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Cowgirls On A Fence
Cowgirls on a fence
Oil and acrylic on photo linen
Four inches by seven inches.
This is what I would've sent you
If I'd been more organised
From Santa Fe, 30 Balsa Road.
It is the hats more than the girls
The girls visiting a row of hats
Along a blue steel fence-
That's you.
Don't forget our bonding over B.B. King
Big Bill Brunsie.
I've always wanted a hat the size
Of the sky
Covering me from life-
You too
And to be able to plant your legs
Freely in space in meaningful shoes
Shoes coming and going, always
Talking
Always saying Something
Leaning forward just to say
Smiling in the bright light
Your face
Never waiting
Always first in line
Diving into- Caroline,
You're seven thousand phone lines away
I can feel the distance in nerves
In still stinging air.
Here there are no natural springs
No living water
No way to send a postcard
That could possibly mean
Anything to you--
Our friendship is not a place
visit: for sandy
i'm coming to visit your life -
to fight with you about the right
way to slice a white onion,
to draw my mouth around the back
of your neck (which i love,
by the way - i've never told you),
to listen to you laugh at the end
of every sentence, tragic or comic,
to find out whether you love me
beyond holding my hand,
whether it's more than strange,
blue-eyed looks, because I love you.
your too many blue t-shirts
your simple, handsome hands,
your certain, loveable arrogance
about your own attractability.
the way life bounces off of you
like a speeding bullet,
the way nothing is more important
to you than the silliness of something --
its circus tent possibilities.
is it possible that I can come
to you in the old-fashioned
night, dressed in anything you wish --
moonlight, lampshade, electric bulb;
and you can know that the mask
of tears about my face is paper-mache,
as easily torn as a paper moon,
that my gone-on-for-too-long grief
is leaving like an old radio song,
dying in the night, dying in space,
leaving you radical, true life love. |
Self-Portrait
I am not who I think,
Bursting quietly out of a BA
Into glorious anonymity
Scrabbling around on the pebbly beach
Of the world for a word worth keeping.
Virginia Woolf weighed herself
Down with rocks, solid stones
Grand enough to drown with,
And, at this point,
I'd be happy to have come
Into the world as part
Of that English rubble.
At least, in some small way,
A ripple of literary history
I could have made,
But I'm making light
Of a disaster greater
Than the titanic,
I'm attaching my fleeting
Morbidity to a far more serious
And heart breaking event.
But hell, if I was one of
Virginia Woolf's stones,
Could I have evolved,
Ever so quietly in that English river,
Waiting out the war and James Joyce,
Could I have woken up one day
In the late nineteen nineties
And in an anti-Opheliaian gesture,
Walked full formed in quaint
Bloomsbury cardigan
With matching flowery frock
And taken to Virginia's
National Heritage desk to write?
All of this is surely possible.
Lesbian Concerto (K.17)
A lesbian is a woman
who wears watches
borrowed from the thick
wrists of noonday lovers
A lesbian is a woman
who carries her
embalmed heart
in an executive briefcase
A lesbian is a woman
who wears lipstick
the colour of her
red-cloud kelpie
A lesbian is a woman
who collects wine glasses
and baseball caps
A lesbian is a woman
who makes eight pieces
of toast to fill in the gaps
of her tarot deck
A lesbian is a woman
who writes with a
vodka ice cube
in her mouth,
A lesbian is a woman
who is neither queer,
gay, nor homosexual
A lesbian is a woman
who gives a firm
handshake to an armed world. |
