After Barthes

New website!

2006-09-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

the new consolidation: www.whatbirdsgiveup.com

love poem 08.09.05

2005-09-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm snug as a bug in a Barthes book
and you have stolen my hole collection
You put them with my mouth guard,
pictures of giraffes balanced, a dry air bear,
cottage cheese, the chewer and of course
the chewy

“All the delights of the earth”

2005-09-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

We.

Sit, laying our hands like wire.
On the table.

Wood of the moon
to touch your head.

* * *

The moon looks good on the table.
It is a holster.
You are holding it.

Your head is balled on your elbows.
And screwed through your hands.

* * *

The sun is put into a yellow edge.

They bring breads’ smelling
so forth, the table that is a fold
with two plates.

And the moon, the rust.
The rust of waited on
talk.

* * *

Your head.
And hands.

In the position of finding out
so to speak.

“We are eaters”

They bring on
pink shanks and spinach
artichokes and then
creme

* * *

Bitter Dogbane at dusk.

Apo, meaning “away from.”

Some of the time
wind is it, filling the rows,

of rows of pink and white.

In drifts shadows on
the chaparral.

I push my hand on you
and my other one.

* * *

No, on.

The sight of us going
underneath the road

The bats. Before anything
it sounds like a lot,
remote flipping.

* * *

Their tails
are split their legs are
tick-tick btw their
dark little tents
are torn and smell
so distinctive

love poem 09.08.05

2005-09-08T15:34:00.000-07:00

sitting in this hammock
is a harmonica

if you please get me
a decanter

To Be Ascetic

2005-07-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

There is a picture
of an orange tree, picture

coarse leaves, water droplets
sent-up light, the plots of oranges
in the evening that has fallen on them.

The mountains.
This little hustler
in shorts.

Regardless of it, it is burning.

You are asking
in the middle of the tree, upwards,
in its way a system

look, one orange

jigging the tine
and the thing stem
the unready
the moth

The wolf to you, like a blunt cusp
in the yellow grass;
pale and hard at dusk,
in the angled grass, the dusk,
spitting in your hair,

None are to you, are under,
the soft dirt that's dust
part-jutting root, the brush

to be beneath, the orange
on the back of the tree
that over arches,

The Heart

2005-02-12T18:11:00.001-08:00

My heart is perched on the ice water.
It has a purpose. I'm parting the swollen tips of ice,
my legs awry, the whole end of one country
in a window on the water. Night is on up
and my heart remainders with the other
material, the paper and pins.

The fish lolipop the ice and
bite flies freeze.

lit with lamps.

to the bushy tips.

My heart
starts like little fish, fish of a fin country. Lo, the
cold ones and ones biting at flies
while sea spreads like a document. At night, at night
we tightend our grip on the governor.

Laetitia

2005-02-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

The Hackneyed Water Walkers
Skim the Water Document.
They are All All. Tinily. Psalms
Said The Feelers First
Sit, then Stand, Then Against
It Synaptically. Fast. Lest They
Be In or Nothing On It.

The Dark Glasses

2005-02-12T18:09:00.001-08:00

When I cry, I place a piece of cloth over my face. At all costs. I am still a child. I bear my clothes.

Atopos

2005-02-12T18:08:00.000-08:00

When you make pork loins, you are cooking. It is the unclassifiable pork loin of you. I eat the animal you are and the animal slain, your reflection in my spoon. I eat as an affront—I’m starving. I’m fasting everything outside this room. There’s you, your miraculous pork loins, and nothing.

To love love

2005-02-12T18:07:00.002-08:00

I’m doing dishes in my bra. This is half of a sign. You lean in the doorway, so I slowly undress. Your legs are lean and white on the kitchen tiles. You are weaving your fingers, which are numerous, into this, which is not a sign. Which is lugged on the stove like a grocery bag, ordered, purporting nothing I can think of save the picture of an orange tree that sags, which has been built and lived in.

Agony

2005-02-12T18:07:00.001-08:00

It’s the great tragedy—just great. Days roll into rapturous balls with small lights inside them. He says: My first kiss felt like an ave maria. I call anything that has happened ‘once.’

Ditty ditty ditty
do we do do do

Just look at us, headless as usual, sitting around this large oak table. I’m leaning into it, elbows trembling, and you—what are you going to do? Whisper something ancient—about Oedipus, the brown stains water makes on old stones. It’s this familiar city, an old voice, arms around my waist and I want to sneak out.

-

One must enter a dream cautiously, toe-first.

What we don’t know, for instance, is like a skin.

I see you doctored around the eyes—your entire face falling into the eyes. And in between your index and middle fingers: The Smallest Camera Ever. I need only breathe.

Trees smudge the windshield to no avail—they are simply taking place.

The dogs in our eyes roll over.
They are too small
to be our babies. Too unpaid.
They just lay around the world for a while.

When we say ‘that’s beautiful’ we mean ‘I’m sick with it.’
Never the bride. Andy Warhol white. Just get on with it.

The Tip of the Nose

2005-02-12T18:07:00.000-08:00

You are a good man (just a good man).

"Adorable"

2005-02-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

I have a crow. A dumb one that all the sudden likes to talk. Love like it’s dinner he says.

Black snow is impossible so don’t even try it. Squawk, squawk.

The bird is a small version of my ex-husband—the one who held me like an overcoat, spouting “adorable! adorable!”

I remember the water all over my shoes.

The crow likes to go places under my blouse. When the engine gets going, it’s all-nite neon signs and big slugs of vodka. There’s a hole in my chest where the fondle throttles. He plays my hair like a harp—I do karaoke numbers.

I have a beautiful voice. It puts footprints on the ceiling. Mash record or play—you can chorus me, etc.

My secret eats worms I drop down my bra—I call him ‘Yesterday.’

He chirps: A field is the perfect form, so I dance too. I dance fields shimmering in Nebraska. Yellow wheat, white dust—the grass frisking itself. I tie the stalks end to end and shimmy down the window.

‘Yes,’ sometimes, for short.

I am engulfed. I succumb.

2005-02-12T18:03:00.001-08:00

I have your head to think
about, your hairy legs—when
I open those

Your job, too. It opens
at your belly, oxford shirt;
your skin

The snow goes off nothing even
walking the white line
home, drunk or enormous,

the railway station we make out of
the projects, and dogs between
the trees. Going with you in-
to the kitchen the cats turn

white as remainders
and lick the pits of snow off