Nails pulled, de-
rooted from wands
bloody, no longer, in such pain
______________fingers

You I offer these
souvenirs of my plain-style.
How short, clean. How
polish-less and cuticlung--

etched remnants of skin,
still adhering. Edged
unsmooth from a recent clip
done in the tub where

evidence, shard and flight
of my dead self can be
by water caught, spiraled
to an elsewhere, not be-

come part of househeld dust.
You--

I offer you nails.
My hands, sleighted, ex-
tend away from my body
their ruined beds.

doll

doll she is in the corner-box
as if punished

her hands are running out

I wish I were not so old and her eyes
were still buttons

stains are: water tea or tear
tennis anyone? doll

cannot play
anymore she comes out

of herself like a woman
giving birth

doll's hair was once gray
yarn young doll was

old and the braid came off
to be replaced

false brunette

her third head I think
she's on now and I make her

sit watching me she is
no longer allowed

in the bed I have a husband
to instead stain

Punning on the Apocalypse

for Adam Hurtz

It's a mouth disease. On both your houses.
Divided against itself, the mouth
opens and what is inside

we have known from antiquity
is abhorrent or at least
dentata. The apocolypse is a kind

horse, or four, or simply
rides one for pleasure. It will come
no matter how fast we go or slow

or harder. Locusts will collect
in a certain place called
the locus. The road missed meets

another perpendicular. Does not continue
The apocalypse is a stopped-up dharma--
what we mean to swallow does not manifest

in our ends. We grow fat
because we hoard. I'm talking Babylonian
proportions, here. Astounding really.

Occasions are never the what we want from before or the what it is but what is made by the photograph, cameraphone, runner.

A naked man showed up on my doorstep from 1865. He said, The war is over.

Because he was naked I had a difficult time believing him, as difficult a time as I have believing in God. Today I was embraced alongside the faithful. And still many parts of me cry out to be cynical as is their nature.

Their nature I have manufactured from words and paralysis and the type of thought which follows from those places but perhaps not from a jete.

In my house three boys chattered about the snow, more important a change than anything happening now but hundreds of miles away. We do not have a yard of size. The angels possible in our yard are smallish angels, angels for everyday use, angels of bread and thread and pencils.

They could not run to the inauguration, certainly not when it's so cold, not when they would stop every few feet to stoop then scoop and pack a tight-powdery ball of white to lob at one another. The boys do this, not the angels. The angels are only the negative space where boys have lain in snow. They do not craft ice-balls, angels. They maybe should as I bet they are bored inside the perfect.

Watching the boys battle in joy I do not remember such battles. I did not have them or the ice hurt, but battle is also play. I should remember that and too to be the teacher. "Only some violence is allowed," I'll say, "Only the violence that results in pleasure for the involved." That's what I would mean but not how to say it.

I think often, Isn't everyone involved? Shouldn't battle be verboten. Left for angels with swords of ice (for I remember my Milton now, and they do fight). And I think everyone is. And also I think they are not. Like today. Some sorrow some hurt is happening and I should acknowledge it in the poem. There are such things as bitter angels, their impressions in the snow that look frighteningly like salt. Frozen there as they look back. Bitter, backwards looking angels.

There, how much better to get to this place of cynicism. Finally.

I have never sought to be a happypoet. Cup runnething--cup a runny thing. Never wanted to overflow my cups all blowsy all breasty motherearthy hippie-sort. A sport. Never ached to be a gleepoet a me-poet a poetaster all ecstatic with the universing-song and the blessings and length of days. You know, all of them.

I'm not usually all full or even half with wonderment, doublemint, bubble lishessness, slavering cuppy love, slovenly is what I think of all that goo. That honey. I was born under the sign of watergate and hate even mentioning my birth as if I matter to my poem.

I don't want to matter.

But trying to invoke the yeasty zeitgeisty thoughts I've been lately having makes me a bit of that lout the happypoet. As does mentioning boys angels and just snow. Here I am, Jenny, here I am! Do you see me? I am a guerilla poet now... breathing big and all that, running marathons one hundred and fifty three years long and ending up at the end of the day that began in a mall.

I will not embrace it. The joy.

But today the snow is soft and the white flies apart through the air. Have you noticed how white flies apart through the air?

Like ash and ironies, and all other attempts at selves and stance that cannot hold. I love my boys. I am glad this day for them.

I check the box marked Fable. Yes, I mark it, but with a short-winged symbol. This gull won't fly. I also check the box marked Love Story. This box I fill in completely with my number two. A satisfying scribble relieves me of a day's worth of graphite. In the box next to the word Allegory I put an X. I mean yes and no. All of the Above is the label beside the first box, the box above all the other boxes. I leave it blank because blank works here, I believe.

Waiting on an introduction, I am very Victorian. My silk blouse is not floral, is in fact a garish lime, camel, and chocolate stripe. I feel inexplicably Norwegian. In preparation for a sudden thing. I hope all the time to be so foreign to myself, but it is rarely real. Most of the time I wake up fumbling at the new, and make it common.

Sometimes, you are not in the war. I am always not in the war but only sometimes remember it, and remember war is bad and not far away for everyone, not even for everyone here. My son, home from school says to be sad for his kindergarten classmate, not a good friend, name not often mentioned, because his dad is in the war. Pressing, I ask, just left for? or is maybe hurt? I don't ask the worser one and my son doesn't know except in the war which he wishes hadn't been invented. I've been seeing many dead children from Gaza, and photos of Lynndie and others--our tortures too. I am outrage without outlet and then a stillness that is a sickness I think is ubiquitous. Everything is closer since yesterday, and also harder to touch. A man who choreographed for me died Saturday. For awhile I didn't know him anymore and then he said beautiful things about my work. On a page about a scholarship fund instead of flowers, it says he also wrote poems. In a piece he called "Forgetting Birthdays" I threw a fallen tiara offstage like it was meant. I would like, I think, to read some.

When I am the queen, which is a forever thing, I will offer you a satchel full of lentils. You are not good at soup but should be. I have spent years and years about the soup--trying to show you soup is an all day event. For it to be good. The lentils are only the base. You must, I will say, it is essential that you... provide other materials. These can come from any type of life. Aristocrats have sharp-nosed pigs to scavenge truffles from under molding bark in black-earth forests. Commoners use hunks of stale bread, bones from other meals. The key to a soup is time, not an herb, but the system with which we measure movement. Take a pot of water, bring it to a rolling boil. Watch to see how very long that takes. Walk away and it takes no time, you boil away half the pot and need to add more, boil again. The key to soup is understanding time. It is a lifelong assignment. I am not such a queen I would ask you to undertake the task isolate. No, together we should begin our study. Here are our lentils.

I am not an igloo. This has been established. I have never been inside an igloo. I have never built one. Igloo is a word that has been passed down to me from generations of primers. Kite is also such a word, queen and yak. The shape of an igloo is a turtleneck on a turtle whose head has been retracted, only stiff. A shirt starched with frozen. When I was in highschool a friend and I wanted boyfriends with tortoise shell glasses and black turtlenecks. Now, I would just like you to remember why me and not someone else, if there was ever such a reason. Occasionally, also, you could say so. You could say so with flowers but they're dying or apples, or by a serenade by xylophone or else by jug or saw. House might seem a warmer word then--less sharp than harm, less drab than habit.

My locks of hair held fast. My fists were tight as walnuts. I urged you not to try me, or my dog, Patience. Patience bit you, and you knew it was your own fault--a fissure down to the rocks below. I blew on the dice and rolled whether you'd live to see bottom. You did, but only for forty-five seconds. With enough skin rent, its amazing how quickly one's blood leaves the building. I said a prayer over you. I was stories and stories above. As it grew around you, the liquid outline made you seem more important. My hand, asked to run through my hair, got stuck. My hair must be too long again--or, I should comb it.

Pretend we are dead children. Dead from the air. You should have spared your mother this grief. I hold something in my hand, and it is not a hatred. Look there, between my fingers, a bit of paper has been folded into a kite. When we are older you will remember playing this way and think that the kite was about hope, also dead. The kite was not hope. The kite was because I liked that shape and that color and how I could draw my nail across the edge to make a straight, sharp crease. If I folded the crease back and forth enough times, I would not need a knife.

So, I suppose yes. Hope.

The gray day jumped up. Asked for a cigarette. Was doused with the blood of a cancer victim. She had been treated, but not well. The boyfriend was always saying, "More sugar, more sugar." We couldn't understand him because he spoke another angstrom. To measure displacement, count the number of miles from the first kiss. We open our mouth when we are born. We open our mother when we are born. From then on, she must not speak.

Pretend I am the goat. You always get to be the goat, and i want to be the goat. I want to eat anything, absolutely anything. I want to acknowledge and enjoy my feral nature. My horns. My satanesque stature. Yes, you are more the satyr, but I have the personality of a pan. And from there into the fire.

The game beckoned and you answered. Line up dots before the computer screen lines up dots. I was having a conversation. I was in the middle of loving you, but the game was scratching at your shin, asking to be lifted up and set in your lap like an injured or willful child. I acquiesce. We name the game. We christen the game Newberry, and we three are very happy together lining each other up, each before the other, before the other. I didn't know how many configurations I had, how many ways I could avoid being meaningful. Downstairs there are children who are hungry. They are hungry, but not for dinner. I was in the middle of a conversation, I was loving you.

The economies of ice cannot be regulated without loss, without trickle. Pretend I melt a little, because you charm. Refreezing in a slightly thawed position, I find my legs awkwardly weak, thoroughbreadish, uncrossed. Sublimating, I overcast us all with the threat of weather. The dark block of me is a warning to cattle to huddle together. The ground is like a brick. The salt licks are taken by the deer for imitations. They look like bits of art.

Pretend a new world. Without end pretend. Inconceivable (that word again) that the world will go on, not--at least-- as-is. Although that's often cheaper. Notice the erring. In the new world, imagine money upside-down, hoardless. Filth is really a way of saying this money is about nothing. Money is a way of showing that everything, everything is competition. Me living is in direct competition with you living. Who better who forever who more righteously-er. Perhaps we could pretend not to compete and then after awhile we would not be competing. But who, you ask, who would be able to pretend longer?