You’re a wet thing in my throat: oyster.
Particulate matter too: oyster and earth.
If I mix it, then you’re planet, the meniscus
so bright to burn me. You’re a ruddy neck,
porous and freckle. You’re opalescent
material in the fathoms, the genus of which
I am branch. You’re the knitting of scars, that miracle.
I sit in the kitchen, and you’re the compound of rain and wind
on our windows. I pin myself to your axis, sure and solid
gradient. You’re the Cartesian pause in my basis,
the cog sound of mechanical doors aching
with exit. Then later, you’re my recurrence,
the integer that began us, the formula, its solution.
The bottles and tubes on my vanity
make my room a factory with no union.
I’m the scab, eager for a few nickels.
I build piecework in and around hangers.
I’ll find the face in the marble if I’m diligent,
reads the affirmation in the mirror.
I rinse my face’s one thousand minutes
and look for the mistakes, which is not to say
I’m not beautiful. If I could finish with erasure,
I’d prop my face on a stand to keep the dust from it.
Before bed I look at women’s magazines
for myself, an old familiar slice. I rub envelope
fragrances against my neck like they’re mash notes
about the slippery inference of my lips.
The TV casts its viridian glare, makes me
a tepid silhouette against the mouse hole.
The hole’s a shadow tunnel into my chest,
one-way ticket. If only diligence were love.
The king is slain, small death since
we used his porn as atlas. Each scene
was our next frontier and we crossed it.
Now he is all tumescent cat eyes, petulance.
He says, My mother never
smiled, I’m always lonely. It’s blah
blah blah. It’s therefore, therefore.
The headboard’s made of driftwood
and Xmas lights, and I just want to kiss
and smoke clove cigarettes like we used to.
Give me the hasty shower and the smell of Dr. Bronner’s.
I want to be the thinking I invented last night,
but I’ve already run out of disguise.
Instead it’s some amour, plush velvet,
some pretending to read Proust. We’re propping
up the corpse of romantic love.
This king is really here to cut his teeth
on our asymmetry. Everyone smiles,
I answer because we’ve already split
the floorboards with our ruckus.
We’re in the shipwreck on the deserted island
and the king’s a parrot cawing shore, shore.
We’re containers told in clay with nice faces
when they orphan our hours for maps:
exteriors to decorate with unction and indigo.
We get sexy over island domination.
The island is inside us: the birth of empire,
its crooks and its courts.
Islands, always the story.
The women at the laundromat across the street fret over their modes of transport (shopping cart, duffel, canvas tote, plastic bin). Because I’m their spectator, framed in my window, I’m also a talisman against cages. They sit outside of their labors to watch me watch them. I’m their poppet, so they interrogate my hermitage. It’s because of love, says the kind one and the cruel one says, it’s because of impertinence, and the conciliatory one says, it’s all those things, but perhaps we shouldn’t judge since she’s just like us, etc., and the compassionate one says, let’s send her up a ladder, and the drunk one says, I wonder who the hell she comes around, and the one with a wimple trimmed in blue said, I wish it was me, and along comes the other one, the angry one: if we’d have quit smoking in the sixties, not given ourselves over, I’ve got an idea, let’s start a posse, unfurl the cue cards, so that it seems she’s taken over, and she has—the other ones tend to her, purge me from their crosshairs. I’m the one who used to look in windows and say, she just does it to herself because she’s a sucker and the void has such a sexy pitch in his voice. I used to wash my clothes in that place, took it wrapped in a sheet like a corpse of want and discharge and worry. To alleviate ourselves of filth we moved around the small hall of machines, banged at the change machine when the monotony rage came on. In the laundromat we were strangers but also repentant and transgressive. From my perch the women seem like specks now. We go, we go. They’re all complicit with my cage. I’d trade all my seeds for a gust out of these millennial doldrums. The tossing swish of the machine might be the best trade in town.
endless is so big a country—
still there’s something soft
in God’s line of reason
that pulls on
the part that longs
for an end
right out of me
maybe it’s that
this gets repeated
in perpetuity
presenting me to
the idea we are
both far away
and right upon it
We had—one chance lined up on the museum bench—examining a Kay Sage painting of doors and robes—
it’s quiet enough for contemplating an undoing—we stood knee deep in a bog of our own making—
heretofore handled one another like grandmother’s horse figurine—even cleaned with our own raggeds—needing the fortress we were—
and then to chip away at—to bear down onto—to find the holes and tear them larger—that would be the collaboration—
If there had only been pauses—if only we had desisted in the tumble downward—I mean we clipped sisyphus and jill—made eddies we could not see to see—
we were analysis and question—secrets forested—both imbued in poems—lies we thought at the time were—
And I might have thought—commenting on the museum-goers instead—the one with the turquoise belt—the one with the diaphanous hair a halo round her—
that this is—what terrible endings were—your hand over me—dining with its spoon fingers—the meat on my neck’s bones—
Because the you slipped from me like a bead of mercury. Sometimes it was a big you with long gray hair and other times it was a young man with a curl on his forehead, a vicious girl in a bathtub.
The you had burrs that made my hands alive with small tears, but I kept it around, hoping someday I would learn how to use it except I was lazy and never did.
My you, my you. Your insistent voice becomes the scrolling windows.
I lent it to a friend and she used it a lot more than I did—for letters and speeches. After a while I would come to her house and the you was a little more frayed than the last time. We pretended for a while that she would be giving it back but we both knew that it wasn’t mine anymore.
Sometimes I actually got jealous and wished I had a you until I remembered how I had had one and neglected it. One day after a few glasses of wine, I told her I had no need for it and that she could keep it. After a few more glasses I told her that I did miss it a great deal and I took it back from her. After that night she stopped calling me and answering my emails.
I sentimentalized the you because to say you is warming. The you is irrelevant but still always within reach because I seldom do things without an audience. When I actually have it in my hands after leaving it under a pile of bills or laundry, the you looks to me with indifference.
The you insists that I engage lightly and instead I stomp around and wake the whole neighborhood with my boots to let everyone know what I think of the you’s ideas.
It’s not safe to bandy it around like we’re all in on it. We’re the opposite of in on it. We’re inside and waving our little white flag.
The city’s banishment is the hand where I sleep like a foundling.
Yellow streetlights bristle against the grid, and I quiver like an obedient child.
I covet the stink of weed and funk in the hours before dawn—the worst time
since it’s cool and barbaric. Then it’s that morning of brackish soup
of which I would eat gallons. Once the city was a he, his arms around
our congress with enough alchemy to narcotize, eyes rolled back.
Once it was a she and we experimented with each other’s tongues
because of anonymous and polymorphous. The radiant heaping dogshit
and its glaze on our skins, tastes of irony, of nickel. A newspaper drifts down
Mission Ave. and announces our new war, the folds alter the story. The broken glass,
a prism for the burdock in the cracks. Wrappers scuttle like living things,
skins shed of flesh. The half-sounds from my mouth are dirty
with pathos, with yellow neon. The alley, my polluted gullet. Launched
into this world poor and blind, I got hooked on turmoil and it’s been costly.
Once on the edge of the ocean, I stepped on a bit of wood
with a nail in it, love-bite. The ocean stunned herself against the shore
because of our loneliness. Church bell sounded dusk to reify our seclusions.
At my window the present day bites into my ear with ideas I’ve liked before. The sun pushes in and out of the blue-green sphere that wavers on the edge of migraine, one, a mimicry of the other.
Lunatic: The circus geek, the Glad Bag man, the shrill and pocked face on the corner.
My street wears scars of real and unreal time but I’m afraid to leave my chair to see more closely. My lunatic crosses the street with all his futures. I see him every morning and take notes. Yesterday tucked in, today not. Today, seeming buoyant. Two days ago, dolorous.
The notes get tucked deep in my chair’s cushion for the next day. My memory works with leniency, so I can see the outline of one lunatic through another though some have more jags.
This city gets settled by broken down fire dressed as someone else, and the lunatics follow with their dustpans.
My lunatic comes at night, the reason I don’t sleep. He jeers when he walks past. It comes from far inside him, like his liver’s hissing its name. I drop him down nothing because then he’ll see me, too.
All of the lunatics’ variations share equity of scale. At night they’ll live in the warehouse, bunked up in tiny rows like the reflection of windows in apartments. My lunatic’s the king. He gives the others maps and directions for making their way through the city, like where to lurch and what corners are good for cigarettes.
If my lunatic is a mirror, then he’s opaque. Interference rises from the manholes in the form of smoke, and the interference colludes with the sun.
I kept hearing the small voice
describe what I was missing or
staying out of tonight: like
trees that howl and have
cooler things than arms.
I heard: Give in. Or easier:
Now.
(Like orange loves the sky
over a desert
I’ve broken open stones
looking for my part
or filled with all to be the planet
you want
I was disappear then come back,
disappear then come back)
Not just a surface. Embedded horizontals,
the six-stroke face.
Five o’clock in the afternoon.
A dwindling black, high tide opened and entered:
glass blue. Vermilion hot, then white
turned over. The mirror is shut.
No mirrors. What we know hasn’t got a body.
The curved sky is always a road
between us. Five thirty, the slack
chrome tripwire. Ochre blocks
recede the wall. The red slit down the left.
Difficult to say which is the sun.
dayone:
At the edge of the attic: a solution. Do I wrap myself in tissue and tuck myself into the scrapbook that smells of vodka, of cigarettes, of industrial glue? If I could wriggle out of this geography, I’d memorize the future and bring it back to my progeny. Instead I’m harsh-voiced bridal party, a husk of that. My voice is so shrill. The lunatic calls and I can barely hold the phone.
dayten:
Fragrant kiss on my neck, Polaroid #3. Unlikely I’ll find another photograph to tell the B side. The reparation provided to me is known as eclectic beauty. I catch my eye in the mirror, distract my very own loins. That helps the day pass, that taboo vaudeville.
dayonehundred:
I’m leaving my greasy print on all surfaces, even the superficial hi-bye friendship. And night falls, and the ocean swallows oil ships, and the deer die in our grilles—we’re a series of mishaps, this vista and me. I swallow compassion from a blue round pill. It soothes my jaw and reminds me I’m not all edge.
daysevenhundred:
For years I’ve not taught anything shameful.
dayonethousand:
Little book of Syphilis. Epistolary book Written to the Latin’s Ombudsman. The book of Irritating boils. The book of Soul-show-You-the-Door. The book of Guttersniping and Chivalry. book of yr. Deeds. Deeds to the Webb’d Hand. Tome on Inchoate Nations, Guide to Wax Seals And their Replicae, What and How of the Republic as told by a Rebel, A Mash note to Step Theory Disaster, how to Make A Quarantine, Encyclopedia of Creatures that Afflict, Dictionary of Ruin and Quilts, How to Gather 7 Horsewomyn, How to Finance yr. Pestilence. The Book of Books and in it, chapter on Boats that Carry you to islands of Your Own Making.
dayfivethousand:
If I could take myself up, if I could climb that vine, if I could give my passport to the Prez with my scent all over it, if I could sever the emollient impulse from my mane. If I had to travel without looking, if I dared mention names from the book of those days. If I could my hairs in your bed, and if you could your blood. If we had all been enough with the loaf split in half. If only I could have a large old bust of you, dilated with starpoints.
As they came around me like a cloud with dictionaries, he said, you’re daughter to Aporia. They bound me to this telling by my hair.
He whispered in my ear the definition of hermetic and urged I should change my sense of the hermetic.
She poured me into a cincture made from dollar bills. I barely moved. I was filthy and priceless. A box of fruit, they called me.
After some conversation they dipped me in water, head back like baptism. I babbled their language, and they gave me kisses as reward.
He tried to love me and I told him I was wed to Culture. When he felt my sagging breasts he was disillusioned. He said,
I thought you came well-built.
I got sprayed with smoke that killed me a little. They said it was the Scent of Nature and that it shouldn’t hurt.
She said, you’ll get the proper stamps sometime, but I didn’t trust her except when eating from her hand. Her hand tasted like cigarettes and lemons and that made me wonder about her life.
One time they unfolded maps on emptied crates and pointed to the New World with their stub fingers. They said they wouldn’t give up and that I shouldn’t either. I thought this meant renewal and I reminded them I’d lain open longer than anyone else.
They left me alone at times and went into the corner to discuss. Whatever was said must have maddened because their faces came back complicated.
They said I was resistant. They said it wouldn’t come out.
These are days and days passing, you understand. They were my undoing. A stretch, a fractal. It had started as play. We were going to switch at some point but didn’t.
And wouldn’t. I liked sleeping in the trundle next to them. They promised me a shining road and forks and just stuff. They gave me names to consider. They suggested Kitten.
I’m left with the desire to be as hard as a monster,
medieval mixed with inquisition and a dash
of troubadouress. You’ll smell it in my black fur.
I’ll be the apartment ghost: pass through walls,
through realism, but smaller, quieter,
the tumor in the center of your heart chakra.
My sister sharpens her teeth
on the millstone around my neck.
This is our perfect union.
One of her feet is screwed to the floor
like the old joke. It allows her some
latitudes, and at the same time,
a core. We’ve been doing this for years,
both of us brands of failure,
but we do have some pinnacles.
Endurance is one.