Two Poems

The Invention of Terrorism

Just as easy to design it without windows
Just as easy to say instead of a floor, a sea of tongues.
Just as easy to give up the ghost of pleasure that’s been haunting the body.
Easy to forget what the purpose of the tool, forget intention.
Wrench. Vise. Tire iron. Just as easy to create
the inclined table, the specialized drugs.
Just as easy to open its surface
like a tear falling into a pond,
how it becomes and devours the world.

Girls Putting On Make-up On the L Train

Two of them are seated next to each other.
One black, one white.
One of them painting a Russian stripper
onto an Iowa cornfield. The other,
laying our powder to deaden to mud the
dewy pleading of her face. From the brush,
she switches to a tiny, fuzz-tipped wand,
sodden with gloss, to shape her mouth.
The other, prying her eyelashes away
from the socket with a small sooty comb.
In this way we pass, lurching,
under the water between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
In this way we leave home and prepare for empire.
They have the look of experts
arriving at the scene of a wreck.
Impervious to the hurling speed, the rails’
sudden unevenesses. Ready. Ready, now.