Janet's Full Moon Rondeau

What we can't have, mistaken in the dark--
My friend & I drive past Judy Garland Park.
That's where the men go? He frowns, so what that he's gay?
I wish there was something like that for women, I say:
The men who go there just have sex, not relationships?
          hmmm....

Two friends of mine, a lesbian couple, on a lark
had public sex in the men's grove on Fire Island park
He finds other gay men intolerable, but hey!
          What we can't have, mistaken in the dark.

Later, at the reading, words ignite : a spark.
But we're in here, not outside in the dark.
She's just my type, older, angular, & makes my day
so intense, intensely so, & for that I'll pay--
a conversation won't do, but after dark in my park...
(my friend & I leave: he's off alone, me home to my lover)
          What we can't have, mistaken in the dark.



a woman alone

1
a woman alone
hears darkness
rising in cloaked
incantation--
bearded in
black robes,
priests caught
in their own shadows--
a woman alone
descends
into courtyards,
their candles
ablaze with her own light.


a woman alone

2
a woman alone
dreams terra cotta vases
spinning on the
axis of night--
pot shards in reverse,
never broken
she retrieves
with sleep
lines scratched
into pigment
that is the blush
of herself, a woman
walking through
her dreams alone.


a woman alone

3
a woman alone bleeds
during Holy Week;
she bleeds through layers
of gold coated bronze;
alone she sees the
persistence of green
eating its way through
in rough patches;
she bleeds her way back,
bronze and iron,
terra cotta bleeding
on earth, a woman alone bleeds.


a woman alone


4
a woman alone descends
without moving
and traces
invisible rooms
with her eyes--
alone she is her own throne
and the three stairs
that lead to it;
a woman alone
is the earth
stepping out of itself.


a woman alone

5
a woman alone is
in the middle of her life;
she is the memory
of the old ones
draped in the solid
shadows that inhabit her
as a woman alone
lowers her eyes
to the black shroud,
her own altar.

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