your immediate cormorants

I wish I could remember
you sleeping
seems to me you were always
awake when I stumbled
to consciousness
awake and writing
I felt for the phone, dailled two, room service

golden
your long curved back
absorbed you reached behind
and clamped my left breast
the other hand
inscribed wet notes on the lions
Sicilian outrageous
grand mechanisisisms
melodious
infamy
my right breast
triggered the secret door behind
the innocent, panelling in my library

your immediate cormorants
oh, my mercy
transcendental work
is going on

Cat People (1982)

Cat People (1982)

when twilight crawls down the lawns of the old
New Orleans zoo
shadows lean like collapsing bars
at dawn she
wakes naked and bloody-faced alone
to the crisp lip-curling spank of cat
pungent cement
her own basso profundo moan

my panthera pardis …

go then through the empty streets as the black city mumbles
the Desire Project where ambulances won’t go
with its broken flat windows leaking Cajun smells
past boughs skeined with Spanish moss
in the drowned French quarter
the graveyard sinking
in Mississippi mud

now this old swamp pops and creaks
around her entering
above, the moon is beaten gold
a crocodile god’s eye

pole the boat past the cayman’s swirl
to the shack trapped in the bayou
black she waits
frightened panting
enter slow
don’t forget
to chain her down