with my dinner of cookies and vodka. And I am amazed

that my own country still exists, though I am not in it

to speak its language or break its drug laws. How astonishing

to realize that I am not the glass being shattered

on the street below, or the laughter that follows it;

I’m not even one of the congregation on my small TV,

getting the Lord’s good news, though I can reach

the screen by leaning forward, and touch

the wavering lines of each transfigured face. I tell you

I can’t get over it sometimes, I still have trouble

believing that an egg deep inside my own body

went and turned into someone else, who right now

is on a tour boat on the river, having forgotten

how she used to hold on to my legs whenever I tried

to leave the room. Right now, somewhere I am not,

the history of the world is being decided,

and the terrible things I’d rather not think of

go on and on without stopping, while I separate

the two halves of another cookie and lick

the cream filling, and pour myself one more

and drink to you, dear reader, amazed

that you are somewhere in the world without me,

listening, trying to hold me in your hands.

On Knocking Over My Glass While Reading Sharon Olds

ON KNOCKING OVER MY GLASS WHILE READING SHARON OLDS

The milk spread,

a translucent stain

covering the word milk,

snaking down toward come

and womb and penis, toward gashes

and swiveled, toward the graceful

grey flower and the infelicitous

errless digit, so that suddenly

the page seemed to be weeping,

the way a statue of the Virgin

in some poor but devout parish

might begin to weep, ichor streaming

from the eyes, the open palms,

so that when the girl kneeling

in the rain of the convent yard

touches the mottled white

folds of the stone robe

her lupus disappears. And I felt

as that girl must have felt,

that the Holy Mother herself

had come to reveal

the true nature of the real,

goddess in the statue,

bread in each word’s

black flowering, and I rose

and went to the kitchen—

sacristy of the cupboards,

tabernacle of the fridge—

to refill my glass

with her wild and holy blood.

Fuck

FUCK

There are people who will tell you

that using the word fuck in a poem

indicates a serious lapse

of taste, or imagination,

or both. It’s vulgar,

indecorous, an obscenity

that crashes down like an anvil

falling through a skylight

to land on a restaurant table,

on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.

But if you were sitting

over coffee when the metal

hit your saucer like a missile,

wouldn’t that be the first thing

you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back

shouting, or at least thinking it,

over and over, bell-note riotously clanging

in the church of your brain