Learn the Silken Rendering            

She says I have the most rape-able voice in the building.
      Perhaps grasping

                          as a violin bow over a bridge.
The lucky hum of plums and peaches.
Or a tangle of
                        lingering. Skin and seeds.

Every Sunday—hiss, brink, a script stroked by vowels.

Week after week, she offers me ripe slices of pear on a blue glass plate.

Crystalline sound, twang or dirge,
      there is such sin in it. Voice of kneel and cunt, of hunt and loot.

            Between songs, I give her two pair
      of my dangly earrings.
They no longer fit me.

I turn around, talk reason into a microphone to a blank wall
      in a voice scuffed, already flung,
then drive home like hell-fire on back-country roads sculpted to snowfall.              

                  The moon above me draws an effortless circle
                  in multiples, a sort of clockwork
                        through the anatomy of night’s slap and poses.

Let’s say I don’t want to be alone with those animal selves
      who are otherwise. Let’s say

                        last week I was alone in a heap
      and night was thumps and silt. Say the voice pulls a blanket
over its rich silk murmur, that the flesh is hidden. I don’t know

      how close to talk that my lips stop the quiet.
Let’s say hummingbird wings. Try to stop the voice that brings up my skirt.

                             I picked pears on a kibbutz when I was 17.
      Early morning, open-ended. Day after day. Above me,

                        the birds were building claws.

      Let’s say I always lick the juice off the plate.

Coda

The media has been promising precipitation,
and the clumsy birds
slant through premonitions.
There is so much of nothing
in the desert,
and we are enthusiastic even
about minimal
snowflakes striking the dirt
like sequins. There is no sun
to believe in. I believe
in the edge of anything’s feathers,
the way some dark
little bird is hungering
under the sumac. I believe a policeman
killed his teenage daughters
in the town I used to shop in. Somewhere else
there isn’t anything left
to purchase, and sometimes
no place is greener
than this dirt road
or this ridiculous winter.
The hollow turns out to be less
of a ruin than the whole
city standing
in line at the market, the city ignoring
the homeless when the days
are this short
of their hours, the temperature clunking
at zero, and wind flaying
the sky. I believe the homeless
are still holding signs,
their black marker promising
how long we are fortunate, saying
what we already know, that we need
to hunger, to believe nothing
but birds.