Theory of Light

She pulls herself into
her blue sun, a dying star.
She has colonized the world on film
as surely as she beat her father out of a coma
with a plastic hair brush.
She will die and awaken in this spiral of storm-eye:
The kidnapped daughter reunited with her mother,
the young girl learning Laotian dance
in the hopes of winning the Junior Miss title,
the hundred suns rising and falling like
pelting molten rock.
The stones, too, spiral,
as surely as she sleeps on the sofa
and leaves the bedroom window open
long before her husband makes it home.
One by one the suns blink out.
Only a million more to go.

Road Trip To The Upper Peninsula

You will drive to the green place,
through the clouds over Michigan
and the purple lightning of Lake Huron.
You will drive
through the places of country songs:
Saginaw. Bay City. Kalamazoo.
You will go far, and you will win,
but it began here, in your room in Lowell,
by night, in the glare
of yellow lights through a dimmed screen.
Gone, your license, gone your
nowhere.
And found, your messenger,
a girl of numbers and letters.
Drive
she said
(numbers and letters
and the soft face of a gray screen)
drive 

Divine Love

Jupiter storm eye,
scarlet dervish,
turn to me, with your
arms of vapor.
Turn to me, shattered god world,
scarred by the comet of demon number,
and clinging to sixteen soloists  
Europa, Callisto, and others
and still others.
In them and in you
I could become
a whole body.

Black-eyed Susans

They rise from the fever of pollen,
from the sleep of a long year
by the roadside.
They exhale a haze of yellow,
like the rings of a lost planet
and parting
of earth.
They are the mile marker of the day's drive
into the haze and gossip
of a lost city.

Luna Moths

Cover me with your linen,
green, pale, the light
in this thicket of sleep.
We turn together, folded over
each other, in moistened threads,
never freed, only knowing:
those wings, those eyes.
Knowing, and knowing
are myour soft bodies,
your feathered head dresses,
brushing and tasting the air and all:
Salt,
night,
and the purple dawn
that cannot wake us.

 

The Dumb's Supper

We break bread and silence.
A woman has died, a poet's daughter,
who left you on hold long distance to Seattle
while she foraged for your horoscope.
Still, you would break bread with her
and all her enemies at one table,
let her bore her guests
with her one good story:
the time she met her father.
Now, commended to the earth and the front page,
she makes me break my silence with you.
And when we break bread,
we'll utter the names of those
getting in line behind her.
We break bread and silence
with our made-up psalm:
"Spare them the white rooms and
the tubes of ooze
lurching uphill toward their hearts.
Grant them the flowered curtain,
the humid breeze,
the dimmed lights,
the voices downstairs
ours, talking of theirs."