Eileen Myles

Milk

I flew into New York
and the season
changed
a giant burr
something hot was moving
through the City
that I knew
so well. On the
plane though it was
white and stormy
faceless
I saw the sun
& remembered the warning
in the kitchen
of all places
in which I was
informed my wax
would melt
no one had gone high
around me,
where’s the fear
I asked the
Sun. The birds
are out there
in their scattered
cheep. The people
in New York
like a tiny chain
gang are connected
in their
knowing
and their saving
one another. The
morning trucks
growl. Oh

save me from
knowing myself
if inside
I only melt.

Eileen Myles
Photograph copyright © Dona McAdams, 1997

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, was educated in Catholic schools and graduated from U. Mass (Boston) in 1971. She moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. She studied with Paul Violi, Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan at St. Mark’s Church. She edited a poetry magazine dodgems in 1977-79. She ran the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project in 1984-86. With Liz Kotz she edited The New Fuck You/ adventures in lesbian reading (Semiotext[e], 1995) which won a Lambda Book Award. Black Sparrow Press has published Eileen Myles’s book of short stories Chelsea Girls (1994) and a book of poems, Maxfield Parrish (1995). Her most recent book of poems from Black Sparrow is Scbool of Fish (1997).

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