In the shower I smell you on my skin as soon as the water hits my body. A mist rises and lifts the secrets you left in my underbrush. I’m taking pictures of your hands and developing them on a paper made of ash. This is how we’ll recognize each other in the dark. There’s a rattle at the door. My wife stumbles in and vomits in the bowl. There’s still something left to be said. It skipped town though. Weeks ago. Tied to the back of a blind dog. She rocks on the floor. Her legs stacked sloppily on top of each other. Her panties riding up one side of her ass. There’s a bruise too. I start thinking about surfactants and ways of misleading the government about the color of my eyes. Somewhere deep down there the sharks are circling each other. They’re waiting for the weight of the ocean to produce the slightest tear in their skin. It’s made up of tiny teeth. I draw the curtain. She’s left her panties in a wet ball in the sink. It’s October. Last night I took my friend to the emergency room. He had cut up his hands and face with a broken bottle. He takes pills that take away his feelings but leave him with a desire to steal and hurt himself. The Nurse who took his belongings at the psychiatric ward said she liked the way I smelled. My wife has a date tonight. I cut up some onions to get breakfast started. You’re in another city. I’m never going to let you read this poem. Not even the nice bits. This poem’s for Neptune. Not even he knows what to do next.
The girls on the bus are taking pictures of themselves so they can send them to each other while they’re riding on the bus. Seeds whirling down in the muggy afternoon and clicking as they fall in heaps upon themselves. Some of them were ballplayers who threw the game now and then. Some of them were doctors who hurt the people they loved. Some of them were fortunate. Lost only a portion of the leg when they stepped on the land mine. She tells me about a machine that makes the sound of a wounded crow. It calls hundreds of crows so they can be shot by the Hunter. The Minstrels have threatened sedition. They’ve set their instruments ablaze and tied your daughter up with trembling string. Spring is making us do stupid things. We trade our first child for a set of matching silverware. Then we eat with our hands. The holes are painted the wrong color white. Where the spider was. A bigger spider. In the distance whatever it was you were looking for wavers in the heat. After the fiasco with the apiary the authorities naturally cracked down and soon fewer things happened than ever. Crawling up the red thread an ant is looking for the last drops of the honey. The new leaves look very much like the leaves that came last year. A few of them beginning to curl at the edges. The foreign contract workers are quicker to sit at the table with you than the wives of successful men. When he said that I wasn’t really sure if he meant death is always a mystery or that he was going to come back later and do me in. By the chair with the cracked leather seat a white extension cord is plugged in and trails out into the empty room.
There’s something strange about the snow. It just sits there. As far as we know no new snow has fallen since the other day when the first snow fell. And it isn’t melting. It’s always twenty degrees. The sidewalks are treacherous. You let me touch you again. You always let me touch you again. It’s funny. I still believe you when you say you never want to see me again. First it’s a handshake. Then I let your fingers rest in my palm like warm stones for a few seconds. As you’re handing me your keys. It’s our bodies. They track each other down. Drag us through ditches and gravel. Tomorrow’s a holiday. But we’re tired of holidays. We’re still paying for the last holidays. The sun’s coming back slowly. The evenings are still dark and the TV shows have all been on before. Forgetting how to live we are reduced to watching others live. Only they’re not living either. They’re just practicing. Hoping once or twice to get it right. The counter at the bus station is closed but they keep the lobby open with the heat on. And the restrooms are open even though it’s Sunday. There are two blond girls. They look like sisters. They’re hungry and high on meth. One wants twenty. The other wants twenty-five. That guy who always carries a lamp that’s missing a lampshade is yelling at the guy who always unravels his sweater while he’s wearing it. It’s not often you get to save five dollars.
Days of freezing mist. The creek swift and iron colored. The occasional sound of tires on the gravel road. Your finger splitting at the tip. You find something blue in the heaps of orange and red leaves. The only place left to go is something that burns inside you. The moon is a dark stone in the sky that drips now and then as it dries. The mice have their civilization waiting in the wings. An amber snake entwined around your spine. Season is a habit. You’re a habit she keeps trying to kick. But she’s shorter and it’s easier to punch you. To grab the last of the grapes just to spit their pulp out into your hand. We should get to choose our ancestors. We don’t even get to choose ourselves. That hard blue thing meant nothing to the person who dropped it. But now it’s the world to you.
Portland Review 56/1
I was the fat kid. I was the kid who wet the bed. I was the kid who was bit in the face by a dog. The kid who wanted to fuck your mom. Last one picked for the team. First one to answer the question. You gave me hand jobs. You did. You gave me your little pearls one by one. I had asthma so I smoked cigarettes. I had too much cum so I jacked-off three times a day. Sometimes I thought about your mother. I wrecked my father’s car in the driveway. I tried to poison my mother when my sister was born. Sometimes I thought about my sister. Sometimes I thought about your sister. I did better at Geometry than you did. I never cut my hair. The first job I got offered was to paint cabinets and give some guy head. I told him I didn’t know much about cabinets. I made a touchdown. I got a bull’s eye. I got punched in the face. That was right before Geometry. It stung under the yellow light. Mr. Kravitz was cleaning the overhead projector with a spray bottle. Beads of sweat dotting his forehead. I kept hoping it was just going to swell without really getting any discoloration. When I was an infant I slept upright on a board. Strapped to a board. There was a hole. It hadn’t closed yet.
When I make coffee I have to stand in her doorway. She has an electric kettle. She has a tin of various healthy teas. She has a bottle of coconut lotion. It’s a creamy white. Men like the way it smells. Today I mention that Jerry Falwell has died. They found him in his office. He was 73. I suspect that much like Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, he will be turned into the sort of elder statesman the dead tend to become. He’ll be hailed as a religious reformer and a shepherd of the offended masses. He got Reagan elected after all. Helped the Contras with their monkey business. He even got someone to shoot your Doctor. She says once in the Seventies she got a solicitation from a young outraged evangelical who had aligned himself with the Old Party. Its ropes and gunboats. The appeal included an envelope in which to return your donation and a large decal of the American Flag. Now Billy Graham. You can tell he actually believes in something. That’s what she says. Falwell. He just seemed like a shrewd businessman. She got her three children together at the table with a book of matches. One by one they carefully burned the decal. But only parts of it. She put the rest of it in the envelope and dropped it in the mail.
Project For A New Mythology 3
To escape my longing for you I take your 33 tongues. Fasten them to feathered shafts. Launch each one. One after the other. Up into the air above me.
Flies in the afternoon. As it starts to grow warm. The whirring and clicking that comes from the grasses. The polluted flower of your womb. How it swells and calls to me. Time becomes a thin crust of salt you will live on top of for years. We look forward to shopping on the weekends. Snappy little interludes that leave our fingers sticky. We go about our business. It speaks for itself. It speaks for all of us. My guts keep slithering out of my bellybutton when I sleep. I wake up in tangles with a craving for milk. Milk makes me sick and now I don’t sleep. Instead I stay up making plans. If they have any chance of success I tear them up and start over again. Why waste your time if you know what the outcome will be? Why play if you know you’re going to win? A cold snap drifts in from Alaska and now the tree frogs are silent in the gray evenings. I leave a candle lit on the front porch. You can blow it out when you come home. I’ll be upstairs digging a well in the night sky. Not because we’re thirsty. Because someday we’ll need a child. The record is skipping on the solo. Rain drifts in from the patio. Every possibility is also the lack of possibility. Isn’t that beautiful?
Portland Review 56/1
distance acquiesces to the heat you tell the Fly he’s ephemeral the vents are being replaced I touch your drink by mistake where the lines end and the absence begins an architecture or so the abruptness of seed I take my orders from the smaller machines I get on top of you they start playing a commercial there’s an eye tuned to the scrape of a chair there’s an ambulance milt of friction the ring where the ring keeps the light from her skin pea on the trajectory of a scratch I will be a Ghost Dance all along the tracks splintered shapes swelling in the rain we talk about TV shows from when we were kids as if they were festivals the Moon a tear in the sky made with a fingernail don’t answer the door in the dream I was Danae waiting for a drip from the ceiling that dark thing in the green of her eye that’s me where she points at the red flower I don’t see anything we both wind up in the fruit aisle a light above blinks out tell me what we’ll do on a bench by the river when on one’s around soaking in the jar for three days the beans are pink and ready to split aren’t all prophesies self-fulfilling sugar written in Spanish the oven opens to the smell of sweet potatoes your panties her ringed fingers twitching she rouses briefly and says Dragonfly an act of transcription opens up the flower travel a violence we exhaust the five hundred gimmicks the eucalyptus leaves like metal my face a Trapdoor Spider candy foil floats along the dark train floor lyric intervention painted over all day I dream about sex all the slurring and none of the puncture no I said sects weeds as tall as roses what I threw out the window when we fought between the cars her body turns from yellow to blue a date seed flushed down the toilet they’ve discovered the Artic’s been melting if this was an Espionage Film we’d all be dead
FENCE Volume 7 Number 2
People keep telling me about the Olympics. There’s a swimmer. He’s very good at swimming. I say I put my television out on the patio the week it started snowing. My reception isn’t so good any more, but I always know what’s really happening. After the vehicles pass the crows return to the center of the road to pick at the squirrel. They must feel the same way when I tell them about you. How I keep returning to the same spot even though I know the car is coming. There are insects beneath our lawns. We could all eat them if we just got used to it. This is what happens when I want to talk about the war. It’s everywhere. There’s nothing to say. Your friend. The one who hears voices. She still calls here looking for you. Sometimes I think about picking up the phone. But I’m worried that later she’ll decide I wasn’t really there. People are usually more powerful than they realize. That’s her voice now droning on and on into the answering machine. I’m going out to the patio to watch the Olympics. In ancient Greece all of the athletes who participated in the Sacred Games were required to cease any relevant hostilities. Apparently this doesn’t help the ratings.
