Morning sunlight streaking through the blind lit the jagged scratch from a roller skate in the kitchen floor’s jazz-patterned lino which I filled with putty and tried to hide with my art-school oil paints in every shade of tan and brown, cream and yellow. Such glowing yellow: the color of a slice of corn bread,…
Now it can almost be heard. But not quite Almost. Still on the far side of nearly, It is the melody of a floating feather. A spiderweb fingers my cheek in the dark garden; A briar plucks at my sweater. Wind on a windless night wafts through my hair. Or the aroma of sandalwood soap…
Here, where the old Industrial School was and then the porn-film sheds, stands the last lamp before the water. Dead as he’s been these ninety years the lamplighter on his beat walks with ladder on shoulder. Above the Mardyke Steps and the donkey track he fixes ladder to pole, stands back then climbs nimbly into…
And this is where they met in secret. Follow my pointing finger. Now you see it quite empty. Those curtains that veiled it are rags, and the bed stripped bare. Here she used to play for him, there he would place his shoes in the corner. A piano from an upstairs room, wanton extravagance of…
In the train, in the dim glass, you, long dead, slip your face over mine. A mask, a shade, a past that is somewhere there, in the dark but not here, nor in any other scored-out street my dog-eared notebook holds, not here, your voice gone, your name caught in a fold of paper in…
Milk, rice, blueberries, plums—I’m laying out our weekend along the beltwhen the black sack of a stormcloud splitswith a noise akin to anger or loveand all the mothers look up from the strip-lit aislesas something larger than ourselves pours down,dances like baby-teeth in the grass outside. I’m frightened says the woman with the mind of…
To taste the salt of the stars in the sea. To love another more than oneself. To know this is to know everything. Do you see how the dusk and rain are one? Do our bodies come to nothing? Not how we fall in love, but how we fail in love. Ask aloud what comes…
It’s not just that he can’t rememberyou: he can’t recall any of it:the university, his otherstudents. I rocked. I reeled. I was knockedoff kilter, as if the child in mehad stepped up to the blackboard and pickedup the chalky duster and wiped herfuture lines away, even the bitwhere he helps me get sober and clear.
I sketch the patternings of the sea:the iter- and reiterationof event. Similar; not the same. Lulled by dull predictabilityof my own selves’ dreary projections,I’ve confused the sacred with its name. Better scan fractals, rhyme sea with tree,tune into tantric syncopationmy mortal gods, frantic and profane.
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