New Year’s Transformers

Out of body, the strange apparatus

divides

air from air. It resembles a mouth,

an opening. Inhale. 

Not really a mouth, but there are hands

stitching together a summer cloud

in a sky of frayed ends.

Not really hands, not a sky, either.

Scents carried in the air weigh nothing.

All you can touch

contains a cosmos of memories.

There is not here. Now is not

the time. 

It can hear you talking,

although you only mouth the words:

it can pick up anything

and bear it along

up, up, and away: all those messages from elsewhere

arriving

and arriving and only passing through.

Interpretation of Dreams, for My Daughter

In my dreams sometimes I relive the thrilling first

sleep of a small,  sated innocent.  No howling, 

primal  twilight.  No monstrous, beating

heart rattling  the crib.

Someone’s mom

(or is it me?) devours every

creeping horror.

Awakening, I am clueless,

bruised deaf, screaming like a fish.

Maybe mothering is only a question

of which chunk is eating whom?

Ritualistically, I might squirt

menstrual hexes across

the sheets. I might chant crone’s wisdom.  Or mumble a prayer

against the scary future.  But I don’t

do anything,

I just dream. Some dreams

are also prayers.  The best ones recall

the naked grin, the bare brine tongue

of a slumbering angel.