The Clumsy Venus
Fallen on her ass,
heels click the sun,
and all the boys cry ‘love me!’
Drops her tray,
spills her wine,
and all the waiters whisper ‘marry me!’
Slops the soup
down her blouse,
the maître d’ smiles ‘you’re the one!’
Ticket-loser,
key-fumbler,
glass-smashing clod:
and all the men sigh ‘be my love’.
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Preparing For Battle
Depilation, loofah, douche.
So clean, the Pope could eat
his dinner off my body.
I rinse my hair in cold water
till it shines like Mercury’s belt.
I have selected my armor:
stockings, brassiere, and panties,
with a tint of blue aurora
to lubricate the black,
and even I am aroused, as my skin
glides from naked to nude.
The lipstick is so red it’s black.
I lift the candle to the mirror,
practicing a half-smile of contempt.
I buff my long nails to a staccato tap,
testing here an erotic cluster of notes,
here a sadistic harmony.
My jacket is the green silk of Indochine,
my blouse little more than mist.
My skirt hugs my hips like a rapist
or a child, sighs like a willow when it’s lifted.
The first move shall be his, and then:
no mercy, no quarter, no terms
but unconditional surrender.
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These Difficulties
We live in different metaphors,
my lover and I, and make love
through a blind interpreter.
When his lighthouse flares its proud
light across the stormy bay
I use dynamite to topple it,
hiding it away in my rose-lined tunnel.
The sparks of his desire
make the pages of my open book
rustle in alarm, till I hiss them out
with tears of joy, passionate sweat.
His typhoon kisses knock my doll-
house into matchsticks and I curl
like the moon till ocean lures him
back offshore.
My garden can’t survive his catapults
and withering enfilade nor can his python
do other than slither slack
in the cathedral of my embrace.
He skis along my melting glacier
and puts on dark glasses
when my sun goes down.
His supernova roars across my spider web,
the compass spins as his arctic poles
grab at my equator’s thin waist.
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The Bright Room
In the bright room
I gorged myself on details.
The bumps on the wallpaper
where the glue laid welts;
a glass bowl filled with red marbles,
brilliant as cherries on ice;
the diamond panes reflected on the ceiling,
swollen and lengthened by the dragging sun.
There is a fish in the pond,
a horse in the wheat,
a tapestry the length of a tennis court.
From the window of the bright room
I can see them all:
they implore me not to leave out
a single thing.
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My Dear
A white dress,
unbuttoned to the navel,
for my tour
of the salmon fishery.
Rubber boots,
from toe to crotch,
as I slip the rounds
of the glue factory.
My mother’s sewing machine,
taut on its leash,
here in the kingdom of needles.
‘Are you looking for Love
or the foreman, my dear?’