BLUE
 

She must have been there
the morning my daughter was born,
blue in the windows;

the narrow glass in the hospital walls
let in her pale spring light.
She hides in the forget-me-nots in the wallpaper,

flutters in the doctors’ and nurses’ dull medical gowns,
glints in the metal of the scissors that cut the cord.
Her threads embroider the bloody placenta.

She tints the newborns’ eyes with her cyan hand,
for babies come from her inside-out world.
She is in the spit against the evil eye.

When I’m blue I close my eyes and see her light
coming from the Greek island in my brain
where sunflowers crook their necks, weary of time,

their wild hair burning in the sky of her wide mind.
I float naked in her color, the sea
hums in my ears, lulling me

like a baby kicking in amniotic waters.
Her throne is a transparent bowl,
a star-sapphire studded cradle of waves.

She must make love on silk sheets of air.
She must have blue skin and eyes,
her breasts amply squirting milk,

lapis lazuli looped in strands and strands
around her arms and her rounded belly.
Peaceful blue, luminous blue, keep my daughter safe.

See, she splashes her little feet in the Aegean,
reaches her hands into sky. I hug her dry
in a towel deep blue as Mary’s timeless robes.

 

THE TRAIN TO THE MILLENNIUM
 

I got an uptown train to the end of the twentieth century.
All my lovers were there, grim as hell, hair spiked with fire,

sexier than sex. I wanted to feel their life-blood strain forward
in the palm of my hand, dig shiny black high-heels into their asses

and make them scream. All my friends were laughing,
our reflections floating in the windows—over brick tenements,

warehouses, garbage, sad smashed cars in junkyards, slag-heaps,
the mowed lawns and token trees of tract homes.

I wanted to love them with my tongue as I never had before.
All the children I never had, all their friends, all my friends’ children

ran down the aisles and climbed over the seats, calling out new words,
sweet and cool as apple juice slipping down my throat.

All my family, all my teachers rode with me to the end of the line,
to the enormous station where the tracks stopped,

where windows rose five stories and opened
to a field uninterrupted by the human, to the big peachy afternoon sun,

the new moon above like an ironic smile.
All our dogs were there among the cone flowers and cosmos,

retrieving calendars and dropping them at our feet.
All my students were stoned, milling about, taking in the fractured

station window light, not demonstrating, looking just like those who did.
All the TVs were stacked against a wall, turned on and tuned in

to different channels, entrancing our retinas with the past:
“Beavis and Butthead,” “Bewitched,” warclips, a boot to a head.

All the typewriters and computers, the obsolete and state of the art,
hung out against the opposite wall, ready to light up, bring on

the next sentence. “Fuck the world!” I called out,
like the crazies on the street below my apartment in San Francisco,

“It’s over! The end!” Then I thought, it’s the middle not the end,
just another day, and all my friends became strangers carrying briefcases,

women in long coats and white tennis shoes,
kids feeling their bodies under black leather.

“Goodbye,” I said to no one. “Goodbye,” I said
to the trains moving away on infinite tracks,

heavy with their own weight of steel, their load of people,
newspapers, umbrellas, sandwiches, memory.

WITH WALT WHITMAN ON THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY

 

What is more subtle than this which ties me to the man
or woman that looks in my face?

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning
into you?

I sat at ease with Walt on the ferry,
and let my knee lean against his thigh.

An expert in corn flakes, he slipped his hand between wax paper leaves,
infused the cock on the box with iridescence,

found a true word for every crunch,
and blew the words in kisses onto the lips of the crowd.

I guided his hand under my skirt
which was scripted with the looping calligraphy of the city.

He kindly fingered my crack with one hand,
unbuttoned the brown wool of his trousers with the other.

And as I arched to meet him,
he hooked his head on my shoulder, breathing in my ear,

“Jesus Kennedy—Jack Christ—
your social memory began in 1963,

with equal parts dread and ecstasy,”
and I saw my boot on the sidewalk, the bright hopscotch chalk,

the November leaves blown against the fence,
heard the kids calling out, “The President’s dead!”

Walt and I knelt on a bed of newspapers,
moaning the holy names, shuddering with the ferry engine,

as the statue of liberty, Ellis Island, and the Jersey skyline
floated by with mercury-lighted clouds.

And when it was over, he eyed the grapefruit mounds
of young men’s asses, hoisted his bag of books,

and melded into the crowd, into Manhattan.
I followed, staring hard into the place

where Walt Whitman had been,
where yellow flashes of taxis curved by Battery Park

and the lighted windows of skyscrapers stretched
disembodied into the heavenless night.

BATHING JESUS

 

If he were a word made flesh I would want to wake him from his godliness
and wash his godliness from him as I bathe his feet in my laughing tears
and dry them with my heat and hair and anoint the topography of his head
with euphoric oil
and comb his beard with electric fingers and pull his face close to mine
to see the multitudes in the pores in his skin, God’s intricate human
handiwork in his cheek.
Jesus would see the flame in my eye burning in time’s skull, deep as the first
breath that lighted the Milky Way.
I would pull the shirt from his shoulders and the shirt from mine
until our garments lay on the floor, cloth lungs pulsing
with the curtain’s white muslin and the little breezes
coming in the window, everything alive,
even the wood floor under our feet warm with the oak’s broad and
branching spirit.
I would pour warm water on his back and thighs and wake the man in him,
wake his hand reaching for my flushed and water-slicked arm, his palm
singeing the place below my collarbone,
make him taste each word on my tongue, each complex mix of sweet
and bitter and sour and salt
and make him sing out from his body, the lips, the tongue, the throat,
the heart, the blood, all the traveling heats of flesh. Praise them.
 

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