Dawn Pendergast

 

 

 

Love Letter America

 

To have the afternoon out, out with a stick

and the figure of a beetle

in the end. Got to swing the simple doors,

don't I? We run things like Canada

and it's very cold and my breath shuts

your ears.

 

I do love my woman and I do

next to the toilet, showering in summer

under vacant lights. My love is saying so

to the policed place here in your white head.

 

To hew jewels and encrust them 

and put soft felt inside green boxes. I tell you

everything I'm doing. It is spit.

The "World-making" ex. etc.

and you, yo you,

choose your coming to.

 

Singing

If we had your hands we would have them

getting smaller, saying Beetle, beetle into your apparel.

 

Singing

The men inside the men unzip. 

 

You want to be pressing a turtle down

with your foot. The very same spring turned over,

going you, you, you and your wifey hair

just as well laid on and burred.

 

 

 

 

Love Letter Hawks

 

Dear let's see, here are my dear hinds, a black shawl across my back, yanked it with my big sticky toes. Way down there. A dear dog wedged in my craw & slopped on my elbow, ass-up, underlit, but enough to read like a jackal. Here dear. String you up like a buzzy horsefly, count tinkles in the tinfoil. I wheeled out the electric heater for us. And hot tea, buddy. Be dragooning soon, rolling droll to the moon for ice cream cake. No, the ground floor. To binge my pinchy lips on your hair. My body swarthy topcloth lashed at the top, intonating to the neighbors, O dear. Here is R. Blaser... "words return where they never were" A thatch of blue, green, silver thistles, wish I could slur this or move with all my clothes on against the door, sort of waltz in white off balance, seven time two-ra-loo like dad dropping the soft gizzard in broth. Dear paragraphos. We volley hawks by the jesses, send them, scintillating green hills, and clear. You laugh at my trousers, kiss my mick chin, that I am dutiful, too humanly faced. Touching what tinges on your eye, look at you, fiddling with the hinges of a grasshopper, the stuff you love right here, how do you do? My thing is sound you dear, lift out silibant, calling me out distant slipshod like I don’t know, a sparrow someplace. Dear I'm afraid to pay rent, fix my headlights, partake,  I think you know how flimsy plaited flailing I intimate the fields. When I was little, whipping heaps of leaves into shape, covered the a's, half of the b's in the dictionary, played baseball with a wiffle while Dad cleaned fish tossing the awful silver heads anywhere I pleased.

 

 

 

 

Love Letter Dinner Party

 

We introduce myself in the foyer, being little

soft with my voice and cupping it

like crepes.

 

A carafe of water on the table

is there.  Is it.

 

Insects blitz my head

of hair and I think, them.

We're going all to 

a same house.

 

They are around me in delicate shoes,

doing to the parquet 

this walk they wheeze thru.

 

***

 

Circa, I let the dog off laying on some grass

beside the court. Think of it. My white dog 

is splotched. She goes to the water

and wants it and the fountain is to be twisted.

It flops forth, I don't why this

in particular way.

 

***

 

The air is tight with smells

and I see a couture of birds

in their seats. They not only look

as though they are coming & they cling

in the same breath.

 

What I wouldn't say to anyone is that

Deguy is a French poet who flips between

languages during an explanation. 

 

Getting my back, my heart, whose people

to talk to get very few.  I touch them.

It is the pain I wear shoes for, 

it is being around.