so we meet again, David Ben-Gurion
and I have to ask you if you are sad,
and have to face facts that, since I have never met you
tragedy of tragedies I cannot give you an imaginary response

though I think you would be sad
at the state of your country, sad that
the search for a homeland could have become
such an ugly thing, when just that word--homeland
might be the gentlest in the world, soft as the way
and young mother would hold her baby for the first time.

It seems unkind that so much longing, so much impossible
yearning for home could become first a miraculous thing--
so the new settlers are thankful for every date tree,
every orange, every comb of honey and drop of milk,
every sunrise, every everything, for it is not perfection but it
can be walked on and slept under and touched and eaten
and sweated under and
died for

and then for this miracle to become like sand in the mouth of the rest of the world.

Truth be told, I always imagined God to look like you
and Israel of those first few years to look like Tatooine
with every settler in white tunic and boots
and two suns setting at night.

How can I imagine a response from God, or even Obi-Wan Kenobi?
Instead, I come to visit you on the beach, and watch you do your headstands,
and cannot give you even imaginary words.

This world seems impossible, I want to tell you,
but now you are making strange motions with one hand
like a man drowning.

Oh, what? 
This world is impossible, it's true.
But it's not impossible to see what you want me to do.

So I'll kneel down on the white sand of Tatooine
with thoughts of oranges and blood rushing to my head
and prop myself up on thin white arms
and do my headstand with you.

This world is impossible, but doing a headstand next to you
in the blazing sun of tatooine, is the sweetest thing:
"Old Ben," I say, "everything does look nicer this way."

And you, Ben-Gurion, the greatest Jedi of them all,
agree: "Yes, my daughter."

We stay in silence a while, both dreaming of holy lands
until you say:

"The sand people startle easily. 
But soon they will return,
and in greater numbers."

Oh, you beauties:
what could make you more beautiful
than you already are
than the simple act of stepping outside
and breathing deep of whatever air surrounds you
and feeling the soft pink of the other side
of bone
turn abruptly to marble and gold?

you, my lovely, are a temple.
you are big enough for the entire world
and murderers will seek sanctuary in the sweet darkness
of the places you keep secret
and call out their safety and ring the golden bells

while all you do is run fine fingers through your hair
and wish for a different chin, a different nose, a different mouth
or eyes that have the smallest bit more green in them
than yours.

You can never have
too many costumes.

This is the principle I live my life by:
you can never have
too many wigs, too many
sequined dresses, too many
acid-washed jeans, too many
fringed leater jackets, too many
rabbit fur coats, too many:

stetsons, kid gloves, butcher's aprons,
surgical scrubs, fedoras, chaps,
glasses, nikes, sport coats,
cummerbunds, plaid shirts,
rollerskates, tube socks,
lipsticks, cigarette
cases, lockets,
bracelets,
rings.

In this life I can't be everyone, but at leat I can be
everyone in my own
B-movie version of the truth--

I put on my lab coat and
OH GOD!! the lab assistant screams
the wolfman! he's coming closer!!

and I hold the lapels of my lab coat,
and know I am a scientest,
and take the pretty assistant
in my arms and say:

there there, my sweet marion.
the wolfman may bare his fearsome teeth,
but his is more scared of us than we are of him.

and I will stroke Marion's tawny hair.
and the wolfman will growl and beat his chest
and the villagers will chase him with their torches
and I will close my eyes
and dream of a winter coat
made of wolfman fur.

I would like to be a bird
on the tallest branch of a very high pine tree
(you know the ones--that bend
but do not break
when you try to hold them)

singing the same song over and over
so each rendition means more
than this poem, more
than any poem in the world

What you have given me.

I can only begin to describe:
how you looked at me, and did not
love me,
how I looked at your, and
loved you,

and how I know now that I can do nothing better
than love everything in the world as much as I loved
one person, one heart, one hand, one face:

yes, every bed of moss and every white flower that salts that bed,
every blood-quickening wave in every cold bloodless ocean,
every mother, every muderer, every child, every ship:
My God.  Who are you, who am I
to love just one man
when now I see in
everyone

the light I gave to you.
I cannot stop, and nothing can be done.

I will go to the abortion clinics all across my city.
I will take the instruments the white-smocked, white-gloved
doctor has, and use them to piece together all
the small hands, the feet, the faces, the eyes
the bodies and the blood, and I will hold
the hands of all those women who are not
mothers yet, and touch their hair and touch their cheeks,
and thank God, thank you, thank anyone that they
will all be you, and I will kiss their foreheads
the way I would kiss you, and say thank God
oh thank you, thank you, thank you baby:
thank you for everything.

I know it's impossible
but still I imagine
(whenever I am watching TV late at night
which is always,
and whenever a cash for gold ad comes on
which is always
between massage school and 1-800-WE-ARE-18)

always I imagine some old ex-Nazi watching TV
like me,
thinking about how low he is on cash, and how he really
should send another envelope to cash for gold--
and part with more of the treasures he owns
gold fillings he pried from high-class
women, who once wore fur and
danced with their husbands,
laughing, the gold in their
teeth catching some
small light, and
holding it--

the fillings get me.
These commercials
never fail to mention old
gold fillings, and I cannot
imagine anyone but a Nazi
who would have such things--
enough to melt, enough to see
money from, a midas-wealth of
small gold that the tongue once
probed in moments of thought,
that were present for kisses
of all kinds, and were pried
out by some boy who was
just following the orders
that he was given.

Of course, I know I could be wrong.
Of course, I probably am.

Of coure, these ads could be for no one else but--
who else?--kindly old dentists, men from small towns
who collect such things, or coroners--all right.
I can't think of a thing.
But surely there must be
someone else who would own such a thing,
someone else who is rich this way,
someone else who has mined a fortune
from the bodies of others.

Nothing can match the love of an animal.
I have thought about this for hours now.
I have though about it as I threw a rubber ball as hard as I could,
and watched as my smiling yellow dog returned it to me, running
through the crimson clover and the tall summer grass, faster than
anything, and warm.

If you asked me at that moment I might have said:
Nothing can match the love of a yellow dog.  But I won't go that far.
My dog runs through the grass and pants under the darkening sky and it loves me,
just as he will hate on sight an intruder, just as he might draw blood from an animal
that is not its equal.

It is those powerful jaws, I think, that wildness
that makes room for the way it can love me: we humans
have nothing to hate, nothing to draw blood from,
nothing to kill.

So we draw blood from the ones we love, we torture them,
because we love them, because we know that our minds
have taken us to the moon, but will not let us love another
without hating them just as much.

It is not a tragedy, but it comes close.
I have truly loved only once in my life, I think,
in  a way that came close to being perfect
as dog-love: the rest of my life, I have been too smart.

But for this boy I would have rolled over on my back
and let him touch my softest parts whenever he wanted,
and killed anyone who was not him, and learned to love
the taste of blood, and let my teeth grow sharp.

Now I am human again; now, I am the worst
kind of animal.  And all I can do
is stand on my back porch at sunset
and throw a rubber ball as hard as I can, and watch
as my dog runs to me, nearly exhausted and still running,
nearly unable to breathe and still running, and still running,
and running toward me through the tall green grass.

How many people still watch Quantum leap?  Enough, there must be,
to keep it on the air so I can see it, but still I sometimes like to imagine
that I am the only one in the world who still cares for the thing, and that
it is broadcast every night not because of numbers, because of people
who are not me, because of what American wants, but because some
talk to God and some talk to a priest, and for me, there is Quantum Leap.

Sure there must be another who loves it.  And like me, he cannot leap
from talking to the air around him to thinking that somewhere ther can be
someone who listens, someone to whom this all makes sense, and some
way in which everything will soon be revealed, in ways we cannot imagine.
Some trust like that.  But for those who do not trust, for those lonely people
whose assurances of wisdom come only through cathode ray--for that

America-wide organization, there is Sam Beckett, who unlike that
jealous and strange God of the Bible, is always ready to leap
forth and help whoever needs him--a lesbian!  a black person!  all the people
whose troubles trouble God none at all, Sam Beckett sees and cannot be
the man would would do nothing; it is a generosity we cannot imagine,
we who live in front of our TV's.  God is all well and good.  But in some

world that is not this, we have to imagine a man, some man, any man, some
man who is B-movie handsome and good like no other, who will see that
a world in which sons are sacrificed and any existing order is impossible to imagine,
and who will make a new order, one that is kind, and in which there is no leap
to be made between what we thing is right and what God tells us.  Could it be
that this is just too much to ask?  Am I the only one?  Or are there people

like me who look at Sam Beckett like a Reagan-era Jesus, people
who want nothing greater than to make right what was once wrong, and some
way to keep hoping that their next leap will be the leap home?  I know it would be
crasy to think this way if you are home already--but who is?  and could it be that--
oh, please, we hope it could--there is no perfect place, no heaven, for us to leap
to, that this is all we have: us, and our belief in a way of life we can do better than imagine.

How can you not fall in love
with the smell of your own pussy?

(all right.  I will admit, like any good girl
that as I write this poem I am a little drunk on Milwaukee's best--
ICE--which as my father has explained to me has more alcohol,
so all the better for me--and I have been looking all day at Playboy of the eighties
in which I saw my first naked woman at the age of ten,
and how beautiful those women seemed to me!
even at ten!  brown legs and blond breasts--
their eyes as sad as those of a Bergman
heroine, and how I wanted to be like them.
end of parenthesis.
)

Milwaukee's best as everyone knows is the official beer of cultures
where the smell of pussy, clean or dirty, fucked or unfucked, is reviled,
and so today I touch my pussy, smell my fingers, smell something complex
as the bouquet of a fine wine--lemon, salt, sweat, good soil, and the musk of
wanting-to-be-fucked,

and dream of a world in which every girl who had posed in Playboy
every girl of brown legs and blond tits, every girl of white teeth,
every stripper, every bunny, every escort, every aspiring acress,
can smell her own pussy and swoon,
can make her boyfriend go down on her
can shotgun a can of Milwaukee's best and say
"hey, baby.  Enough about your cock.  Let's go to Xanadu."

I will bet you a million dollars
that I could write the best poem the world has ever known
using only lines from
eighties power ballads.

(and if not the best poem in the world,
then certainly a better poem than anything
that I could write myself--not
for subtle imagery, for words that you can
carry around under your tongue like gold, or
for describing, perfectly,
the springtime sun that flickers through the trees, but
for describing, perfectly,
the way we feel when we fall, imperfectly, in love
which I have known, which you have known
but which no one can describe better
than the beautiful,
the immortal,
the irreplaceable Steve Perry.)

Yes, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats,
and William Butler Yeats, and all the rest of you:
you know it's true.

So here I go:

Broken hearts lie around me,
and I don't see an easy way out of this.
Was it something I said or something I did?
Did my words not come out right?
Though I tried not to hurt you,
though I tried,

But I guess that's why they say:
Nothin' lasts forever
and we both know hearts can change.
and it's hard to hold a candle
in the cold November rain.

I heard the preachers bangin' on their drums,
and I heard the police playin' with their guns,
but I never heard nothin' like you.

In my life there's been heartache and pain.
I don't know if I can face it again.
Can't stop now, I've traveled so far
to change this lonely life.

I want to know what love is.
I want you to show me.
a new religion that'll bring you to your knees--
black velvet, if you please.

Where you going, what you looking for?
You know those boys don't want to play no more with you.
It's true.

All we need is just a little patience.

Some will win, some will lose.
Some are born to sing the blues.
Oh, the movie never ends, it goes on and on
and on and on.

Don't stop believing.
Hold onto that feeling:
come on, pretty baby.
Kiss me deadly.

Listen:
I do not want to live a life
of grasping at the water that surrounds me.

You have looked at as many rivers as I.
You have seen as much silver,
and more gold.

I know you have seen
what happens to the most precious things
when you try to hold them in your cupped palms,

and dream of seeing what you wish to see
whenever you wish to see it
even on days when there is no sun
even on nights when there is no moon
even when there is nothing but your eyes 
and your hands 

for the water of your river to take hold of.

Listen:
You know as much as I,
and by tomorrow morning, you will know more.

I forget everything.  
Don't we all?

And tomorrow morning, won't I have forgotten
that it is the water grasping me, and not the other way around--
and won't I dive into my river, and hold the water in my cupped hands
looking for the silver in it,
looking for the gold.

Today I walked for a thousand miles on my knees
to get to the water.

I walked on the paved roads, on the dirt roads,
and tore the palms of my hands,
and cut my forehead and my cheeks
in the moments where it was too much to go forward
and all I could do was kneel down on the asphalt,
as if in prayer.

I did not pray for long.
Prayer is, I think, for a climate much more temperate
than this.  All I could do was move forward.

And do I need to say that water looks different
on a day when the sun shows itself in full,
and has no intention of falling below the horizon
for hours yet?

Do I need to say
that the sand is another shade altogether
that it is a shade not at all close to true white,
but brighter?

I don't think so.
You know enough already.
You know enough, even now
to be taken away from thoughts
of sun, and of sand, and of other small things
by the memory of the waves on a summer day you once lived
and how they moved toward you like horses on a plane
and how you rose above the sun's burning
and how you could no longer feel the sand
and how you could not stop yourself
from kneeling, as I did, on the
burning sand, on the
burning road,

and in the coolness of water
that had found you.

today I failed the exam
that would have allowed me
to go on a moment's notice
to the ocean, the desert,
the mountains.

I was sad and then I wasn't sad.
First I thought: But this
was meant to be
a summer of oceans,
of deserts, of mountains,
of jungles, and of new skies.

But then I thought of the things I had
available to me, and though of a summer
of bicycles, of rollerskates, and of running as fast
as I possibly could through fields of crimson clover.

I thought of the island on which I lived and thought of
knowing every rabbit, every bird, every patch of moss and
every miniature forest world, every path through the darkness
of trees, every swift little river, every stone in every dirt road,
every everything, as well as I know the curves and scars
of my own body, and knowing the sky as well as I know
the pale color of my own skin.  How could I be sad?

How could I have dreamt of better things when I knew,
having gone to school for as long as anyone else, and
having learned the things that every girl is meant to know
that there is nothing better than lying in a field of crimson clover
on a summer day, watching the paths of birds across the sky,
and listening to the wind through the aspen trees.

I know that you don't love me as much as TV,
as much as you like to hate some things,
as much as your car, as much as your
T-shirt collection, as much as The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, as much as the girls
who came long before me--but please, baby:

if you are ever at some old summer house upstate,
someplace you have not loved since you were a child,
and your mother asks you to help her lift the cover to the
hot tub (which has not been used in years), and you agree,
and strain to help her, and feel the slosh of years of water
trapped in a blister beneath the plastic, making it much
too heavy to lift, and step away, and look at something
you haven't looked at in years, and see things that
you have never seen before--if you step back

and see wasps flying in and out of a place
you cannot see, where they have made
a home of paper, and you see little
green frogs--the ones that sound
sometimes like birds--that live
inside, in the last of the water
and you see emerald mosses
everywhere--growing from the
cracks in the plastic, the gap
between water and wood,
and the cover's handles,
and everywhere, and
everywheree, and
you look closer
and see the
new green
things
that
come
from the
moss, things
that you know you
have never seen before,
and so see a new world, and
so feel--for the first time since you
had a cardboard sword and a cardboard
boat--like Christopher Columbus, and
like everything you see with your
new eyes is magic--well
then, pretty baby--

I hope that at that
moment, you think
of no one else
in the world
but me.

The world is a terrible place.
It's impossible to live one day,
to turn on the TV set looking for
a pleasant movie, to open the paper
without knowing this for sure: that
the world is a terrible place, and
that there is no such thing
as mercy, no such thing
as remorse.

I know this as well as you,
of course.

But before I tell you everything
you think I need to know
let me tell you this:

Once it was hot.
Once I was walking
through a city of green arches
with a girl made of green arches.
This was not a summer of holy times.
This was a year of cavities.  But that day was sweet.
We decided we wanted cherries.  It was a day
for wanting things, and we wanted
something sweet, something
scarlet, something we
could desire for
just a moment
before we stained
our mouths with its color.

It was a day for cherries.

so we went into a store
where all our scarlet
dreams were arrayed:
and oh, my friend, were
they beautiful?  Yes they
were.  Rubies.  We bought
a bag, and only found outside
in the hot sweet air of summer
that we had paid our life savings
for the one sweet thing we wanted,
that we could never want anything
again.  We had paid an incredible
sum.  It had seemed an incredible
sum.  It had been eight dollars, but
eight dollars was everything, and we
had nothing.  So we did what we could
do.  We went back into the store.  We went
into the place where our dreams were arrayed,
and we asked, as sweetly as we could, if fruit
could be returned.  (this was our hope.)

What a thing to ask!  We might have asked if the dead coudl be brought forth from their graves,
if the fighting could be stopped, if everyone could live in harmony and every white can in an alley
could have free dialysis when its poor white kidneys went out.  We stood knowing the audacity
of our wish.

We were ready for anything.
But the man standing before us
only smiled and said "of course!"
and reached in, and gave us a handful
of the sweetest-smelling green leaves in the world,
and then said, "but you have to take half of these cherries, of course."
and so we took them. 

It was a day for wanting things,
and a day for loving other things,
thought there was much to hate,
and we walked out into the sunlight
under the green arches of the city we loved,
though the white-coated cats were dying everywhere;
not every cat can be saved, not every war avoided.
It was a day for scarlet teeth and scarlet tongues.
It was a day for wanting.

Once I lived
with a girl who was named
Sarah--just like me.

There was nothing else about us that was alike.

She would leave in the morning before dawn.
I would come home in the middle of the night,
while she slept.

If we had timed our comings and goings,
we could not have known less of each other
though every day we saw the same things
and walked through the same pale gold-
hued snow, and even sometimes loved
the same: Sarah
and I.

I know we talked, but I cannot remember the things we said.
I know we saw each other, but I cannot remember the way she looked,
or the way I must have looked to her.

What I remember is this:
once, we didn't miss each other.
Once we came home at the same time,
under the same moon, and moved to our beds
and decided to brush our teeth.

(Both of us were so unhappy
so damn much of the time, and we did not need
to talk to each other to see it--it was something we both knew,
whether we wanted it or not, like the tall trees,
like the pale gold-hued snow,
like the moon.)

We moved to the bathroom together.
It was a dark narrow hallway.  It was
a complicated dance.  It was a dance
of: How are you, and You are more beautiful
than I had thought, and Here is your toothbrush
and Here is mine, and Here is a good thing that we
can both do, and Doesn't the moon look nice tonight?

(Yes, it did.)
We brushed our teeth together.
This is the only memory I have of the other Sarah,
and the only one I will ever have, and the only one I need
at least for now: we stood in front of the mirror, and the moon
was beautiful, and we were beautiful, and everything
seemed awful, but it wouldn't be for long,
and even if it was,
even if the worst was true
even if everything was awful forever
(as it sometimes seemed then)

at least we were standing here now,
at least the moon was coming out,
and at least, at the very least,
our teeth were white
and clean.

If we can have
one word for love
then why not have a thousand?

Why have one word that means--marriage.
the first kiss.  the song you always wish the radio would play
on the very last day of summer--
when you could have:

The feeling of renewed affection for someone you did not think cared for you
when you see they have put the glow-in-the-dark triceratops you gave them
on a prominent place on their desk, on top of the pencil sharpener,
so they can look at it whenever they want to (should they want to)
and think of you.
Or

The feeling of relief at rediscovering a long-lost relic of your childhood,
when you turn on a TV set in a mustard-colored motel room,
to see "Legends of the Hidden Temple," and remember
a part of your first ten years that you had forgotten, and
remember lying on your living room floor, and how
the armchairs were upholstered in mushroom
velveteen, and how the carpet
was goldrenrod.
Or

The feeling, as simple as it is impossible to deny
of waking up in the morning to see the world
covered in snow, and so see the world
transformed, and so know what it is
to truly be an explorer, and so know
what it is to see the world anew.

Or:
any of a hundred thousand other things,
that present themselves every minute of every day:
but there are not enough words in the whole of the world,
in every book and every library--or so I have been told--
unless we gave up on the principle faculties
of language (I want this, I need this)
and concentrated, every hour of
every day, on talking about
all the things
we loved.

I know a girl who belongs in a different world:
every time I see her face,
as we ride on the bus, as we walk down the street,
as she talks at great length about whatever new
thing she has suddenly found she is in love with,

she looks not like a girl of this century
but a woman who lived in a time when the world was colder
when people talked seldom, when colors were scarce.

she belongs
by the side of a wide river to the north
her face lit by the fire of a viking funeral.

The subtitle says
"But I must live another day, and see at least one more sunrise
even if it is without my Sven."

For a moment the camera catches
the face of shadow and light:
darkness, and skin as pale as bone.
Then she turns and walks away
and the people on the number 56 bus
think for a minute of applauding
but then think better of it, and return

to their small lives.