homing

our senior year

we lived off campus on

the corner of fulton

& washington in the hood

because we were bad—

ass thugs who read

heidegger & hocked spit

at oncoming trains when

the monthly checks

came in like clock—

work from our parents

we blew the cash on market

novelties: somebody knew

somebody who sold

carrier pigeons apparently

it was a popular trend in south

america. collectively

we invested in a dozen

or so kept them on our rooftop

in homemade cages

built out of plywood nails

& chicken wire. sunday afternoon

while the old ladies in matching

pillbox hats & leather pumps

cooed sweet baby jesus

on their way from church

to the local crown fried chicken

across the street we tied

little bags of marijuana & cocaine

around the small feathered

backs watched our stealthy aviators

hobble left & right under

the foreign weight before unleashing one

into the eggshell blue sky

for a test flight: the bird

shot out of my hands

like a can of soda exploding

this was fast money but we mis—

calculated & the bird fell

somewhere along the way

to queens in the heat

on the concrete pavement

wings beating hard

heart even harder & in the news

police called it a case of

criminal ingenuity. we tried

setting the other eleven birds

free but the catch

we learned

with homing pigeons

is they always fly

back.

elegy of charmian

Before the Roman dogs break down these doors,

let’s talk woman to woman, queen.

Though you lie there on the bed

and see no one.

No one but your soldier—transformed

into a god, perhaps.

I laughed the day you set out to greet Marc Antony

over the waters,

in your golden barge with the purple sails and silver oars.

So perfumed, they said the winds were

lovesick.

Now you lie on silk sheets in your own monument.

The perfect tableau, once again. Your body,

cold as a slab of marble, is beautiful

as it was before. I see the asp's fresh bite flush

on your left breast, like a lover’s kiss in the night.

Even in death, you know how to wet

men’s appetites.

Tomorrow, you will be buried next to your Antony.

And Caesar will remark: No grave on earth shall hold

a love so destructive

it took the world’s history as its stage, and then

the heavens, too.

What is death compared to

slavery. Shall I be a puppet paraded on the streets

for the enemy to stare and paw at?

(Even sweet Iras—look how she sleeps—

said she’d rather claw her eyes out with her nails

than witness such a spectacle.)

No, I will play my part in your script, Cleopatra.

But when I take the poisonous asp

no one will say:

There lies poor Charmian who loved once,

and was beloved. Who could have married a young farmer

and settled by the Nile. Bore him children. Two strong boys,

running like the wind and turning golden in the sunlight.

Who will leave nothing behind now, not even

her shadow, for her love was not worth

a tragedy.

In the final act, the maidservant might as well

be furniture.

the heads

I wake up and find my husband
buried up to his ears in dirt in our backyard.

His mistress is next to him,
between the roses and azaleas.

Only their heads and necks are visible
from where I stand,
on the patio we built together.

The two heads talk animatedly to each other,
though they can't actually see
their partner in crime, because of the way they are
positioned in the ground.

I think: It's like that Beckett play,
Happy Days, where the heroine
is all alone, and with a gun. At least, she could move
her hands on stage.

From afar, they could easily be
tree stumps, or a very large rock in the grass.

The high noon sun beams down.
I don't know if I should offer my husband a stiff drink,
or cool him off with the garden hose.

As for her, I pretend not to notice
the way she pouts her little lips. Even in this heat
she is beautiful.

I imagine her twenty-something body
beneath the sandy dirt. The breasts still perky,
the stomach relatively flat.

I wonder if he still pictures her naked
the way I'm doing now.

Straining to read a face
I lived with so long I no longer remember
what it looks like. Then resisting
the urge to walk over to the two heads in the earth

and pull them up individually, by the hair,
like you would a carrot or some other type of root.

What do you say to a milkweed?
Nothing, apparently. It goes on spreading
wherever it pleases.

Until one day, you learn that it's not the garden's fault
for being weak. That you are free
to overlook this imperfection. Let nature
return to its original state. But not before

you set the field on fire.

His wife says he's still a child.

Threatens to sell his

1968 Smith Corona Galaxie,

because he wakes the baby every night

with his clicking and clacking, DING!

If only she could see, the nine different

muses inside his head.

Tolstoy’s wife copied out seven drafts of

War and Peace: He would send her weekly telegrams

with edits. One word change

and she’d rewrite the entire page, by hand

with pen and ink. This apparently went on for years.

His literary agent suggests he find a hobby:

fishing, salsa, or perhaps take up the

violin.

He's convinced he's of the late bloomers,

the stalwart soldiers who never gave up

hope,

or did and despaired, but their writing

was better for it.

There was the summer he locked himself in

a room

for sixty days—inhaling coffee and cigarettes—

while his students systematically forgot

everything he’d taught

on allegory, conceit, and the Fate of the Prelapsarian

Man:

He was at his desk in a June fever,

striking the keys with white hot fear, matching the symphonic

mating cries of the cicadas in the trees

outside, and his words were sex

or money, or both.

(The trip they planned

but never went: a long weekend in Western Mass when the leaves turn

a red-gold crisp, by the pond where they first met

during her college years at Smith. They were young once,

and he had promised.)

Tomorrow, he’ll hear back about a story.

His story.

He’ll buy a bottle of champagne. The only sound

that will wake the baby, in the middle of the night,

will be the quiet shuffle of their two feet, as they slow dance in the kitchen,

she will draw close to him, in the fragmented moonlight, and

sigh.