Circles on the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

afford to.
    The August sun melted them all.
    The dancers in your plays move too in the dark
    with masks and machines and chairs that trot and wail,
    flimsy ragtag things that turn holy and dance
    till no one is audience
    but all grope and stumble in your world.
    When you enter, we feel your presence burn blue,
    no longer a woman, not wiry warm quick flesh
    but a makeshift holy artifact
    moving on the blank face of the dark as on a river:
    ark, artifact, dancer of your own long breaking dance
    which makes itself through you fiercely, totally passing in light
    leaving you thin and darkened as burnt glass.

I am a light you could read by
    A flame from each finger,
    my hands are candelabra,
    my hair stands in a torch.
    Out of my mouth a long flame hovers.
    Can’t anyone see, handing me a newspaper?
    Can’t anyone see, stamping my book overdue?
    I walk blazing along Sixth Avenue,
    burning gas blue I buy subway tokens,
    a bouquet of coals, I cross the bridge.
    Invisible I singe strangers and pass.
    Now I am on your street.
    How your window flickers.
    I come bringing my burning body
    like an armful of tigerlilies,
    like a votive lantern,
    like a roomful of tassels and leopards and grapes
    for you to come into,
    dance in my burning
    and we will flare up together like stars
    and fall to sleep.

Crabs
    They are light as flakes of dandruff with scrawny legs.
    Like limpets they cling to the base of each curly hair,
    go lurching among the underbrush for cover.
    Our passions are their weathers.
    Coitus is the
Santa Maria
hitting on virgin land,
    an immigrant ship coming into harbor,
    free homesteads for all.
    Or native crabs vs. conquistadors wrestle and nip.
    Or maybe they too mingle.
    As the boat glides in, there they are, the native crabs
    with mandolins and bouquets of bougainvillaea
    swaying on the dock singing Aloha.
    For three generations we haven’t seen a new face.
    O the boredom, the stale genes, the incest.
    Or perhaps when the two shores approach
    the crabs line up to leap the gap like monkeys,
    the hair always lusher on the other side.
    They travel as fast as gossip.
    They multiply like troubles.
    They cling and persist through poison and poking and picking,
    dirt and soap, torrents and drought,
    like love or any other stubborn itch.

Trajectory of the traveling Susan
    Round Susan, somewhere Susan,
    Susan with suitcase and Berlitz book and stuffed shoulderbag
    flies in the air sitting down.
    Your spices are waiting under the falling dust.
    Strange pussies are sticking their paws under the door.
    Gottlieb sits in a corner with his head loose in his hands
    and plays at poking out his eyes.
    The ceilings are blackboards he has scrawled with hieroglyphics.
    The mailman fills up the box with nothing.
    Quail Susan, pheasant Susan
    riding an aluminum paperclip
    between the cold stars and the jellyfish,
    remember us in the broken net,
    come back to us in the wooly strands of the caring web
    stuck between jammed weeks and waiting testily.
    Each love is singular.
    The strands hang loose.
    Apricot Susan, applesauce Susan
    stuck up in the sky like a painted angel,
    you think the web is a trap.
    You see mouths open to swallow you in pieces.
    You see gaping beaks and hear piercing cries of fill-me.
    Susan, you are a hungry bird too with mouth wide open.
    The nets we build never hold each other.
    The minnow instant darts through the fingers
    leaving a phosphorescent smear
    and nothing else.
    Jagged Susan, enamel Susan,
    Susan of sullen sleeps and jabbing elbows,
    of lists and frenetic starts,
    of the hiss of compressed air and the doors slide shut,
    you can’t hang in the air like a rainbow.
    We are making the revolution out of each other.
    We have no place else to begin
    but with our hungers and our caring and our teeth.
    Each love is singular
    and the community still less than the addition of its parts.
    We are each other’s blocks and bricks.
    To build a house we must first dig a hole
    and try not to fall in.

The butt of winter
    The