pressed into each other
as the dark is into her.
An excess of black velvet,
black lace, licorice silks
and ebony flowers. No
thing has room to breathe.
No matter she filled 72 bags
with clothes to give away
but then keeps pulling
what has no color around her.
Once light and sun filtered
thru her rooms, her hair
thick. Once her lips were
plum and ruby but color’s 
been sucked from them
and what’s left is ghostly, an
iced bud no sound comes
from. Her closet like her dreams
is dark as Bluebeard’s 
castle. Bats could live
invisibly on the gauze
of some dresses, in the 
velour of nightbreed, glitter,
panther sleek brocade.
Nights she can’t sleep,
she hears hooves of black
horses in the crow and raven
wind she can’t believe
isn’t just in her mind

I think of the oak sticks on campus then, probably running 
across slippery dark ice across the quad. I was a radio and
TV minor, afternoons among wires and glass with mostly
guys from Iraq and Morocco. Somehow it was always
sundown when the class ended. How little it mattered
in a daze of Corwin’s words, already a world past like
Normal Rockwell’s sketches of small towns that would
morph into something so unlike those scrubbed faces
long before the Internet’s paintbrush. I rushed thru cold
on a day of almost snow fog to a dorm room a color I
wished for, pale lilac, and let Corwin’s world hold me

she aches for what’s
left out, the last lines
broken as she is. She
wakes in a sweat of
blackness, can’t move.
Pain and sadness come
thru the window slats.
The cat won’t come
to curl into her chin for
another hour. If she
could drink, she would
gulp Wednesday away
or beg a wild horse
to throw her thru the
canyons or have some
poisonous snake circle
her like a bracelet she
will never get rid of

the blues man who wrote
on the cartoon book she’s
in, the only one not in music.
She was sure she knew where
she could find it but like him,
it disappeared. She knew he
loved another who wasn’t
that into him but in the small
room at the colony, he was
hers as he is in the drawing
a famous artist did of them
and the paintings and sketches
he did of her nude and alluring

under the blood
red dogwood,
berries crinkly as skin.
My mother whose bed
I’d curl into the
whole year I was
six, woke up
dreaming of fire,
doesn’t want to
be alone. Between
the car and the 
house, shorter than
the hallway to her
blue room where
Otter Creek Falls
licked the window.
She holds onto the
doll, the Lindberg
doll I smashed
in a tantrum. My
mother who’d take
subways at night
all thru Brooklyn
is afraid in the
drive way of Apple
Tree. Don’t leave
me she cries like
a child begging
for water she’ll
never drink

in Segovia, in Alsace Lorrain.
Last night she dreamt her old
Maine house was up for sale
and she was determined to
buy it. Just when she’s letting
go of everything that mattered,
jewels she has no one to give
to, no place to wear. Wind moves
under the door. She remembers
that morning standing under a
dripping sign as fog eddied
around her feet waiting for the
bus, unsure how she ended
up with this man she imagined
going off somewhere far, feeling she
should feel guilty about that as
if it was the only life she had

but a flesh horse, his
dark mane pressed to
my forehead. Before
the moon’s full, I want
his solid body, a book
of blood and breath.
I need his ears to
flatten against my
ears. No, I wasn’t
horse wild as a girl,
didn’t die for statues
and books though I
painted a black stallion
against a hot orange
sky. It’s this horse
I dream I sleep with,
one that couldn’t, like
a dog, take care of
himself without
me, this beauty
already filling the
space where I
dream him,
wait for him
to become flesh.

clapboard sinks into its
colorlessness. Pale drift-
wood’s banked by leaves.
The year fades with the
frost. The last maples
camouflage where there
were deer tracks, leaves
eddy around the new
apple. Acorns carpet
pewter stones. One patch
of scarlet hangs on, blazes
like a fire into darkness.

flamencos past the catacombs, gypsies
past the monastery of cloistered monks.
How little she supposed years past those
days her hair hung past her wrists she’d
ache for nights when it struck midnight
and everyone who mattered to her would
be a moat around her aloneness, wildly
swallowing green grapes as the clock
banged at each bell and cheers and
sparkling white wine filled the ink blue
air. Those dozen grapes gulped in the
square, fast, faster to insure a good year
to come. How she’d look for the smallest
green grapes, giggling and swallowing for
luck and love and then the Spanish
wine maker wearing red underwear to
assure whatever the next year wraps
them in will be better than the one
they are sloughing behind likek worn out
shoes you can’t wait to throw out
the window into a bon fire where nothing
that was terrible can stay

one minute, the sun was out, it was fall.
Geraniums under a quilt last night, a
            blotch of red opening.
On the front step what looked like lint
has small pink claws and feet.
Next the sky was the color of lead. 

Geraniums under a quilt last night
like a child you’ve tucked in
or a body wrapped in the earth under leaves.
In the swirl of sudden snow, what
was left of the headless fur blows west 

Like a child you’ve tucked in
whatever was living, a just born
squirrel I suppose, hardly a living thing
            except for feet.
In fifteen minutes, the light came
back, cars stopped sliding 

Whatever was living. Or just born
must have felt the wild snow was a warning.
I thought of the lover wrapped in dark
cloth and left in the leaves while, not knowing,
I took a ballet class. The geraniums 

are still under a blue quilt this Tuesday.
One minute the sun was out, it was fall