Spring in Hell and everything’s blooming.

I dreamt the worst was over but it wasn’t.

Suppose my punishment was fields of lilies sharper than razors, cutting up fields of lies.

Suppose my punishment was purity, mined and blanched.

They shunned me only because I knew I was stunning.

Then the white plague came, and their pleas were like a river.

Summer was orgiastic healing, snails snaking around wrists.

In heat, garbage festooned the sidewalks.

Old men leered at bodies they couldn’t touch

until they did. I shouldn’t have laughed but I laughed

at their flesh dozing into their spines, their bones crunching like snow.

Once I was swollen and snowblind with grief, left for dead

at the castle door. Then I robbed the castle and kissed my captor,

my sadness, learned she was not a villain. To wake up in this verdant field,

to watch the lilies flay the lambs. To enter paradise,

a woman drinks a vial of amnesia. Found in only the palest

flowers, the ones that smell like rotten meat. To summon the stinky

flower and access its truest aroma, you have to let its stigma show.

You have to let the pollen sting your eyes until you close them.

“...because in the dying world it was set burning.”

                                                            —Galway Kinnell

We are not making love but

all night long we hug each other. 

Your face under my chin is two brown

thoughts with no right name, but opens to

eyes when my beard is brushing you.

The last line of the album playing

is Joan Armatrading’s existential stuff, 

we had fun while it lasted.

You inch your head up toward mine

where your eyes brighten, intense, 

as though I were observer and you

a doppled source. In the blue light

in the air we suddenly leave our selves

and watch two salt-starved bodies

lick the sweat from each others’ lips.

When the one mosquito in the night

comes toward our breathing, the pitch

of its buzz turns higher

till it’s fat like this blue room

and burning on both of us;

now it dies like a siren passing

down a street, the color of blood.

I pull the blanket over our heads

about to despair because I think

everything intense is dying, but you, 

you, even asleep, hold onto all

you think I am, more than I think, 

so intensely you can feel me

hugging back where I have gone. 

For years had anyone needed me

to spell the word commiserate

I’d have disappointed them. I envy

people who are more excited

by etymology than I am, but not

the ones who can explain how

music works—I wonder whether

the critic who wrote

that the Cocteau Twins were the voice

of god still believes it. Why not,

what else would god sound like.

Even though I know better, when I see

the word misericordia I still think

suffering, not forgiveness;

when we commiserate we are united

not in mercy but in misery,

so let’s go ahead and call this abscess

of history the Great Commiseration.

The difference

between affliction and affection

is a flick, a lick—but check

again, what lurks in the letters

is “lie,” and what kind of luck

is that. As the years pile up

our friends become more vocal

about their various damages:

Won’t you let me monetize

your affliction, says my friend

the corporation. When I try to enter

the name of any city

it autocorrects to Forever:

I’m spending a week in Forever,

Forever was hotter than ever

this year, Forever’s expensive

but oh the museums,

and all of its misery’s ours.

^{after the photo by Jonathan Bachman}

Our bodies run with ink dark blood.

Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.



Is it strange to say love is a language

Few practice, but all, or near all speak?



Even the men in black armor, the ones

Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else



Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade

Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?



We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.

Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.



Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,

Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.