Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine
And everything on the hair
of starting again.
The girl
spills the half-gallon of milk on the floor.
The milk is all over the floor, the table,
the chairs, the books, the dinner, the windows
—Mother and son are gone happy.
The father to work.
The sister to marriage.
The girl is still spilling
the milk-house
white negative shining
out of one life into another life.
Mother
in your white dress
your smoke
your opaque eye
you whose name
my foot
wrote
I had to die
break the rope
push through the stone fence
of you, of myself, and fly
Eighteen
Green bookbag full of poems
I leaned with my bicycle
at the black brick edge of the world
What was I, to be lost
or found?
My soul in the corner
stood
watched
*
Girl and boy
we had given each other
| we wanted | breasts |
| bellies | hair |
| toenails | fingernails |
| hair | nipples |
| foreskin | foreskin |
| heart |
*
I gave up signing in
to the night book
little notes in time
signing our names
on the train's engine car
gray 19th century Irish men
in our gray stiff clothes
“She Sang”
Save the goat of humanity!
She started out
shot through with love books
She chose closed hearts
those she knew
would not kill her
Save her memory her bones
dig under the house
dig near home
here at the X in the mouth of the house
the shell shocked woman all her bones
goat bones
A Bone Standing Up
A bone standing up
she worked for words
word by word
up Mt. Fear till
she got to her name: it was
“She Sang.”
The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns
Talking with Mary about 1972:
like a needle
through my 25-years-
older breast my years thinner rib: 1972:
a child-life
away from my children:
“but you couldn't have been different
from the way you were”
but I would to have been different
Out in a sailboat
Out in a sailboat with the warden
he says so-and-so weighs 95 lbs. now
says she slept with him
because he was kind
when she was in prison
She woke up
hypnotized
A wonderful boat
She woke up
walking with the homeless
on a plank
no red schlock rope
I came to you
I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence of this world no, not the world, not reticence, oh
Lord Come
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground.
*
Cousin
The erotic brown fedora on the desk:
the erotic silver watch from your father's time
balanced on its thin hinged silver lid
on the Teacher's Desk:
Once or twice, someone comes along
and you stand up in the air
and the air rises up out of the air:
One leaf
then branches
stood up in the sun consuming
—Cousin, it was happiness on earth.
The Very Bad Horse
The very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. —The Buddha
My first own home
my big green “bed-sit”
in London, in 1956
double bed green spread
sixpence coin-fed gas fire
London fog huge little footsteps
TOK TOK TOK
I knew three people
and three more at work
I knew you
I felt around in the dark for Life
and you I picked myself up by the hair
four stories up and dropped me
—Still I wouldn't budge.
Once
Once there was a woodcutter,
when he asked me to marry him
the woman in the grocery store said
You look like you lost your last friend.
First