A hawk's rise
over a talus bed by the freeway. Willed
missile of flesh & feather.
Its shadow pumping into the ground
just as furiously--

A mountain road, cut
between talus slopes. Debris
from the cliffs, erosion
flowing
to Lake Coeur D'Alene, axe-heart.

A swim of heat
in the air. And a drink
of rock, a river of rock
to drift off on, if
we should abandon ourselves.

***
Suffering is inherent, said the Buddha,
in all compound things. The trick to
become basic, rendered
like a carcass in a farmwife's hands: into the pot
this huge thing, life, & out of it
a small substance: mostly fat & bone,
fat & bone.

***
How much heroin did it take to become selfless?
Senseless? A wisp
almost beyond the cold reach of phenomenality?
How much Orange Crush & methadone I remember
so much just not remembering, a great blank of time
hard & soulless, wonderful
in its purity of conception. Forgetting
how to strike a match, what my hands do.
A place where no Suzanne existed. Years
frozen & gothicked out of time.

Always in langauge we betray our sense.
Addict meaning
the spoken against, the sentenced--

Your bones cry out, your cells
clamor, a bold testament rises in the blood.
This is how the body takes us: I want I want I.

How much more can the soul imprison you
with its taste for infinity, its spiritual belly
that expands to the size of god.

***
Mescaline. A roomful of children staring at colors
scarving from their hands. Heroin. A boy
with a needle just into a vein, so you can almost see
the long ribbon of milky opiate unfolding with pomp
into the blood--
a swirl, a rapture, like life forming in the womb.

Epiphanies, mystical marriages--

             Last night we hit a tree

Sometimes we forgot everything: a boy I was with
lost the concept of street & drove his car into a field.
Accidents, fights. Self--
carvers. My boyfriend who slashed a man's hand
off. Frail-veined girls

who shot up in the webs of their fingers,
in the skull behind the ear. Ropes
of bloat on the forearm. friends
who disappeared,

these things were not important--

The one question was oblivion. How to live
anonymous to yourself. a character
narrated by others in day-after phone calls, memory
wholly transplanted to another mind.

             they said for two hours I threw up, & took my clothes off
             then threw up 1,1 my sleep

Did I do those things? Does it matter?
Weren't we unlocked. listening, like an amused
audience at a Victorian salon, to our own adventures?
Slightly bored, slightly formal
with it all.

***
Pale, painted, body
geographic with bone:
this girl who lived as myself
             She's become
a thing I carry: unsure, watching her sleep
from Coeur d'Alene to Seattle to Bellingham. Hip-
bone, ribcage, imperishable breath.

We looked too hard then: we boarded the wrong ships.
In the one drive
for a stillness so tangible even the shadow stops.

All things, as the Buddha said, of one pure Suchness
free of arbitrary conceptions derived from sense

& inconceivable, as a river of rock, as a mountain opening its
             drecked passage,
the small shadow frantic there, & our car's shadow
crossing, seemingly at will, the stygian black.