Malleus Maleficarum

You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil

Lately I live in the groupings I make with my eyes, the way I bestow
too much fuel
on a particular landscape, the south side of a city, a project of calamitous
elevation.

The trouble is the loose window with the mirror to the moon's surface,
the glossy road
that reaches into cosmos's cool core and wrestles with metaphor.
Everything I know

drifts into the scene before me, hummingbird and trumpet vine, the sun
on one knee
beside the lagoon, water lilies gaping.

*

The ghost in the oyster shell is a fool of small places—molecules
between people who write
like gourmands in the throes of food, like a pitfall, a sorry god, a last
joint, a fulcrum,

an aviator, four score and one hundred Lilliputians ago. Words come
when I’m obedient,
when the infamous thing about me is the way I part my hair.

There is a lake running with silver and in this lake are waves turning West
turning South
where a woman lies, head down on a hill in Illinois. The lake gathers stones
and stores them

in her treasures. How cliché you seem, says my mind, small girl holding
no one’s hand, blank

space in the air beside you. My body folds into itself and says:

There are lilies all over the lake, closed now, but ready, in hours, to
break apart.

*

Keep going in the midst of ornery grasses and tall latitudes. If ants pull
each other along
and counsel each other in the same way as these children spread on the
lawn like

chenille, then when they’re settled down for a night of tacos, unashamed
and eating
strenuously, in fact, engaged in serious taco competition, it's time to enroll
in a series

of movements regarding spontaneity, all you can eat stenciled down your
legs, tattooed
on your palms, little hairs bursting from your pores like soldiers on a long
beach.

When I was in Florida I missed the ivory woodpecker—no easy way to her
cry, no
forwarding sound, not a beak, an egg, a soft and tiny shoe.

Repeat the gist and grit, the holy angles and digested grouper that slings
into your being
from an ocean you've learned never to trust and in that certainty, trust it.
Be certain

of the signs around you: ink, swan, drill of a woodpecker. Destroy
the world.
It will fly out again from between your legs.

*

A horse gallops into the sound barrier creating a window into 4D, a time
unlike now
but closer to now like the voices of painters, the stilled voices of birds.

The rage of a cardinal.

The scent of several men in lawn chairs exercising self.

A woman cried because a man said step on the cicada and everyone
laughed. He didn't
step on the cicada and she didn't know the people well but he said that
and they did that

and then she did what she did and I saw her in the circle suddenly so
angry she could step
on the man so I said let's step on the man and we all laughed.

A mouse ran out and looked exactly like Mickey, the old Mickey of the
early cartoons.
He had something white in his mouth and he stopped for a moment
to be surprised

that I was there as quiet as I was (as a mouse) and then moved on.

Even when the answer involves a flow to the head a blow to the head,
a cello. Now we round
the unbelievable curve before Sedgwick where the conductor slows
to about ten mph or else.

I always wait for this place with a small fear like before penetration,
that tiny held breath.

*

There are five minutes there are all the times flying into the corpse—
we are too blah—we are
blah—write me again and this time smoke and stink and if I ever get loose
I will pop

into a sun and you will dry away.

Read me into the phosphorous that's all over your legs, your arms, your
gorgeous
green tongue, oh land, where is the land—ah oh! We are earth-bereft,
we are fidgeters

in the propelled terra the way the earth whirs in orbit—in orbit—hear that?
Every time I say
orbit I get a pulse. You could call this nonsense, but why am I self-
conscious as a kangaroo,

absorbed as a sapphire? When I was young I loved him because I was
female and her
because I was female—and gender bound me in its usual expected ways.

If I stop talking everything will be white space and I will age into it like
peacock blue ink.
As children we were given blue-black, humblest of all the inks,
a student’s ink, but my

fingers ached for peacock blue. When Ntozake appeared in Chicago she
said people die
from lack of beauty. I thought of you and lathered henna into my hair
and painted my nipples

peacock blue.

*

We are all the time squeezing into the lines all the time yellowing. Here
is the green paper.
Here are the squares upon it and the boys swigging in the classroom like
rampant sycamores.

I saw a sycamore once. A Bronx point of interest I called Twins. She was
split at the base
and spired in two directions, much like you and I and the way we
started out before we flew

in a vee toward sky.

The way the shaking takes us down. And the birds say. And the birds say.
Increase, beautiful,
there are twin trees everywhere but none as old as the one they call
Twins in the Bronx.

What if you end up alone you say. Then you will be like me, I say, then
you will be like me,
a half smile. I want to go away from you and today I said it. Tunnel.
Pointillism. Someone

smarter than me at something. Bring the babies around the pool. Behave
among them.
The ghosts are enough to break me into a thousand tunnels.

*

I wish my name were Zelda. I wish I were a filmmaker. When all of me
collides with all
of you will I be too busy? I just missed being killed by a huge window that
flew

off the red skyscraper and sliced a woman in half under the awning of a
pizzeria.
Peter Greenaway, watch over me.

There’s a story about a woman who was just stepping on a manhole cover
when it blew her
sky-high. I fear that word, sky-high. It reminds me of how air is for sale
in the city, how lives

develop like cones into the heavens. How much for a fourteenth floor,
a twenty-ninth?
How much for a cubic foot of space, cloud caught in an air-shaft, how
much would you pay

to shake hands with the sun? Put 'er there, I've heard people say as they
hold out their hands.
Put ’er there, pardner.

We could meet in Albuquerque. If it's just sex, we could have it in the
desert where cactus
survive without water but we'll have to be careful—remember how
dehydrated we got

under all those quilts? Now an old-spice smelling coffee-smelling man
has sat beside me
and said oh shoot out loud as if the world might care about him.

*

Sex is a trick, a letting go in such a way that you're always there. A trick
the body and mind
play together, a play, a collaboration. The body dives while the mind
holds the rope although

it might be the other way, the mind hang-gliding, the body back on the
cliff taking notes.

You can pull back on the strings of civilization, striate into the dung-
covered statue of Mary,
Mother of Le Roy, or non-comprehend all of the above. It doesn't matter.
Time is a lake. I’m

in the boat not rowing. Last night when we walked from the Biograph,
a young man waved
from inside a ginmill. You talked to me of denial and I nodded. He drank
a tall beer and I

nodded at you and I nodded at him. Think of the word NOD until it
becomes a sound
in the corner of your mouth. Swallow it. Digest.

If I leave something out will the way I didn't use the word NOD truly raise
that woman
back to life? If I continue toward NOD will the dog bite take its place
in your life's utility,

the same way as Alanis Morissette sings, whiny but beautiful, pathetic
but simmering,
causing my throat to close. Yesterday your body said, tell, don't show.

I threw my secrets at you just to see you nod.

*

12:04 The pith the wax the string the break the fuel the post the posit
the reach.

12:06 A word a point a pout a puss. Increasing clouds. One and a half,
stop, one and a half.

12:08 We are forming against the Republic, we are debting, we are dead.

12:12 Bargains hit us—Bim Bam Bop. With an egg on top.

12:14 Pukka pukka pukka pukka.

12:15 A woman died, creating a hole in the sky, or so it seems.

*

She she she she she and she she she and she over and into on through the
dance the spouse
a dilemma. The priestess and the pallbearer, the home run, the home,
my running home

to bread to the sink the splish the grease the sponge. She and squeeze
and squeeze the trough
the mate the sorted the sorter the sortie the béchamel the hollandaise
the reverence we hold.

There were fire engines, ambulances, police cars. A body on the sidewalk.

Creating an orbit around herself, she solemnly dreamed never to glow
the way she had
at birth. In this way, the pupils of her eyes blackened and smoked. It was in
the dream

to poke fun at reverence—and a couple she knew well—a Florida couple
—reached up
from the floor beside her bed and grabbed her. Only once before had
someone truly

touched her in a dream. She'd slipped from her bed on Bernard Street
and someone
hoisted her back up, a great hand lifted her back into her dream where
colors

of spilled blood ran Kodak and satisfying, smearing her whole waking day
with hope.

*

I will walk into Wonderland with which I've been in love since childhood.
Blue-black
or peacock blue? I don't believe in symbols—portents, yes, I like to predict.
I can be honest

about anything, just give me enough ink. Alice is right: Sometimes we
want meaning: My
daughter’s ear. My daughter’s hands. My father's hands. My brother’s
heart. My sister's hands.

My father's ear.

A look at chaos shows this to be true. Here we are, three bodies colliding.
I am the one
ejected because of my light weight and my ability to orgasm. There is
nothing left of me,

except as vehicle or inspiration, in your nightly plot. Still, I think about
the atom and the way
electrons tunnel into new places with a sweet intelligence. Must
everything relate to me,

even something as small as a leap?

*

We’re here in the tunnel again. The tunnel has sides like a brain, bumpy
and soft. If I punch
the tunnel it springs back, unalarmed, the way I would like a parent to be.

I wonder if it’s the devil who has me, if that's why life is so burning bizarre.
Or maybe
you could lift me up and throw me down a hundred times and every time
I break there are

more of me, holograms with little legs, running around the world objecting
to things.

*

Swing me into tomorrow like a lantern.

Place me solidly, a small sack of sand with a candle burning, on the ground.

You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil. Big words on the tongue, open flame.
The window flew
from the 29th floor splitting the woman in half. There she was, lovely
ghost preparing

to lift off. There was her child on the sidewalk pulling her mother’s skirt.
I was walking
South in the city and you were home not knowing how close I’d come
to glass, how Brazil

I’d felt as I Babyloned down Wabash, as I brushed the beveled edge
and walked away.