Tuesday, August 21, 2012

THE WEDDING




There is a man here, present in subtraction,
in the whispers of airplane wreckage,
the coils of Alaskan frost—and in the spark
of his son’s sad eyes, who’s space is filled
with a painful chorus of your father
would be so proud.

Every Pride drives deeper, edging
those sad eyes somewhere else,
sealing flush the gap
that should be filled with the squint
of his eyes—the bounce of his laughter—
the pressed white shirt
ruined red with wine—

Pride steals the place of everything:
his crackling skin—his quiet musk—
the weight of his hand
warming my shoulder.     




Friday, August 17, 2012

THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT WATCHES FIELD HOCKEY




She loves the spittle and uneven grass of hockey on the mall the same way
she loves the curling clouds lapping around her neck, as the heat dips 
orange and crimson, and for a moment, she watches us:
how swampy our shirt-necks must feel and how boring it must be,
that we rarely think about the shadow lengthening across our field,
rifling passes to each other over the uneven grass. 

They only play in that spectacular sliver of evening, she says,
the moment that knows how it feels to look up at me, in a passing way,

and say: I've forgotten how beautiful living feels
and how incredible it is to sweat
under that shifting shadow, like the Egyptian must have,
forgetting how unique and monstrous
that pyramid was, as he took his stick in his hands and used it
to strike a round rock with all the precision
his eternal soul could muster.





Friday, July 20, 2012

THE DROWNING



             July 20, 2012

Something massive—the unbearable and impossible
of violence, random and ugly—big,
bigger than the hole in my chest—bigger than the stall
of my mind—bigger, even, than all the words. 

I am without recourse, without exit strategies, strategies
of any kind—my mind and body colliding
bursting for beauty or love or forget
like a man held deep under water.

This is drowning—struggling to empathize with a man eating
the face of another man—or with the bikers, gripping their handlebars,
glimpsing, riding on—or even with the boy two bowls stoned,
watching the youtube surveillance video in a cold apartment

he shares with his father, who will wake him one morning
to explain there was another shooting in Colorado, at the premier
of a superhero movie, and that twelve humans are dead
this instant for that reason, and his voice will tremble

not with those specifics but with everything that burdens—
the senseless, the horrific, the daunting, the inevitable—
the heavy and the unyielding.    




Wednesday, June 6, 2012

CARRYING THE TUNE



The moiled reed in my mouth, the untuned fuzz 
of your piano, out of breath and losing time,
I sacrifice notes, use my right hand to point our place
on the page. We had an audience, and they forgave us:

we weren’t performing for music, but you and I, mother,
never could admit ourselves to something like that. 
in early evening, and I walked you out of confusion

into confusion, to the bedroom where you wished us
to go back and perform it perfect, but you had already
forgotten anything beyond the burden of awake.

*

I have a half-memory of walking my elementary school
linoleum dinge halls, half-lit as a dust-storm,
and Scott Stover, who’s great-grandfather, or great-

great grandfather had opened the first general store
in our town’s history.  He sat against the painted cinderblocks,
expelled from our class for some anonymous third-grade offense. 

I don’t remember why, or what reason, or if there was—
but I remember taking my hand and throwing his skull
against the wall, as a chimp would crack a coconut

against a rock.  He was concussed, although that word,
concussed, didn’t carry the same weight of brain juice
and spinal fluids then as it does now, after the double-

murder suicide of Chris Benoit, after Junior Seau ate
a bullet and his family allowed a posthumous study
of his brain, as if the scrambles of a shuddered mind

might be a direct correlation to whatever thoughts
consume a juggler in the months and minutes  
and fractions of minutes before he looks at his pins,

methodically rotating, ticking and spinning in the air,
before he closes his palms against his chest
and allows the cascade into earth, like lit matches

falling into the bowl of a toilet. You spoke to me about it,
never able to admit the action that was within my hands,
that your sweet son did look at him, and with some level

of awareness, though I have no memory of what this instant
could possibly have felt like, snap hard his head
against that wall.  You were the purity running through

my DNA.  There’s a weak metaphor somewhere
about your soul contrasted with your pancreas—
you gave everything to the spirit, and left nothing

for your body.  Sometimes I wake up from myself
wondering how I have these memories, the path
of destruction left in my landmonster wake:

I don’t remember why friends won’t speak to me,
how these street signs ended up in my bed, or if I enjoyed
the way his coconut head echoed down the hall.

*

I seize a narrow gap between the closing doors and the mob
packing the metro, fleeing the harsh excuse me of a woman, her words 
eviscerated by the seal of the subway doors, drifting into the chorus

of abandoned guilts, long forgotten missed notes.
I rise before my stop, and for a shuddering instant,
watch a thick middle-aged man, his bratwurst hand

on the shoulder of an old woman.  Her frail arm reaches
to tightly grip his mitt.  She trembles in the crowd.  
He taps her shoulder with his thumb—flickering, keeping time.

*

It’s been two years since I cut locks
off your cold head, since I twisted
the wedding band off your empty finger.

You hiya Will and I hiya Ma back, we walk
under elms and sycamores, listening
for the songs of cardinals and blue-jays,

watch herons glide away to the far shore.
The space you left grows, sucking into itself
hikes, and weddings, and anniversaries

draped in your shadow, song lyrics ablaze like tinder
when they’re sang: a lil water came

*

The moiled reed in my mouth, the untuned fuzz 
of your piano, out of breath and losing time,
I sacrifice notes, use my right hand to point our place
on the page. We had an audience, and I wish we hadn’t—

that our last duet could’ve been without the pressure
of performance, that it could have had the focused inertia
of rehearsal, you taking the time to help me play

the notes right—that it could’ve been a hike, us improvising
thick trunks of harmony, wind bursting in melody,
sound, a golden forest rising towards the sun.











SAXOPHONE



Tethered to my French rust tenor, old as music, I sat inside woodshed washed melodies, withdrawal Harlem harmonies, my lips and fingers reverberating Dexter till I played drunk, Trane till I split rage, Sonny till I stood on the bridge and knew pain’s lonely breeze.  I watered that inherited pain in a terrarium garden, whisky heavy, till it sounded almost like jazz belonged to me. 

My fingers learned to race the spines of mountains, my lips learned to dip and heave thick timber trunks, my ears memorized the architecture of Birdland and Watts.  I sang their heroine solos at the tips of suburban cul-de-sacs, threw their tormented arpeggios at the glass doors of closed strip-malls, locked myself inside their craft as if it was my own.

I abandoned it.  Shut the horn away in my closet.  The borrowed pain sat empty in my hands, untrained and awful.  My tongue slurped gin and fluttered nonsense. My fingers ran scales up the spines of women who couldn’t love me. “What are you doing?” they’d ask.  “Practicing,” I’d say. 

Mother’s cancer body ceiling collapsing, boyhood walls melting around me, I was a child shivering naked on a lonely stage. When she died, my father slipped, “your mother’s gone” and I couldn’t find tears, instead, my mouthpiece, and unchained Harlem and Watts and Dex and Trane and Sonny and burst rehearsed pain, shuddering the Rocky Mountains, the levies exploding, blasting dust out the bell.



BASHO AND THE DEATH OF HIS MASTER, YOSHITADA


I.

Summer rides innocent as a kingfisher skimming water, breeze shimmering.
The countryside teems, luminescent against the still night.
The moon is pastoral.  The moon is everything.

Under cicada shells
sweet fireflies swim breathless
forgetting to dream

II. 

Autumn is kerosene’s slow burn, dusk anticipating snow. 
Yoshitada thins.  We toss light verses to dusk, ornaments
waiting against a magnolia tapestry.

Pear tastes bittersweet
unaware of the season
music understands

III.

Winter has nothing to do with anything.  It’s the brittle
beards of samurai drinking themselves lonely into night.
The monk sits calm--a dead carp suspended in ice.

Yoshitada my friend
hair dimmed to the scalp
lonely as bonfire

IV.

Spring snow sifts blossom petals, a Koan slips into the wind.
The moon looms, lantern of another universe.
The water is warming without you. 

Left for wandering
robin eggs rest in their nest
burdening the branch






UNISEX RESTROOM IN THE COLFAX 7-11



The plastic placard labeled Employees must wash hands before returning to work 
stares at me as if it invented passive aggression amidst the fresh rank, feral

combustion, the kamikaze rainbow of browns on a canvas of bleach.  I am Clint Hill
frantically climbing the trunk of a Lincoln Continental stretch limousine. 

Maybe his sphincter felt the crack first, for his brain to catch up he had to abandon 
his digestive fail-safes.  Or he fancied his asshole a fire-hose, relishing the moment

of singular inertia.  He’s a sadist, finding comfort in his fecal closet, praying
his heart to stop, so he can rest, locked here forever.  He hates me, my excesses,

my employment, my splendor of dying retired in a luxurious tomb, buried
alongside a PERA account held from my checks.  He’s a student of revolution,

finding the seams of civilization for which to wedge his silent protest, degrading
the pillars of the free world, till they crumble around his pantless legs.  

He's Serrano, seeking grace through the profane, chasing the perfect timbre
of piss in a jar, to make sunlight soar.  Or maybe he's Pollock, just going for a shit,

the plainness of vinyl walls calling to him
with a sadness, quiet and infinite.