To be in this world, ask:

what draws the body?

 

Some found object—

not of man’s making

 

but more natural and

bearing its own light:

 

Ansel’s sand dunes caught

in a black-and-white tango.

 

That’s it—the passionate

restraint, the rhythm of

 

a drawn line disappearing.

The artist’s lens said as much

 

about manipulating shadow,

equating deft fingers stroking

 

ebony and ivory with finessing

nuance, framing the rapture.

 

Is this the essential dilemma

driving us to love in the end?

 

 

 

 

 

just a year after the Summer of Love

when my yellow Mustang was designed

for more than the Sunset Strip, we drove

past Santa Monica’s pier, the Colony

and our curfew.  We floored it, then

parked by the moon and the grunion.

 

We brought along a flask of Mount

Gay rum, but it wasn’t enough.

I don’t remember the name of my make me

wanna shout or whether he or the automatic

gear ripped through my scanties.  What

do I remember?—the drifter—his eyes grave

 

as unnamed planets; his breath piercing

the fog outside our fogged-up windshield;

his mouth, greedy and toothless as he

drooled for what we all want:  to grapple

with flesh.  Even now, I hear his laugh—

raucous—raw as a raven’s.

 

 

 

 

 

All his volleyball of language,

 

the spiraling outward

of its giddy-up—

 

wordplay?

It can’t hold a candle

 

to his tongue

in my earbox,

 

his hand deeply into

my pocket of thighs

 

even when mute me—

blank page—disappears

 

into candle-light        beneath

less than          until—

 

*

 

He failed, of course,

to take

what should be

taken daily;

 

almost took me,

me of the trembling breast,

one small fist closed

around a homicidal pen.