2003-12-05 - 10:56 p.m.
After the Morning

Will be your little round figure
in succession to itself
up the road, fat and wary
as a gull's, your gold-bowed head
predicting a downward arc
and the fur-robe's fringes
dragging a little in the mud --
this is everything you can't see now,
prior to light and slow weight
of tomorrow's waking. No,
now someone's sleeping
on the still-wet carpet,
their face pressing red on it
and you, innocent of afternoons
and the notion that carnivals travel,
adjust your own stretch of self
a little on the mattress,
think of the favor you've done,
unaware of overturned bottles
and certain that the bright inevitable
will not really be said.

2003-12-04 - 10:55 p.m.
Practicing Transmutation

These are the thin phrases
I can't let escape --
thin and crisp as a wafer
broken on your palate,
not a flake of which
may be wasted or passed, one to one, after it's been
bitten. You're never dazzled
by metaphor, by scale-slide
of fine phrasing that shimmers
and flashes slender
alongside, around, anywhere
that doesn't meet the gaze.
Like Newton in his mystic's robe,
I'm mocked by the ruddy ore
that will not burn itself golden,
despite ritual being followed
to each gnarled letter.
I say my hello, I say my goodbye.
I pronounce each word
with care, weighing it out
in suspenion like brass kilograms.
No use. When you visit
or depart, your footfalls sound
heavily as an iron ball
rolling down the stairs,
sharper than your clicking tongue
and reptile eye of disapproval.
These new clothes will not fit,
you'd tell me, And how
could I compete? Would I show you the brown-glass apartment
I built by alchemy
in my year-long coughing fit,
its one part sand,
its two parts blood-crust?
You barely sip at wine
during your golden dinner.
And anyway, you've heard
my claim before I can forge it,
your easily predicted answer
proven by past experiment,
implicit as the promise of a spoon
descending on an egg.

2003-12-03 - 9:59 p.m.
Britannica Ode

No, winter's a poor metaphor
for the encyclopedia,
the lake frozen over and the pages
falling from your hand
like sleet clinging gently
to the bridge. No, it's exactly
what it seems, present
as its own straight prose,
standard as its weight
in your hand, bound
in stoic reptile brown,
the record of its own ossification.
No, only death will do
for this keeper of thought grown blue
for lack of breathing.
Not a book or a season,
but a terrain -- the place
of sullen, dirty rest
for bright nymph thoughts.

2003-12-03 - 12:08 a.m.
View from the Airport

Squinting at vanishing light
while it ate those half-sad faces,
I wondered if I'd return
to find a world gone stone,
the black museum of a house
inhabited by sculptures
who could not lift foot from floor,
whose own marble weight
overwhelmed all attempts
to challenge the threshold
and instead memorialized
some epic surrender. Like a fly
I watched them in still multitudes,
a collection of endpoints
absolute in space and time,
a scene I could always return to,
never affect. The letters
I sent weren't meant for reading;
the replies came from some fiction
that other life went on.
Bring back pictures, they had said,
as though motion belonged to them
and the rest was stillness.

2003-12-01 - 11:04 p.m.
Telephone Sonnet #29

I was pinned and folded
away in your jacket pocket,
the inside one you've forgotten
until a stray card or keyring
left there pokes your rib
or falls out in the wash.
A long time to spend
in darkness. Like a problem
of translation, I meant
only half-caught collage
of sound and a few stray breaths
dangling in the abyss
on the long end of the line.
Nothing was taken away.

Ode to a Streetlight's Color

Wan gold, you've burnished autumn
an egg-milk hue, built hives
by the leaf-bushels and lit
all their cities.
You buzz like wasps.
I've watched you snaking
the rain's puddle-streaks,
patching stretches of sidewalk
where ragged darkness hasn't held.
Once, you broke open
and in a mad rush, threw yourself
at me, getting only some liquid
toned like you in my eyes.
Every morning, you leave
without saying a word,
quiet as caoutchouc worn
by someone who's been paid.

2003-11-30 - 11:21 p.m.
Boys' Dolls

We were always chubby,
nothing in us firm,
born without bones.
Evenings we spent in tents,
learning to cook potatoes
with hot rock, foil,
and burial. We interred things
as a matter of course,
shelling the ground weeks later
while we excavated plastic soldiers
from the backyard mudpit.
Like all boys, we studied burning
urgently, darkening our names
into woodblocks, passing hands
over the smuggled lighter,
and inventing the coal tattoo.
We were on display
for one another --
no one else looked.
So with our tribal markings
and our shed-soft skins
we stretched on the flats
of summer, plastic in the grip
of unclosed fists, while above us
white cotton dreams grew granite
and grey, and in time we too
were excised from youth.

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