The Porch, Late Evening

When I told Roger that I had never loved
a woman
not really, anyway
he wheezed and laughed
and lit a cigarette

and said

"I loved a woman once;
a great grey turret
of a woman
as stiff and thick as a stanchion
with eyes as wide and slow
as pelicans
and shoulders as broken and slumped
as Tennessee."

I remember thinking that, perhaps,
I could love someone
who could love someone like that

I think we liked the end of Inception for very different reasons

The tedium of watching a slow rotation:
the grudging quarter turn of a bolt
while kneeling on the side of a highway,
sweating, while cicadas hum in the scrub
we tighten a stubborn screw in turns.

I'm indebted deeply to spinning
noiselessly in space
it's a function of the universe
that I have always found charming
and perhaps a little
ad hoc

but if
the universe is a perfect
conical construction
spiraling down from the vastness
of infinity to the minutia of elephant
and again from fingernail to ion
if the twist we fail to feel
is in the blueprints
a feat of engineering laid out in advance
then, well, I am surprised

instead:
knowing what I know of delicate work
it seems to me that perhaps the first thing,
whatever item on a great oak desk
signifies the whole
of, well, everything,
was probably set to a ponderous wobble
by the fat flank of a chubby cat in a work space
who believed himself stealthy

thereafter, we have damage control

I find a devious pleasure
in the idea of wild spiraling;
I wish, on dreary Wednesdays, to become
the reckless and gone spin of lost control;
to see the bolt strip, the ridges dull,
to watch a wrench spin free and away
from a tired hand

There is a joyous tension there,
relieved finally when a little top begins
to spin irregularly, to weaken, and fall.

Lunch and Soot and Sail

1.
Lunch and Soot
were my friends
before I learned to use semicolons
before pretension set in
like pneumonia
from exposure
to

all this, I guess

I liked the rattle of school, the
sound of the wheels on the gravel
when it grew intolerably hot
all of your weekends would roll out before you
unfurl like a sail, and we would mark our charts with schemes
ideas about time and ambition, before
the sailcloth would flump to the grass, and we remembered
that we owned no rigging

2.
When I eat macaroni and cheese, I prefer to use a spoon (because
I am a graceless slavering thing, who is primarily concerned
with the transfer of twists from bowl to maw);
I get fuller bites and besides
what did you mean to accomplish
with both a large bowl of macaroni and cheese,
unaccompanied,
and dignity?
I just prefer spoons.

When Soot learned dirty words, he used them like spoons,
on anything they could even conceivably hold.
He would have used two spoons to eat sushi, if he
had been aware of this analogy then,
or of sushi.

he swore with diabolic innocence
a little dictator
a prepubescent nuclear option
and a firm belief in Valhalla

the words themselves could frighten us, could fill us
with dread and life

 3.
You still like toys
and I still like that
but you really ought to remember a simple dentist appointment.

When you wake, or fail to sleep at all

slipping beneath centuries but
asleep in ten minutes
snoring hungrily
in twelve

there is a quality of malice in that specific type of breath
drawn like a bow
poorly
across the rusted strings of a cello

snoring can be adorable exactly once;
after that, it is the sound
of carefully plotted
murder

but:
in the warm light of breakfast
when we can be troubled
for that particular ritual

the dawn gives way to a few seconds
of space, and peace, and ownership

of faculty and forgiveness

Curses and Stickpins

Writing is to speaking
as burnt hair is to lightning;
perhaps this is why
I prefer to draw.

Writing is sandbox to the battlefield,
it is play full grown. To speak is to stage. I find my pleasure
in the press of charcoal to soft, cream paper. I find my pleasure
where I will.

To speak of writing requires something fermented,
sticky and sick and ghastly sweet, left to
congeal in a pickle jar poorly rinsed.
Wouldn't you rather hold that bottle,
tilt it to the side, note the viscosity
then put it back on its homemade wooden shelf,
and back out of the room, and quietly shut the door?

I am concerned mostly with Rube Marquard,
and opal, and a curse:
I have lived in this city for ten
long years, and the traffic reports still sound to me
like spells, powerful hexes
that leave me foreign and affected.

I have flung totems into rivers before, into cold waters,
and it's not such an odd sentiment--if
these were older moments, we might even ask some god
of sweep and dissolution to protect us,
to carry away all poisons. We will lose
games, and pen the articles
of frustration, and later, when everyone else is gone,
we will gather the words unused, and make a little joke
for those that loved us anyway
as if to say "I'm sorry, it was always a third thing."

A Single Honest Thing

You say: I'm not prepared to drive another mile in this dark
with animals crossing the road
the way you stumble through the bedroom:
rubbing sleep from your eyes,
lifting your shirt to clean your glasses,
murmuring something about the library

So we get out and stretch and
I'd like to use a different word, of course, but let us be real
here and now:
those stars are completely
fucking
twinkling

we stretch, and climb some small hill,
a precarious pile of rocks,
and then we sit
a little apart, but near enough to touch
if it comes to that
up here on our mesa
in this non-metaphorical desert,
under these stars

stars shining,
honest to god,
earnestly

we lay flat, and feel the way
a person might feel
while laying flat on their back beneath
an omnipresent sky: vaguely moved,
non-specifically struck,

and there is quiet
and we think, together

with nothing to stop us
but ourselves,
here on this black stone

say to me one
single
honest
thing

and we each say together
nothing could be more difficult
or more beautiful

beautiful is a word I would never use
to describe a notion
back home
in the city

and perhaps then we touched
or perhaps not
but either way, I thought
what
the fuck
has the desert done to us?

Sound/Space/Legume

When you seek space, you are located. It envelops, develops,
presumes, consumes, gently,
so gently, it entombs

Sound/Space/Legume
Stax soul/kitchenette/black beans
with rice, slicing bell peppers and swaying
humming and mumbling, dreaming as small as we dare

those little prayers, whispered between tasks
will find the cracks
the weakened buttresses
the weekend mattresses

what sort of being sets its own
mold? Defines its own parameters? Draws
its own boundaries, in ink,
in a language of
its own devising?

Sound/Space/Legume
birds/bed/coffee
the gentle indentation of
confused giddiness
still, stillness

what sort of being sets its own mold
and is then surprised to see
its final shape?

the deployed plastic
the drained hot metal
loose in your apartment
loosed in your compartments

Sound/Space/Legume
The hiss of a braking train/the snowy station platform/a small hot cup of lentil soup
held tight, in both hands, sipped carefully
waiting for you, to step out, walk back
through the damp weighty air
into home

Let's Make It Instead

It's easy to imagine
myself, unshaven, forgotten
apartment
listings on a sheet
of folded graph paper
creased soft under
my fingers

how's the water pressure
check
are pets allowed
check
where do you get pets
check
and

has it ever been haunted

and the guy laughs
a little and shakes
his head

and I say
I'll fix that

Washout Harvest

Sawed off just a right - for makes alone
mine and me in correct consecutive
Tuesdays, in Nigeria

careful, the downtrodden understand us, warrant a hunger, a trigger, a sneaker. Raspberry
Suede: the letter: happy hiring. Up
one run, the sick stomach drop
boasting is losing season

A hit (ballerina-length)
is a torn hamstring, a congressman, a smattering of appalls. These kids, a composite
loss; they fire loch, they shed plague, they breathe deep graphite

furthermore standing in nylons nevermeans            in socks, in powder blue.
Really, then, it was a date with the Kansas City Royals
that provided the cure.

Mother and Child

the past is a vacuum and

it’s horriblehollow—

the inside is just lint

and shame—

the past is a space where

dirty things are stored—

in the same small,

reusable womb—

most of it is just fluff

from the carpet, the

fabric of living, stirred and soiled

by feet and soda,

unbirthed back inside as

she pushed across the carpet—

I mean she moved across the carpet—

and I fled into the bedroom,

scared of the hollow sound—

the roar of the suction—

I heard the ringing in my ears

of creation

from the kitchen

—your mother is calling—

You think the phone

is ringing but

it’s difficult to say—

the vacuum is so loud—

don’t let the machine get it

pleasedontletthemachinegetit

The Histrionics of Game Shows

I’m not making this up, and I’ve got a right to say it:

Polo was my game, and my mallet was the sky.

But I’ve no memory of my history, and

now it’s just myself, and a pretty

freckled orphan in some cat’s pajamas. Also, it seems, a dog.

“Don’t give my dog chocolate, because it’ll make his stomach

swell up and explode,” she said.

I watched her

face, small as hope,

small as pixels, every fresh outburst

a little prayer. The sun sets

like a southerner, sighing,

easing down on the porch.

Memory is a passionate pillow kiss

at eleven, a

sordid mock mop tango

to boot. Your fingers run down

it’s hair, your eyes are ablaze.

and history, oh!

history has ever been a game show,

a silly indulgence for academics

and lonely mothers. And we each

choose a deity—Barker, the Immortal, or

Wise Trebek, or maybe Louie Anderson,

maybe. He’s the Nietzschian candidate.

It’s yours like a jockstrap, though;

no sense in pretending someone wants that.

  

“You mean pigeons,” I said. “And probably Alka-Seltzer,”

but she was already busy with breakfast—

She folded little stars into an omelet, removed
her apron
and clicked

the hanging chain.

Watching Mad Men Makes Me Feel a Little Bit Ill; Like, Physically Ill

Old Blue Eyes had it,

a whimsical masculinity--
lying and believed and rising and obscene—

smoke lifting like prairie kitchen steam,

            ash falling like

Winter on the postwar era.

I could have held a cigar like Hitchcock, or

Milton Berle—phallic, forgiven—

what drifts
is the sense
of self-awareness
blown out in rings
to hang

at arm’s length

a smoking jacket

removed when things got

hot

Oh, and

I never really figured out 

that winking thing

Another Costume Party

We get died to the roots

for animal painter’s eve.

Slip a shark a fin             shuffle

in past some marine life—

two coke-thin crustaceans.

We check the competition

    we are the competition

Lions (fresh from the coliseum)

this place: Tangier/ Arkansas.

I am my uncle (whom no one has ever met)

the costumes=complication:

everyone is a pregnant teen disguised

as something else; is everyone here?

Wolves howl on the roof; we’ve places to be.

 

Dinner party: we connect colby jack

(eats cracker crumbs)/ Marble

Madness/ A needle in a stack

of needles. The show is

starting and we are clumsy

adolescent sex/ pure charisma

David Duchovny/ Silk Stalkings

I watch the foyer as costumes revolt to

bathroom/bastille; I think:

you were going to be a comma/

you decided to stay home

inside the vein

we were Trolley Dodgers when we met,
just kids, blue collars on factory necks
Brooklyn Dago
hearts on sleeves, sleeves rolled up.

We took down the navy in our first year
together,
the pinstripe empire crumbling
the same week he moved in. We were
don’t ask don’t tell with everyone from the old neighborhood,
but the way mama looked at me—

We loved Jackie R, but we never talked about why.

We got hassled every
yellow moon/rent due but
this was the fifties, and
blue laws played louder than
Behind Closed Doors, which
is still 20 years too late.
“you queers better get out if you know what’s good for you!”
So ’57
comes for everyone

a Kind of Blue
Train, and Period,
while our team skyed to L.A.la land. Even then you
could trace the
varicose tracks to the west,
to San Francisco,
where there’s an excess of blue-blooded hearts.

But we left you a note, Brooklyn, a
muted third with a little
twang: Sorry Lucille,
you ain’t coming where we goin’:
Trolleyhaven—Tony Bennett,
Blue Velvet.

For Motionable Horizon

It was icy on the waves. Six months until June,

and the ocean held us like books on a shelf. The stress

from our lunches, taken seated on the ice—the moon

beamed like our mother—we used our napkins often. To obsess,

honestly, on manners and bibles (serpents,

arks, god only knows what else) is moot

these last days—an age we celebrate with cake,

honor like the boat cars of yesteryear—“What a beaut!”

Evil, too, these unparkable hulks, these sleek things, Garbo-

sweet in their nostalgia. It’s at the past we play,

picknicking on the frozen lake like a lost hobo

waiting for the swell, for motion and horizon. Today

cripples in the sunrise, refracting through rhinestone:

present pooling heat, melting ice like cologne

After the World Tour

Mildew is the basement’s skin.

Damp socks, pork rinds, Gunsmoke

marathonning. The mold is a forest, perhaps—I pin

an oak to my throat, the folk-

lore mysterious like the ocean. What’s venom

to a desperate loanshark? Cartilage/enamel/

cocoon, we are entombed…damn us, denim

us, force us to the dunes. We trade a camel

for a caramel, for fountain gun

confections, for a song. I left with a tattoo,

a return address on my neck, the orphanage, a nun,

A heavenly lady/place and a fondue

farewell, dripped across the sweets, the fruits, the vegetables; A fetish

abandoned like my mother, the sister: "hell ahead, red as rainbow."