Monday, February 1, 2016

Episodes on the Floor of the Sky

          1

God sleeps
In the wilderness
Of unopened letters.
My mother wrote a note to me:
Son, come home,
Your father's heart has fallen on the stairs.


          2

Surgery an hour every day,
Lobotomy with cotton balls.
The thud of picks inside my head,
All night water like blood drips down the shaft.


          3

I stay free,
I rub rain on my wind-burned lips,
Riding winds
Across cloud chasms
Toward your wine-filled breasts.


          4

My ruby breasted woman-bird,
A water-walker,
Flies with me, lets me sleep between her wings.
When a drought comes she cries:
Now drink!
When our daughter is born
She will be named Rain.


          5

She hunts spiders with bare feet
One Widow crawled under her arch
These women stuck together twenty years
Loneliness is life lived under water
Tonight they watch the moon dive like a man.


          6

I'm higher than you are, mother, father.
I let my heart drop
Through elevators.
Walking down cliffs
Without wings,
I float out of my life.