Venice Daphne Run Backwards

        the way that sandpiper runs
        as close to the water
        and then knows, pulls
        back, but not
        before he's dug
        into sea grass. I'm
        walking out of branches,
        wood, Daphne
        run backwards, my own
        breakwater this time.
        Blue shells, sun
        cupped in the arm of some
        one who doesn't own
        or want to own me.
        The leaves he pulls from
        my skin are stained
        with the verbs of someone
        who didn't see what she could.
        Salt air chews them.
        We dream of Nantucket,
        wine in a grey wood
        someday. You know I never
        wanted a man just
        for myself
        but didn't know that.
        Gulls. Old women
        unbutton black coats,
        feel the light, dreams moving
        in their throat like birds.
        They are willow roots
        hanging on under
        the sand, pushing deep.
        In this light, if they
        were to unloosen a few
        pins they would grow into
        their hair, birds blown in the
        sun toward cities rarely
        found on maps.

       Those Quilts Invite

        on e mail like a gulp of rum with
        honey, what my mother gave me
        to keep the flu away, burning
        as I swallowed. I think of the
        summer it was sweltering,
        jasmine and rose on my skin
        so heavy somebody walked
        off the train and I stopped to
        wash it off at a café. I was
        sweating in boots, cursed the
        sun, the stain from rose oil on
        my sleeve. I couldn't believe
        I'd agreed to traipse into town
        with bags of poems to meet in a
        stranger's bedroom. With no
        desk or table, we spread poems
        over the bed, read for hours.
        Then he stopped to bring me coke
        and slid his body between the
        family poems and my thighs with
        the bed tilting. I slid closer to
        him, felt the room become his
        mouth, his body become a hard
        muscle like the verbs in his
        poems, his hand under my denim.
        It was too late to stay, my face
        rose as the scent he must have
        smelled all over his body. I
        had to go, was drenched and
        not from the heat, throbbing, as
        I am re-reading, "those quilts invite"

       The Apple Orchard Man

        I saw him four times
        in my grandfather's Dept
        Store's triple mirror,
        my own cheeks pinker
        than my pink pique
        dress. Flourescent
        lights, mountains of
        house dresses still
        hugging the week's heat,
        he strutted down aisles
        of Levis. No matter
        later I heard he
        was on drugs, had
        three wives. When he
        leaned a hip toward
        me, his grin of other
        dark charming men I'd
        never see as danger,
        I could have invited him
        into the stuffy dressing
        room as if that close
        dark was a part of me
        and I'd been waiting,
        longed to lie under
        his branches, have the
        dark fruit glisten over
        my body, saw myself
        brushing long mahogany
        hair in a window over
        the orchard, everything in
        me wild petals he could
        open and coax to
        bloom as wildly.