Hairless

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:
it’s newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff,
every thought visible, – pure knowledge,
mind in action – shining through the skull.
I saw a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning.
She mopped the green floor, dusted bokshelves,
all cloth and concentration, Queen of the room.
You can tell, with the bald, that the air
speaks to them differently, touches their heads
with exquisite expression. As she danced
her laundry dance with the motes, everything
she ever knew skittered under her scalp.
It was clear just from the texture of her head,
she was about to raise her arms to the sky;
I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, roar.

Pavlova’s Physics

Everything in my body

has been processed
through at least one star
(except for the hydrogen).

I want to speak to you about it;
I want you to know how much
I understand – and more and more
reveals itself in waves

I’m really a wise kid,
the kind that gets on and doesn’t
need to go to college to do it,
secretly learning to peel back

the potent leaves of mathematics
while boning up on Greek at night.
For all that, the consciousness
is an outdated barn of a thing,

a slow phenomenon compared
to the speed of the senses.
Today even I’m entranced
by the marine symmetry of my body

but, believe me, this world
is a place of bizarre consequences
where matter can appear
out of nothing and where

the light of stars is ancient
history when it gets here:
we can never understand
what we’re living through at the time.

You can show me your piece of warm
thigh the length of Florida
and I’m telling you, I’m affected
by the way you look at me but I need

more dimensions than geography allows.
I’m falling forward, tumbling
into increasing disorder; yes, disorder
is increasing in the universe

and will keep increasing until
the whole shebang becomes a place
where it is remembered
only the alert rodents swam.

Piss Flower

I can’t pretend to a golden parabola,
or to the downing of many pints
for making magnificent water.

I can’t begin to write my name, no
not even my pet name, in the snow:
except in pointless unreadable script.

But I can print a stream of bubbles
into water with a velocity
you’d have to call aesthetic.

I can shoot down a jet stream
so intense my body rises
a full forty feet and floats

on a bubble stem of grace
for just a few seconds
up there in the urban air.

Deft

I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body…It immediatley declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft. (Helen Chadwick)

It’s as easy to make an antibubble in your own kitchen
as it is to open up a crease in language
and reveal what you couldn’t say yesterday.
Just a matter of squirting water onto water
without snapping the surface tension until liquid
surrounds a skin of air, surrounding liquid. My body’s
a drop of water. Maybe the imperfections, the proliferating cells
help it refract the full spectrum. These last breaths,
air, water bubbling at my lips. The soap film is my skin:
permeable-for-some-things, membrane, separating-other-things,
this and that, the moving point between, the unsettled
limit, stretching and contracting under the breath
that comes and goes: I am this one, I am that one,
I breathe in and become everything I see.