Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine

      And everything on the hair

      of starting again.

       The girl

      spills the half-gallon of milk on the floor.

      The milk is all over the floor, the table,

      the chairs, the books, the dinner, the windows

      —Mother and son are gone happy.

      The father to work.

      The sister to marriage.

      The girl is still spilling

      the milk-house

      white negative shining

      out of one life into another life.

       Mother

      in your white dress

      your smoke

      your opaque eye

      you whose name

      my foot

      wrote

      I had to die

      break the rope

      push through the stone fence

      of you, of myself, and fly

       Eighteen

      Green bookbag full of poems

      I leaned with my bicycle

      at the black brick edge of the world

      What was I, to be lost

      or found?

      My soul in the corner

      stood

      watched

      *

      Girl and boy

      we had given each other

we wanted	breasts
bellies	hair
toenails	fingernails
hair	nipples
foreskin	foreskin
heart

      *

      I gave up signing in

      to the night book

      little notes in time

      signing our names

      on the train's engine car

      gray 19th century Irish men

      in our gray stiff clothes

       “She Sang”

      Save the goat of humanity!

      She started out

      shot through with love books

      She chose closed hearts

      those she knew

      would not kill her

      Save her memory her bones

      dig under the house

      dig near home

      here at the X in the mouth of the house

      the shell shocked woman all her bones

      goat bones

       A Bone Standing Up

      A bone standing up

      she worked for words

      word by word

      up Mt. Fear till

      she got to her name: it was

      “She Sang.”

       The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns

      Talking with Mary about 1972:

      like a needle

      through my 25-years-

      older breast my years thinner rib: 1972:

      a child-life

      away from my children:

      “but you couldn't have been different

      from the way you were”

      but I would to have been different

       Out in a sailboat

      Out in a sailboat with the warden

      he says so-and-so weighs 95 lbs. now

      says she slept with him

      because he was kind

      when she was in prison

      She woke up

      hypnotized

       A wonderful boat

      She woke up

      walking with the homeless

      on a plank

      no red schlock rope

       I came to you

      I came to you

      Lord, because of

      the fucking reticence of this world no, not the world, not reticence, oh

      Lord Come

      Lord Come

      We were sad on the ground

      Lord Come

      We were sad on the ground.

      *

       Cousin

      The erotic brown fedora on the desk:

      the erotic silver watch from your father's time

      balanced on its thin hinged silver lid

      on the Teacher's Desk:

      Once or twice, someone comes along

      and you stand up in the air

      and the air rises up out of the air:

      One leaf

      then branches

      stood up in the sun consuming

      —Cousin, it was happiness on earth.

       The Very Bad Horse

      The very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. —The Buddha

      My first own home

      my big green “bed-sit”

      in London, in 1956

      double bed green spread

      sixpence coin-fed gas fire

      London fog huge little footsteps

      TOK TOK TOK

      I knew three people

      and three more at work

      I knew you

      I felt around in the dark for Life

      and you I picked myself up by the hair

      four stories up and dropped me

      —Still I wouldn't budge.

       Once

      Once there was a woodcutter,

      when he asked me to marry him

      the woman in the grocery store said

      You look like you lost your last friend.

      First