Bibliomancy
Because the moon was a crystal ball between
two palms of space
and the stream wavered through fire-smoke
and it would sooner or later be midnight
you asked me for a reading.
I should not have used Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
“For the universe will constantly torture him and say,
‘You ought to have talked. Where will you find the certainty
that it was not after all a hidden pride which governed
your resolution?’”
You’d asked: when will I feel like myself again?
You seized the book and I asked: when will I feel like myself again?
“A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils
only by the power of the devil.”
Damned as we were we asked that book
would it prefer to be fed to the fire or the brook?
Does a Branch Ever Feel Like It’s Stuck in a Tree?
Meaning:
1. Soul pushes at subcutaneous tissue, overflows
from pores into dirt—
feeling not unlike bleeding.
2. What I like about birds is that they’re very upfront.
They tell you what they want.
3. Unlace me like a sneaker.
4. (Archaic) Unlace me like a corset or someone wearing one.
5. I’ll trade you my whole body of poems plus a second one of flesh for yours against mine.
6. My hitchhiking, bushwhacking brother and I are bushwhacking in the forest.
7. Not weed whacking. Bushwhacking.
8. He sketches witch hazel into his notebook, rips out the page, gives it to me. “Hold onto this. So you can recognize me in my next life. This is what I’ll look like.”
9. There’s a butterfly here who looks like a hawk. Flies like one too. Fierce. Fast. In circles.
10. By the way I carved my phone number into a sugar maple tree, should you ever need to call me.
11. The next day I’m in Washington Square Park where only the old men are topless.
12. A man in a vest approaches me, sits next to me, demands we talk sensibly
about the Reincarnation Application Process.
13. Who gets it right in one try? Being alive?
14. So now we’re playing Twenty Questions and I’ve got to guess who he was in his last life. He only comes around as “big characters.”
15. So now MOSES pulls a glass and some liquor out of his bag and offers me some.
16. “No. Hell no. Thank you, no.”
17. So now Moses is drunk and wants to discuss the ulterior motives of gay men who strike up conversations with straight men they don’t know.
18. Then he tells me that in THIS life he’s a chiropractor and one day one of his patients just started levitating out of nowhere.
19. Then he tells me about a man in Nepal who was yanked out of a cave by his beard and deported.
20. I don’t seek Normalcy and it doesn’t seek me.
21. Then a man comes around with a sign that says FREE HUGS.
22. “I’m sorry, your prices are too steep. I can’t afford it right now I’m in college.”
23. Actually Normalcy flees me! But
24. if I’m a tree branch you can be the vines that shoot out of a neighboring stump and latch onto that branch. Go ahead. Grow on me.
Joythief
As far as I know it’s legal.
I watched a ménage-a-trois:
two bees in a flower and the flower an active
participant! I saw
two eyebrows make like inchworms, venture to cross
that vast chasm where nose bridge meets third eye.
Is it possible Adam and Eve weren’t really
immortal before the apple but thought they were so
may as well have been?
I wasn’t born knowing I would die and if no one had told me
I might still be in the dark (the light?) about death and separation.
Then I’d get to celebrate
when the man in the subway terminal with a scratch-off ticket
wins the jackpot or my rival receives an award or a kid saves
a frog from the jaws of the snake and I’m not there even to bear
witness because it was fifteen years ago and the hero’s just
telling me now.