Like One Flapping Her Tail on a Rock

mermaid diptych
 

• • •         the rooms above pitching around
      
    •         like songs we’d made up in the kitchen: too many forks, now you’re fucked; spoons you are alive
    •         no love, not a shred of tenderness
    •         no more of the worn ornament, ticking down through the tree; no more collapsed already on the rug, sister, like leaves
      

Earth to Cowboy

Enough, friend, of the car show—
The passersby whistling there she is!
brushed, touched, rubbed with cloths
and lifted clear

Enough of the field below
and the evening light, lean
at altitude, empty as a stairway

When I was small, I heard a story

Girl, all’s been lost.  Stitch up this weedy dress.
Girl, in a well the Frog Prince sat, firmly he sat
then a face, like a moon, rose over the lip

—it was glorious! Her face the sound
of a bell in the distance. Or like once, twice,
when getting high:  the lights beyond you and those within you

met, held each other, shhh, here you are,
equal to the world—

Because I’m telling you, friend, this is a sink

and over it, a spinning.  Spinning like even at eighty
our tiny mothers, spinning like someone

who loves a holiday!  Spinning like CDs
the neighbor strings by the windows of her house.

Rainbows flash around the bowl of the yard

and the tree by the sidewalk
looks like a tree when you know there is a nest inside.

Animal House

Inside the wall, there was a well.  The cat, Amelia, went where we sisters couldn’t get.  Now the rain, driving against the edge of everything, is a showroom. C’mon down!

Big voice gets the grease, I see.  Nurses float over at dawn, I see.

Can we talk instead about Tom Cruise, his teeth? In the way of my eye, teeth so clean they see me seeing them, are not my father’s teeth which fall shhhp back into a greasy sea

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And My Land, I am sick of my father’s teeth, wreckage of his bowels and breath, sick too of Tom Cruise rising over the screen and his big bicep moving back and forth under the skin like a small forest animal.  Bitch, in your dreams! my ex, now dead, often said, flexing, joking.   In the mirror, in Philadelphia.
 

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Once, upstairs of the Army Navy, I turned in a door.  a dozen or so tents stuck there in the sunlight
 

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It was August, the sounds of traffic clogged below rose through the open windows, and voices on phones saying, I’m saying, Marilynne!

A few of the tents shifted a little and squares of fabrics rippled around parts of the room, like a wind passing over the far expanses of a lake
 

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Later, walking home up Walnut, bits of air conditioning cooled my skin, suddenly here, there, at the mouth of the swankiest stores

but back in the showroom, the tents were something else: bedded down, breathing quietly.