you ask me how they keep walking
the Peace walkers
walking all the way from San Francisco eta
to Moscow
their message is too beautiful for me to encompass
in a poem
GOOD NEWS!
But as a metaphor let me point
to that long-legged woman over there
she's pregnant in shorts and sneakers
her bunched veins
like blue hyacinth petals or berry scratches
& she wears a nice cool peppermint striped blouse
well, now she's walking heavily from one side of
this small playground to the other
in the sun
I approach with such
a careful tremor, always
I feel the finally foolish
once in a rented room on
27th street, the woman I loved
then, literally, after we
had made love on the large
bed sitting across from
a basin with two faucets, she
had to pee but was nervous,
embarrassed I suppose I
would watch her who had but
a moment ago been completely
open to me, naked, on
the same bed. Squatting, her
head reflected in the mirror,
Swinging
behind her
swinging behind
is swinging
behind her
like a lantern
her swinging
behind.
O what a woman
what a beautiful woman!
a beautiful woman:
with eyes of bayou sea bathing
serene in green April dreaming.
O what a woman!
what a beautiful woman:
Beauty her knee-flurried motion
walking with pure wizard lightfeet.
See in her hair the loud sunlight!
See on her cheeks the proud lovelight!
And on her lips the pink kiss.
She is April-May girllike sunflower,
She is pearl of the sunlightning face,
with voice of lullaby midnight
softly shifting to caressing consent.
I figured that some degree
of evaporation could be
expected
even in cool twilight
turning my collar up
and buttoning the last button
Defiantly she slipped her
step-ins off twirling them
on her finger
there's a weather map
she said, at the bus station
I remember distinctly
low barometric pressure
is predicted for the Northwest
portion
I figured, I admitted, something
I never saw you
Young and trembling
In Arkansas stooped
Over sharecropperlike
Making buttermilk for
Your fierce husband
But I loved you deeply
In the squalor of
Northern California
When you were old
And full of Jesus. . .
If there were another world: orange skies and
purple flowers; tall languorous women
waiting behind the bouganvillias, each with her own dark voice
to send those low calls toward the night;
and huge birds, bigger than ponies.
soaring through the crimson skies; with bloodstone plumage
and shadowy wings making windstorms as they passed.
and a soft succulent silence,
and the low drifting calls of tall women,
waiting behind the lattices; and piles of oranges in the
streetstalls, piled higher than the houses,
mangoes, melons, pineapples: all the sweet clear acid orange;
and coconuts, and rich dark beer;
canaries, mockingbirds and parrots jangling in the patio;
For me/ even for me
Who cant say a word to them;
there is, wherever I stand
a woman, in front of me
even a violet, or a bunch of ants is, for me. (I conspire with them)
and I touch her, my
hand a bamboo rake.
Now we stopped looking
to be excused. You
have said it.
You who shrug
the flesh, for
all it's worth.
Woman: stroked
to a fine
cross-hatched plan.
The guts of it!
to take each
thread and loose it.
I can take
the grabbing vines
and slapping branches.
But this!
one leg shorter
she walked into me early
Slowly the night blooms, unfurling
Flowers of darkness, covering
The trellised sky, becoming
A bouquet of blackness
Unending
Touched with sprigs
Of pale and budding stars
Soft the night smell
Among April trees
Soft and richly rare
Yet commonplace
Perfume on a cosmic scale
I turn to you Mandy Lou
I see the flowering night
Cameo condensed
Into the lone black rose
Birch tree, you remind me
Of a room filled with breathing,
The sway and whisper of love.
She slips off her shoes;
Unzips her skirt; arms raised,
Unclasps an earring, and the other.
Just so the sallow trunk
Divides, and the branches
Are pale and smooth.