Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

from Self

• 48 from Self from Part i. the jour naL oF aLbion moonLiGht We go out into the world to find our face. —rainer maria riLke 10. the meaning of no Self I hide my face, the front of my body too yin shot through by spears of light The universe bears down to get through my shoulders stooped, my head feathers At my sex my left hand holds the structure that holds the sun I am overlit, over exposed. The three-headed dog yelps and dances at my heels I am dread penetrated by wheat —For Diane di Prima, the Hermit card • 49 from Part ii. PSyche driveS the coaSt 2. “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” (bertoldt brecht) In a lounge in Seaside she takes shelter in the music of her parents. She walks into their darkness, a theatre. Their eyes keep to the screen of her body. It’s true. She sees it too. She’s lived the great tragedies of their time. Sometimes she can’t change fast enough. The bartender bends to her, honey then reels. A woman is a sometimes thing. Wanders into the wrong room. Her parents’ bedroom as a child. He asks her to marry him, saying the deep anguish in your eyes speaks pages of dialogue. But it grows dark. Fishing lights bob way out. Her husbands signaling her, who might know her. One more tune at their windows, she lets go a girl crying in their arms. Then leaves her face behind. Goes back out. The sea loud. Goes down the road. 3. Sleep: the i in Language The deer startled as if by cedar and my light • 50 the stillness. the water. the light the enormity of being, these trees their trunks. My womb turns over the quiet. the dark. the density. the depth the presence. the dark. the light in the density of the forest my body contracts. Turns over a million stories. A million Is in the proud waters of Loulan the hands of men inside 5. the God comes out of your mouth, california A half moon so large at the play. We are thankful it’s not full over the ominous land. Said. It’s all turning to. She writing so still Meditation of the world’s vast Memory. Then the waters overwhelmed us. The stream had gone over our soul. We are thankful it’s not full over the land of Love. This myth. Almost said. it’s purple. turning political Then the political waters had gone over our soul over this loving land, turning purple so still • 51 It’s death to souls to become water but our soul is escaped as a bird out of our mouths. Solidifies his Castle high in the Empyrean, Hearst printing the myths these Cows of Heaven, the most pelicans I’ve ever seen prehistoric purple on the currents of each other and the wave, uncovered in the prehistoric city of Loulan some ancient minority, enormous throats of Blondie in her piety graying the troughs of the northern rim Meditation on the world’s vast Memory . . . —SuSan howe ...