And this is another poem with blocks of verse and blocks
of prose, but the prose is mine, as is the verse.
It's called "Reforming the Crystal."
"I'm trying to imagine how it feels to you to want a woman.
Trying to hallucinate desire centered in a cock,
focused like a burning glass.
Desire without discrimination, to want a woman like a fix.
Desire, yes.
The sudden knowledge, like coming out of flu,
that the body is sexual.
Walking in the streets with that knowledge.
That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh,
fantasizing going to meet you.
Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy.
But knowing all along that you were not
the source of that energy and joy.
You were a man, a stranger, a name,
a voice on the telephone, a friend.
This desire was mine.
This energy, my energy.
It could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet
you could be one of them.
Tonight is a different kind of night.
I sit in the car, the engine racing,
calculating the thinness of the ice.
In my head I am already threading the beltways
that rim this city, all the old roads that used to wander
the country having been lost.
Tonight I understand my photo on the license is not me,
my name on the marriage-contract was not mine.
If I remind you of my father's favorite daughter, look again.
The woman I needed to call my mother
was silenced before I was born.
Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out
on sheet-ice.
I want to understand my fear both of the machine
and of the accidents of nature.
My desire for you is not trivial.
I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents.
But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a cold engine,
cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting
into the field of a poem wired with danger, or to a trip
through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night
of female memory, where delicately
and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes
upon the ribs of the volcano the name of the one
she has chosen."