Louise's Party

The wind blew so hard this morning it

sent in leaves as I 

swept dirt and crumbs

out the back door.

There’s a full moon coming tonight,

the eleventh of November, in the year 

2011.  All sorts of new passages 

are supposed to sprout open in our 

anatomies           on nights

like these

the sober world

bores me.

Last week I treated both

my home and my body

like temples and ingested only

Kava Kava tea and leafy salads, smudging

sage into every crevice of my space,
ruminating on what it meant

to be the only person living in 

a home built for two, 

and as I waved the bundle of

herb and alighted and depressed my 

feet up and down the stairs, in

tandem with the smoke,

I sensed some 

fresh coming, and now,

here it is:

Louise's party

   

    The instant I see you, or

you see me—whose gaze w/is first,

can we ever know?—

I spin in dance like a child’s top. 


Louise is an herbalist,
she grows tinctures and balms
in her cabin

Perhaps you are a person who demands flat 

facts: I could show you the way notes and words 

on sheet music and books appear different

now,

post-dance, post-

cleanse, post-

I could reference Anne Carson in an epigraph,

He sought her in the ribbon of her missal

to evidence my reading, when in fact, I am 

not well-read.  For instance, I know nothing 

of mythology, cannot reference other

centuries

to declare my past and now, how 

ancient lovers made the alphabet 

the results of animal claws and 

with you they are that which is not 

bloated white swaths of air.  That with you letters 

are mountains.  that which was and that which was between.  Sound

and silence.  You,

my love, are the sound.