The Witch Series

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Mirror Spell

You are a shape-shifter

and a storyteller.

You have spent many nights as crow

or snail or leaf waving in the wind,

for you are changeable and unafraid.

You have been hurt many times, oh, yes,

wrecked and ravaged, and then set free.

Your relatives think you crowd a room,

though you feel yourself tiny and bee-like.

Your heart’s ease sprouts from

the pine needled floor of the forest.

You can conjure love for every being,

whether flesh bound, leaf adorned,

petaled, antennaed or furred.

You carry every kiss, every compliment,

every lightening you ever walked away with,

in a little suitcase behind your eyelids.

Right now, you are long overdue

for a voyage on waves of bliss.

Just write your desires across the sky

in the swiftly moving alphabet of birds.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published by The Nerve: a Writing Women Anthology, in 1997

During His Lectures He Notices

that her back is a straight garden 

wall from which the breasts

cascade like clusters of heavy blossoms.

He imagines God's head resting 

there on the startling blue of her dress,

God's hand that sweats

and wrinkles what covers her thighs.

His eyes follow her pencil.

How lightly she holds it, how she resists

putting his gray interpretations across

the white expanse of her notebook.

White. White moons in her nails. 

White sliding down a sheer stockinged leg.

Her shoe like a narrow 

black canoe with a bow:

he will take her across 

the lake of his desire some day soon.

He will begin to plead with her on paper:

Without you, he will write,

I am the soul of a rat, 

a crimson abnegation.

Without you -- nothing 

but a hammer

striking the Pieta, shit

on the head of the Buddha.