I didn't win the pageant
because those ******* wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these ******* looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction on my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so ******.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and Macomber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
___

i didn’t want to,
but i wrote anyway.
cracked open
like a shell,
flooding with memory.

some words
arrive as if they’ve waited
their whole lives
to be read.

when you watch the shadow crawl from the floor to the wall,
a branch falls,
the dawn crushed in the palms fades,
the spiral of smoke despairs of its own act,
not to enter your sight, moves aside,
evolution worked on these blue eyes for millions of years, no joke,
you follow every move
like a spy
the shadow returns:
- be wild again, dive into the green water
sunlit,
with the arrow in the back,
call your arms, shout, swim,
she is a tide in the chest,
just a tide,
the moon an ellipse end, a chain,
it spins around his axis
like a hub,
the waters break the sky, bleed between the thighs,
innocence lets us see the valleys beneath her feet,
don't let your lungs melt into smoke like a forgotten spring
out of air,

like grass,
tender and gentle
the spring draws its life from the graves,
out of mourning,
that's why the murmur resembles a cry,
a sigh,
and thirst,
hunger,
and the river smooths the stream,
and the wind settles on your cheek, waits
a feather to fall on your head,
in the abyss
waiting for you to look at the sky, amazed, to ask: - who is hitting me,
who hits me every time i try to find solace,
refuge,
serenity,

when you watch the shadow crawl from the floor to the wall,
the murmur elevates any escape to the rank of genius

*** in the morning
Death in the afternoon
And it was dark

Milling about stacks
Of paperbacks and out of focus snapshots
Some of her in the shower

But pay heed
She's an iceberg
Warm her up on a bed of nails

Until she's a plaintive waterfall
And then tie her to the scaffolding
Of a clean well lighted place

What remains out of sight
Through omission
Through silence

Through childlike syntax
Shall float to the surface
In its own due time

This ache seems to be
like Papa's White Elephants;
valuable in a sense
I've yet to understand.

Busy body, tranquil mind,
a joke I say!
The fishing line
is ever tangled.

Another
wasted morning,
another
throwaway.