lust poem no.31
there is the air
poured
from stale radiator to pool
over bare skin
and open sill.
there is the lament
of a passing train
this side the river. there
is firewood stacked
beside the door, but no
goddamn snow.
it weighs like the hesitation
in her eyes that he
can’t see: that she
is tired of sad poems,
their puckered footsteps like
icefall on the second day
of spring. all ragged clouds
& slush & cold
metaphor. her skin
is forgetful. his hands
are on the small of her.
they weigh like silence,
like stone, like
remembering, brim
with words left
over which long
for un-houred mondays, for
un-hung evers, un-strung lives,
for words which long.
what i mean when we talk about the weather
i am writing the same poems
i was before i met you, where,
raining, i was then too pre-
sprung and ungainly and in-
congruent, lofting
plastic smiles
and polysyllabic line-
breaks despite the yellow
of my skirt. alas, you say,
and i like the letters in the word,
how they spell wings
in other tongues, but we
are far from flying,
drown down in our
respective sadnesses,
can’t remember
conjugations or cloud
patterns or what it was
to love easy. it must be
snowing hard, still,
somewhere.
mindful.
this is how spring comes,
stripes of green between
herring-boned brick, fern-fronding,
bare-armed, broken-eternitied;
mindful. (i am) convalescent,
cognizant of the dragons
that still lean in, hungry.
they bite at me, at
wrists and cheeks and eyes,
blindfully, so that my shape
is not the shape of others, ever.
after dinner, your stereo
won’t work; you ask me to sing, but
i’ve got only that song
where the girl is leaving and the boy
must drop everything to catch her.
(and that is
not us, after all.)
dragons, as everyone knows,
hate the sun. while you are gone, i sit
on the winter-warmed stoop
bare-armed, watching spring come,
scars palely fade, wondering
how this song will end.
the last rhetorical question
where do we dream,
now? i ask, remembering
monday afternoons
that could run through our fingers
like the juice from an overripe
plum. the snow this year
wasn’t as wonder-sunk as the last.
you didn’t dress me up and say
let’s make the most of this.
no, we sat with our backs
to a bar and watched the
flakes fall until they
didn’t. like a disconnect. suddenly
i feel i am stop-gap, filling-
in, badly wrapped
arm-candy. like winter-grass,
pale and limp and persistent.
like the snow that cries, fading.
so i do my dying during
daylight hours, afraid
the neighbors will hear,
call the cops, take
the cat, run. somehow i
am, still; embittered
& embroidered and melting
in what was. you are trim &
full up with prospects & when
you say let’s make the most
of this, it doesn’t sound
the same at all, at all.
sitting, two years later,
in the james center starbucks, i
am distracted by the business
which parades in suit, by
the slow, slow sound
of winter dying, its feeble thuds
keeping time with my own unarmed
chest. there is a meek half-light
outside the windowed-walls,
the sun un-warm & indecisive.
i am afforded a first-class view
of the parking garage,
the crimson-awninged atm,
the bundled cafe umbrellas.
i am waiting, brokenly:
for a car crash, for a lightning strike,
to see someone i recognize.
for you to catch hold
of my cheek and say, come,
let me take you home.
it is more limbo than
purgatory, the waiting;
there is no redemption at its end,
only the promise of a flatter
mattress and yellowed teeth.
as the poet said: there
is evening, there is morning,
and i think i loved you better
when we were
desperate. besides i
quit being a good catholic
years ago, now only
remember my rosary
when digging through
the jewelbox for a gold
chain you also didn’t give me,
also years ago.
This is kinda a re-make of a poem i did about two years ago, posted wayyy back here.
Don’t apologize.
Sorry is not a poem
you post on your wall,
framed in flimsy black plastic
that wouldn’t hold a body.
Sorry looks at you,
dead straight, only
when the war is over.
Then it unfriends you on Facebook.
Sorry has no metaphors.
No spindly pale analogies.
It smells like your future
ex running late on a Thursday,
face scrubbed
with a stale washcloth.
Sorry tastes
like what i imagine
funeral flowers taste like,
broiled. Sorry is the sound
of a silence two
seconds too long;
is the difference
between stalking
and lingering, between
dancing and dithering,
between a kiss
and being caught.
Sorry is always caught.
But is hardly ever contrite.
thunder-and-lightning love
they razor
across a face opaque
as sugared absinthe, her smile-
shanks, swearing nothing
could ever come between them, nothing:
the studded starlight, the straightness
of his spine;
there was a time i would’ve moved
everything; now all
that is left is to move on,
the piles of pills uncut, un-
touched on the kitchen counter, a
caress in their cold aloneness. no
half measures in this meeting; she
reads too fast, so crazy she
mustbe in-love, in-
fatuated (i find
i do not believe youmuch, anymore), un-
characteristically alive; still, she reads
too fast, like cobblestones
coming up to meet you, & there is no
sorry in cement, like our
footsteps that day we walked
the beach in the cold, like
elbows in a coffeeshop
on a streetcorner
where they sit and argue
(will they remember my voice,
when i am dead?)
over what it means to be crazy.
becomings
she breaks hearts
like she breaks
bread, gnawing &
soft, follows
the trail
of heartbeats
as it grows
more obliquely
spaced, slowing.
she is searching
for a place to rest
among the wreckings;
she is silent,
like an empty
tattoo, like a bruise
on a thigh. she is
chewing up her past,
tearing it in tiny pieces
and swallowing.
it is fibrous,
absolving, like a train
whistle, like you
in bed on saturday
mornings. she
still dreams of snow
and red dresses, of
the stuffed bear
he left when she left:
please don’t go
again.
crazy (déjà something)
is the sum of us
counted out into highway miles
between here and the ocean: two-
oh-seven the plastic
inscribed on the single room
key; three close
hours we fight
to keep the bed
from squeaking while your
four gushing walls tattoo
against my own
ever, a millisecond that melts
skin into skin & still
hurts with yearning; the backdrop blue-
lit bourbons spilt
through drip-
ping minutes of Saturday night
into the misty evanescence
of Sunday morning &
suddenly it’s five
twenty-five and unbearable:
the distance, the leaving in
darkness, the cleaving
breathless-ness of one.
this is what goes on the last page
we fall, as the year
into december, so
wetly longed-for.
the rush
that calls our quiet
is the absence
of sirens.
the rails we walked
for so long
now blink
into forever,
a smoke-curl
on january’s horizon.
your left hook
is useless
against the coming
cold.
that kind
of hardness
can only melt
or burn.
reflecting as we turn from the water
there was such hope
in this morning.
there were springs
and summers all
jumbled up in our eyes.
there were poems
scrawled in neon, winding
between our fingers:
binding, not bound. now
they slog through wet
descent, flailing, &
here we are at the back
of the notebook, a single
leaf remaining
before october ends.
cold settles in
like a low fog,
like tequila hung-
over, like
responsibility.
the river keeps rising,
and i will miss it.
there was such hope
in this morning.
& i am waiting still.
the things we burn
you say we are descended
from giants,
but i
am more impressed
by the tenacity
of acorns,
how they worm
their way into the wet
fall ground. inside
their porcupined-cap heads
they are oaks already, & we
mere children
playing in the dirt, watching
sparks curl round the thread-
bare dark. their every breath
threatens to catch the night on fire,
and my eyelashes are singed
with soot-stained doubting.
these are the things we burn;
with smoke in my hair,
will you love me still?
suddenly
we’re reaving yesterdays like
leaf-fall & peanutshells, piling
them in great heaps to smoke
and shudder; tonight
i listen to the same sad song
you sung me on those days
you sang for no one, and
the creak of the polished floors
under my uneven footsteps
echoes through all the seasons
between that day and this:
fall, winter, spring,
summer, fall
winter, summer, fall, winter…
the sound of broken
promises is similar
to nothing so much as that
of broken glass, & suddenly
nothing
is so bitter
as chocolate.
suddenly,
there is all this talk
of elephants.
doubt
is a dragon
who eats love poems,
chews up their beginnings
and chars my pages
with the white li(n)es
and black letters of regret.
fall has not even
truly fallen, yet we stall out
like gas-starved engines:
sparks that stutter, flame,
consume. will winter find
us hitch-hiking home,
the snow melt sogging
through wet leaves, limp
socks? what can rev up for-
ever, catch us now on fire?
who will teach me, again,
to purr?
reckoning season
summer passes. all its hot-
cropped doubts and match-
struck storms leave
a vacuum where we used to sit
on high-backed stools
and sip on laughter. this is
why i fall in love
though it makes me sad, why
we kiss on street corners
and write poems
about poems. autumn
comes welcome and in-
between, filling the sky
with empty spaces
to tell a story
of matched rails
and sunlight-through-leaves.
today is a good day
for the beginning
of end-
ings, wet-burnt
and rising as they carry us
off in laughter and smoke,
leave us fearless, bare-
footed in rain.
it is too early
for sad winter metaphors.
september holds
a hard enough leaving
in her crumpled fist:
dry and caustic and
eager to flame. like
tracing flowers in bleach,
like soaking cattails in gasoline.
day-dreaming in stolen words
children chase the shadows
of butterflies round a fountain
of stone; pink
blooms of crepe myrtle drift in
the august breeze to land
teasingly on skin, clothes, hair.
she finds it strange
how every man who has ever said
he loves her has also said
you deserve better;
hikes up her skirt to let
the late afternoon sun
kiss knees, thighs;
wonders. the moon
will be small and orange
tonight, a plaything
for summer’s dying gods.
who will kiss
her noon-shadow,
chase the butterfly wings down
the arch of her back, crown
her summer-glow
like a prom queen in pink crepe,
carry her home when
august has ended?
augury, in the strictest sense
we walk through thunder,
and there are drawn stormclouds
across your cheeks, brow; like train-
tracks to nowhere, and i’ll hop
the next boxcar, simple as un-
wanting, follow it til i find
the sun buried in your irides.
this metaphor is a railroad:
straight, the slow
unraveling of sudden horizons.
a friend tells me
the story of the red-
tail hawk attacked
sequentially by two crows
and a mockingbird. i
wonder if it’s because they know
jealousy like you do, see its predatory
threat atop every lamppost and
telephone pole.
raindrops like fat clay pigeons hiss
against rusted rails, tear-on-trestle,
black-feathered bullets of omen:
where will you be
when the lightning comes down?
question i will never ask
there is a Hebrew saying that means: the world is a narrow bridge;
the most important thing, not to be afraid. yet the night here begins
to forget itself, and there is fear in the darkness. you have your gloves on, thud-
squish, my heartbeat as heavy bag. i sink slowly, unrepentant.
the air stickens, and like good fighters, we each face the lightning alone.
a coolness rises off the river, wishing it were the sea. tideless, i
am drowning in the honeysuckled tears of a frustrated blue-green.
the march of dandelion clocks ticks onward, dug-in: six months, some-
odd days and twenty-seven seconds. slow mornings filigreed into chains
of summer hunger; wonder if when i reach its length, i will still find you waiting?
epitaph for the soulless
there are
wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this
was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched
into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings
in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-
current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth
dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each
rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,
this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.
between the rails and the river (keep swimming, girl.)
there’s a sun tangled mid-
winter in the confines
of your eyes, spilling out
over the rocks like sick
solace or liquid
lust & trestled between
either shallow
bank as if it alone
owned the hour-
glass dripping
sand into our shoes
& under our
pretenses but
i’m in love
with silhouettes,
you get lost in
the separation cry of
down-stream currents
and there are still
shadows in this un-
plumbed ever.
