.

Insufficience, Part Deux

[that was then]


Now
HIBERNATION
the carousels are sleeping. Our
breasts glow blue in the light of another
liquid crystal display.
I wanted this.
equation ^ eradication ^ exclusion ^
like we could all equate/eradicate/exclude
an epiphany
that belonged to someone
else.

What do you know of
cross-linkage and the
doe-eyed glance?

Tell me again about

(snow)

(blood)

(feather)

(bones)

the I-it-I-thou question
pulls me you-me-ward
and for once, the moment believes in itself

              write this down
              between lines you’ve already read

minus     I only listen to sandstone
(waiting for
another exchange in memoriam)
and minus     I only cross-hatch lives with broken
charcoal. Of course
I haven’t any proof;
I only cross-hatch other lives
with bits of pencil from the math lab like we could
all be graphed
while
X≠Y | I=I              x is not equal to y given that i is equal to i meaning
I AM

(even if we are not)
…the same

But I can’t dedicate enough to your prototype.
What was
first and last        is only motion and time
                          explaining illusion.

Language is an act with consequence.

and the way you wait for stone to speak,
I watch lines for
== something ==
to appear
in the frame of me

                      “What do you know of
                       me after all?”

When I was a girl I loved
fairground organs and

SEPTEMBER
full of peacockish forgettings
and the general
insufficience
of: crimson = chrome = citrine = chartreuse


s o m e t i m e s      endings
beginnings        s o m e t i m e s


[that was then]

A Poor Representation

Pockets full of free
songs
I climbed the last hour
of the year
like each rung was
three minutes long.

I know
there are never two of me
in one moment.

But you don’t see me in moments, only
years,
and you don’t know
when there are twenty me’s she won’t be
yours.

You see? When I think
of it I divide my words
into packets like
seeds.

Twenty years from now I will be
unable to graft
all the me’s together
because apples
and pears
and oranges
can’t all live on the same
tree.

Take this instant
for its own sake.

I grow only
oranges in my mind,
skin
waxy like amber
pitted like a compact disc
with potential songs I peel away
I peel apart
its segments like glowing
truths,
and they rustle
like pages of a book.

But neither of us understands
the Braille beneath our fingers –
not being blind
keeps us from seeing
so much.

And, sitting between the tree of
life and the tree
of knowledge, I eat oranges
like something grown in place of
the world.

Katie

If I am
my name,
I am.

I am hung from the loose threads of
Hecate
knotted in the filaments of her
linguistic filiation
I am
tied
to the syllables
an alternate history to hers in
the ragged web of string
theory
I again, at another
point in space and time
like I’ve fallen
and gotten up, or fallen and
not gotten up
but let the ground level of time
sink its teeth into my (sur)face
half-hatched
from this escape, I
shout into a different shell
and let the sound of me
ricochet
off the sound of what
I have been
and
tongue sharpened
on the edge of this alteration, I slice
the syllables
like crossroads
only just a three-faced
parallel,
I can’t tell
which torches will fail, which
spheres will collapse
on the threshold
of what
I am
doomed to rooted liminality
(waiting for someone to move me)
without Hecate’s creature or Hecate’s keys
left to repeat
like a chthonic incantation
the name
I am.

Winter in Binghamton

Mr. Johnson’s carousels
(organs still mostly
intact)
house carriages pulled by the
slowness of horses
on a turntable.
Admission: free.
That is how
our winter moves,
each month ending where the last
one started,
four
horses abreast, one for
each week.

Ours only goes
in one direction, and even
if I loved you,
we aren’t
getting younger and they won’t
spin the carousel backwards.

I want to
break the connection
like this was a real horse
trailing the smell of
sweat and leather and
hay, not
paint and oil.
But I’ve invested so much
time
carving my initials in the bridle,
the saddle,
the rosettes and bared teeth,
I can’t pull my hand from the
curve of its neck. Maybe
next year
I say, wanting nothing but to
die steeplechasing.

But things like that don’t
happen in America. Even
Mary Poppins hasn’t tried
since 1910.
One thing always
leads to
itself,
on the carousel, and
it’s alright
except I wish they’d have told me
before I got on that
we all fall
still reaching for
the brass ring.

An Attempt to Become Sane

I.

Anyone can be clothed in red, anything
can be made out of blue
said the clock on the mantle,
counting
spoons of sugar and the
clockwise stir.
So what if you’re Sylvia Plath?
Everyone’s Sylvia Plath
more or less.


I can’t admit that I
drank art with my
coffee
and wore the timeline backwards.
I think it was already dead.


II.

This time,
the mirror said
your camera lied:
there is a box of clementines on the table.
Forgive me. I am a poet.
They were too good for words so
I eat tangerines now,
for the seeds.


I can’t help that
I don’t know what sfumato is
and some poet does.


III.

I think I’ll burn smokeless
this time,
said the candle
forgetting that it already had.
I’d play the piano instead, except
I hate the way
fermatas stare me down.

I can’t see music
like you do not.
I suppose I should pretend
my future is strung
across
the sounding board.


IV.

Here is something to do
without writing, and nothing says
loneliness
like going into
a photobooth alone
and making a museum of it.
I have lived in black and white,
which is more dramatic
really
than painting streetlamps in daylight.


I can’t mean anything
that you haven’t heard
already
disappearing into the vacuum
of history.
It is an exact science.


V.

You said I said child,
I am in love with the circus.
I said no such thing, except
let’s unbutton the present
and see if time is linear
or nonlinear
or nothing but
itself.

I can promise I can’t
let go of your hand
before you run
out of
ink.

Post-Colonial Theory

Don’t worry if I’m still alive. I’m
ungone, an
absent presence or
present absence
banished to the line of
my lips pressed against each other
like a line in the sand,
lips calling for allies
pressed against
their own
existence
like reassurance.

I still undo
revelations like
skin and beyond
bones,
nothing is new, just
newly superficial.

But you brandish
interpretation like a
knife,
your meanings only wounds
weeping words and
later,
you peel scabs off their scripts like they’re
your own.

What armed resistance leaps
from these pages?
Apparitions in a crowd?
The subaltern cannot be
heard
beneath the passenger trains of your empire.

Some of us cannot speak.

Don’t worry if I’m alive.

17

I've spent most of today (except for two hours this morning in which I read the entirety of Liz Rosenberg's 17 -- more on that later) writing. When I write, really write, at the expense of everything else. In the winter I shut myself up in my room all day, in sweatpants and thick socks and no makeup, huddled under a quilt. I usually forget about eating meals and surround myself instead with coffee (at the moment, my favorite -- Ja-Makin-Me-Crazy) and chocolate (another favorite right now -- dark with chili). I also get up every once in awhile to light a candle or a stick of incense. It would seem like a meaningless ritual, but it gives me a minute to clear my head and look at my work from a new perspective. I also have, within reach, a stack of books with which I have armed myself against loss of inspiration -- at the moment, a Buddhist philosophy collection, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (which I have not yet started), and the Norton Anthology of New Poems, American Hybrid. Whenever I realize I've stopped writing, I turn to a random page of one of these books, pick out a word or two, and go from there. This works really well for me, and helps me not to stop writing for more than a few minutes at a time, which I think is really important. At this point in the process, especially when I've set aside the entire day for writing, quantity is just as important as quality. The likelihood of emerging from this room at the end of the day having completed even one piece I really love is very slim, so I've got to have a lot of material I can work with later on, when I've got a moment here and there to re-read and revise.

Anyway, back to the book I mentioned earlier. This morning I read the book 17 by Liz Rosenberg, who I know is a professor at BU, although I've never had a class with her. It was alright. I expected better, but I think it was written for a teenage audience and it was published by Cricket Books, so I expect it had to be accessible enough for the mass market. It was a story about a girl named Stephanie the year she was seventeen, and how she falls in love for the first time, and also how she is coping with the sickness of her mother and her own psychological troubles. I liked the way it was written in short sections of prose poetry instead of chapters, and some of the passages were really striking. But I felt that those passages maybe stood out a little too much and that the whole book should've been as carefully crafted. I did enjoy it though, of course, or I wouldn't have finished it in two hours. I think I might like to take a class from this Liz Rosenberg sometime.

Writing

For the past few days I have been writing a poem that started out being about New Year's Eve and now seems to be about time, music, and oranges. Funny how these things turn out sometimes -- I guess this is what I love so much about the writing process. I'm always surprised at what I end up with. Anyhow, I'm still working on the first draft, so I will share it when I think it's halfway decent.

In the meantime, I've been listening to the sounds of my house at night. The shower in my room has a leaky faucet, and the water drips in almost perfect sync with the clock in the living room right beneath it. I think that's pretty special.

That clock has the best clock sound out of any clock I've ever heard. It's true. The tick-tock sound reverberates in just the perfect way, so it's rhythm has a certain soothing quality that puts me to sleep if I sit next to it for too long. In any case, it's a relaxing sound that makes the house less quiet for me, and I'm always grateful for that when I'm alone.