1974

From the darkness you come strange

In memories that don’t belong to me and I don’t keep.

Born wild eyed and late, as the first are,

Swaddled in a German flag and taught to speak

In machine gun tongues and walk in the step of black boots

By some ghost dredged up from before.

Although your mother held you in thin white arms,

And your father took your hand in communion photos,

The war in your breast held – waiting, watching –

And here is the chair where your mother sat the day you held

A trembling palm to round belly, where the lotus bloomed premature

In earth turned too soon –

Here is the infant girl, left in passenger seats wide eyed

While you sought lightning from strangers’ pockets

And crawled flesh to asphalt in the alleys of yesterday

Always fixing an eye on the last –

I remember you as a point, a vision,

A wavering light that shines darkly to me even now.

Love Letter to V.W.

No, you may object, I will not

read moving letters, but —

Dearest, I seek you in your room

stripped, powerless,

arms full of men’s books

and a mind made too masculine

in need of feminine discourse —

Let us go, then, to the lawns

becoming supple under sun and institution

I am attracted to a brooding intellectualism,

the Dalloways and Bretons, jealous,

stagnant under watch of

a beedle manifest in ancient madness

enraged his machinery finally come unhinged.

Since you are so new, impermeable,

patron saint of female restlessness,

voluptuous in course, unmanageable,

your shadow has come to shelter my resolve —

Before the river Ouse we stand,

your hand in mine, palm to palm,

leaving the stones to their beds. 

something else

a dress

cast

in slanted light

pools of jersey

slip formless

after taut form

he draws a

lingering

b r e a t h

wrapping fabric

around his white knuckles

like spidery ropes

ex

hales

undoes the knot

in his stomach

the struggle

clasp against zipper

a lace lining

caught in the fold

and it does not

fit

shoulders too football

and a gape

of breastless being

Goddess of the Manic Sunflower, reclines

above golden wheat along a nebraskan highway –

a spread of blue tapestry hung

tight against an idle sky –

nothing between it and the wheat.

 

sunflower sun-goddess blossoms yellow

heat into july, one in the afternoon,

wavering like all indecision

obscure over the asphalt.

 

the arrow points inward

to the dark nest of a female apollo

flow in, the center says,

flow in, the center aches.

 

a circadian rhythm disrupted

by the arrow point, whittled by easy hands

launched unsuspectingly, a petal gone red –

setting of the sun.

heat comes forth

poured from palms open

like two shields, side by side

absorbed by the blackest nights.

 

blackest nights follow brightest days.

asphalt skies pin-pricked with

memories of light seeping through,

a flower bows its heavy head.

 

Cebu 1

Once in Lausanne, under the loose black soil

came undone the girl whose father braided her hair,

offsetting the ends with polished fish bones

when her eyes (now gone

to white) still blinked blue.

Two boys on a pale horse will ride by me,

laughing,

while they wonder what sad man

chases a sunset with both hands tied behind his back?

What man waits sleepless for three months

watching for sugary petals taking root at her eyes

to burst and blossom,

and giving from them new light to see?

I hold in the shadows of mountains, soundless,

drawn by her delicate fire. 

Vignettes

Where the great plain of the dinner table

stretches until it consumes a horizon of

Midwestern sky billowing out into

golden streaks of ninteen-sixty-one,

my mother sputters and hums at the edges

like her black Oldsmobile cutting across

cracked and gnarled highways that split across

the open countryside like the tree branches

my brother and I would hang from as kids.

Pass the salt.

My brother kicks at me under the table,

his little bird-legs like arrows darting

and diving into my shins, but I don’t

dare turn my father’s grimace into an open-mouthed

war siren like the ones we listened for in class,

expecting a swash of red men cutting across our

golden fields while nuclear warheads singing through

the atmosphere turned the cold war hot.

My family hovers like heat at dinnertime.

Pass the water.

Unknown Depths

upon a scacchic trevally,

a boethic isba quelmed,

the reg avayed, and finally,

the o vrille was helmed.

though the yarraman was adiated,

the folgoth yandied still.

yauld ebernines unabated

fashed against nibel.

when the vorant abatis broke,

the nazold went gly,

then halimous kelds of raad spoke,

and weeshy ivi.

Concessions

I will stop using my body as a brick wall

for you.

Expectation, the rise and undoing,

is a learned thing.

 

For you,

stepping out from under your skin

is a learned thing

(as it always is).

 

Stepping out from under your skin,

as a visceral child understood

– as it always was –

softness kept us naked.

 

As the visceral child understood

expectation, the rise and undoing

of softness keeping us naked

I stopped using my body as a brick wall.

Telos

He rolled a cigarette, unlit, between thumb and forefinger

Lightly tucked it behind his ear, palmed his hair

“I never wanted to leave the important things until the end,” he said,

Smiled, out of habit

“When my dad died, the only time anybody ever said anything nice about him was at his funeral. The only time anybody gave a damn.

He was a mean bastard, never knew the difference between telling the truth and cutting a person up. It was all the same.

He never said I love you. Not to me, not to my mom, especially not to my brother. People say, ‘Oh, you know he loved you. Deep down, he did, more than anything.’”

A pause. The cigarette is removed, there is a crease in his hair.

A lighter appears, fulfills itself. Telos.

An inhale, the tip excites, burnishes, and then the drifts of smoke leak from the sagging corners of his mouth.

“I know what his belt felt like.

I know how his scarred, gnarled fists seemed so big when I was so small.

I know what my mom sounded like, muffled through the bathroom door, sadder than anything I could ever…”

Inhale. Release. Cough. Repeat.

“Anyway, years after he’d died, I thought, you know, maybe if I hadn’t been so afraid, if I had tried to tell him that I loved him, tried to look at him as a good person, he would have been more like that while he was alive. Ah well. Maybe, maybe not.

But it was at the end there, when everyone talked about what a good man he was, the tragedy of a man leaving a wife with two teen boys, I always wondered

What if we told him he was a good man while he lived?

”

Inhale. Release. Cough. Repeat.

Telos.

“It doesn’t matter. Where did I start?

With the end –

The important things shouldn’t be put off until the end,

But sometimes, they make you wait until then anyway.”

Inhale. Release.

The beginning

“I’ve taken on a lover.”

She whispered this to herself sometimes while she showered, sometimes in the mirror.

It was as archaic and useless sounding as though she said, “A gentlemen has deigned to call upon me.”

The truth of the matter was she was fucking someone who wasn’t her husband. And though there were words to ease that truth, as there have always been kinder, softer words to ease all truths, they were unsatisfying and left her throat clumsily. So, she practiced in the relative privacy of her bathroom some mornings. Then, she would step out of the shower, or step back from the mirror, wrinkle her nose and make the preparations to leave for work.

She dressed with the gravity of someone readying a funeral. Her husband, on his way out to his own job, would pause as he adjusted buttons, buttoning and unbuttoning the top, scanning her body for lint he could brush off. He would outstretch his hands to the back of her skirt, wavering yet never touching. Sometimes he found lint. Sometimes he brushed it from her.

They kissed lightly, they kept their eyes busy while saying good bye. They would see each other that night. Dinner, TV, formalities. There were no children. It made the situation less serious to her, she believed. She wasn’t ruining a family. Not hers, at least.