It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice.
Its colours—blue white brown greyblack silver—vary.
Some ice has core bits of gravel or shadows inside.
Some is smooth as a flank, you cannot stand on it.
Standing on it the wind goes thin, to shreds.
All we wished for, shreds.
The little ones cannot stand on it.
Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, can stand.
Blindingly—what came through the world there—burns.
It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice. 

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me. 

River fogs (7 AM) stray and begin, shiver and begin
on the September mill rocks.
Bits of leaf mirror along. I have arrived at my sanity.
Evidence (7 PM): while she medicates I walk by the river.
Millwheel smells like wet cornhusk.
On my back (2:38 AM) in the dark at Dorset Motel I listen to the radiator click
and to her, awake on the other side of town
in the hot small room
gripping a glow-in-the-dark rosary.
Whatever they say about time, life only moves in one direction,
that’s a fact, mirroring along.
River fogs (7 AM) go flayed and silvery
when it dawns dark
on the day I leave.
DANGER DO NOT DROP OR DRAG ANCHOR
reads a sign just off the selvedges.
Mindingness gulps us.
Her on the bed as bent twigs.
Me, as ever, gone. 

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

that 4-year-old Muslim girl and
her 5-year-old sister
and the 16- year-old babysitter
and the 20-year -old mother of that 4-year-old/that
Muslim child gangf raped
from dawn to dark to time become damnation

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

Too bad there is no oil
between Sbrenica and Sarajevo
and in-between the standing of a life
and genocide

Too bad
ther is no oil

Too bad
there in no oil
between her legs

the woman in Somalia
who weighs 45 pounds and
who has buried village elders and
who has buried village children

who weighed even less
than she weighs after so many days
of hunger gaping open
to the flies

Too bad
there is no oil
in South Central L.A.
and in between the beaten men and beatup woman
and in between the African and the Asian throwaways
and in between the Spanish and the English speaking
homeless
and in between the dealers and the drugged
and in between the people and criminal police
too bad
there is no oil

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs
that four-year-old Muslim girl

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

rabbit-light:

I am tired of hearing about dogs
used as metaphors for the uncivilized.
Imagine a world in which humans

possessed at least twenty times
as many olfactory receptors,
able to distinguish the tang of cancer

rising musk-like from the bedsheets
next to a smoldering ash tray,
able to detect that one drop of blood

in every five quarts of water,
to know what you did last night
no matter how many times

you soap-scrubbed the evidence.
It does not take savagery
but more love than we can muster

to lick the hand you’ve sniffed,
to love despite the perfume of sins
we wear each day like a halo.

Michael Meyerhofer

rabbit-light:

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater
and how i kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover

Leonard Cohen

Thank you, fluttering-slips!

Three thousand miles away
in a city I barely know
the man you love
has beaten you with a hammer
and if what needed to be said
were something a woman could make
from whatever she had on hand,
like a cut-down dress
like a good warm coat,
I would stay up all night
to finish it for you.

In the house that sheltered you
a woman’s hands have rubbed your shoulders,
brought you tea and the names of lawyers,
the titles of books that might help.
And when you couldn’t stand it,
when the terror was a muffled weight
on your chest, thick as fur
over your mouth,
there was always a woman there
to hold you.

It means you’ll survive all this
though we both know you’ll never
get over it. There’ll always be a need
for something tougher: a skin you could wrap
your heart in, fold it away
from this grieving that stuns you
with its news of a death.

“I only needed to hear your voice,” you tell me.
“Just for a while. It’s better now. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight. Take care of yourself.”

But sleep comes piecemeal,
teased by the goblin shapes
of what I could have, should have said. 

I will be glad for morning
for the brief light that delivers us
into its own kind of certainty
where the dream you woke me from
becomes a message I can puzzle over.
While the love I feel for you now
is like the story a mother tells her child
at bedtime, knowing it only serves
to carry her into a land of strangers
where she must dream her own rescue
from whatever scraps and fragments of it
she finds, wrecked there.