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Back
When Again
Though
outlasting the morning
the fog is now hoisted away
exposing
some ocean, this spectacle of sun.
Through mounds of fatigued
grass and seaweed,
oysters shellacked with both a broth and a
grime
you poke the rubber stopper of your cane
while a
glaucous gull whines pathetically--
air Heimlich-maneuvered
out its throat.
In the rubble, broken glass has been
mishandled
into stone, clouds preserved in each center;
after
brushing an anesthetized fly
off the outdated map of your
face
you begin returning the treasure back to the sand,
a
period accompanied by the grind of your thrust.
Passing by
these shimmering bodies
unconcerned with your miscues and
stats
you reenact this most complicated of shuffles--
your
shallow prints taking in water,
the eyes baffled with
solder--
a mixture of bother and dim recollection
disguised
behind lenses of medicinal green.
A pause in your unspoken
sentence, you linger--
each movement uncharted, each stunted
discovery
dissolving into vapor, these temporal
convergences,
before returning to the rental, your scantest of
scents.
In a night depleted of legends, even shivery outposts
what few stars that advance into blackness
are immediately
regarded as suspect,
dragged off into night for more
questioning.
A hurricane from a year of no matter
with
a name of no significance, once restored
this stretch of
houses into blueprints again--
dream figures absorbed by the
earth
and then flattened against the sky.
Now any
stimulation, rise in pressure
is restricted to your mind, its
capricious revolutions,
as you rock in your riveted
chair
imagining visitors at doorways, on horizons,
invoking
the windows to be shattered,
suck this monotony from the
room.
Instead it's a shoelace you've missed,
pants
hampered with surf, pissy foam
urging you closer towards
shadow, stillest pool
where you fracture a hip or a
collarbone,
introduce an unchivalrous twinge--
this pull on
the jawbone or chest,
your body now an estuary, all binges and
bends,
depreciating the diets and walking shoes,
the
emergency cigarettes in the end table.
Useless are the
dues and subscriptions,
the interchangeable talk of
professionals,
only your prescriptions, their illegible
spells
helping thin the uncertainty, quell the deep,
let
you slip further beneath that luminous pain
and drain your
limbs of the phantoms' reach;
after positing the third capsule
under your tongue
you clamp your eyes into dashes, muscles
fluttering,
waiting to be cleared of this mysterious tug-
a
rewiring of that familiar persistence,
until sputtering
contentedly to a halt
you're at peace in memory that is
breath.
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Peninsula
(From a DC-10)
What
he wouldn't surrender
to better comprehend the scant
geometry
of down below--
to find fit what he can't when he's
part
of it, contained in its plight,
the discontent of this
continent.
His face, force-fed with oxygen,
no longer the
usual site of allegations
sectioned off with orange
tape
bitten clean through by some god.
How he'd pick his
own skull clean
with that hooked limb of land--
curling
more and more away from him
when once it drawled fortresses
of
sumptuous dunes, unzippering ferns,
and now barely registers a
twitch
from the season's last combers.
Smugly tucked in the
clouds
he tries zeroing in on the streetlamps,
the veiled apprehensions of small towns
with their
buzzwords and codes,
the winded and the overly discussed.
Oh
the contradictions lit up by flight!
Pools sustained and then
emptied by tide,
buds swollen in the noon sun's stoked
glance,
all diffused by some fact about weather,
an excuse
to scoot by, walk the aisles.
He wants to utter something
never sized
up or positioned on the tongue--
a vocabulary
informed more by distances
or even the absence of gravity.
Is
it these barren surroundings lending him
this sudden degree of
serenity, this amenity
towards the land and its
inhabitants
or is it these recycled cues that invade him,
sweeping off any proofs, the acquired smile
shelved as he
dwindles so obviously to sleep?
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Photosynthesis
So rotten we
come to this--
no strength to stand or to sit,
even suck
from a straw,
saying no more no maybe
these commotions we
make with
our hands less convincing
than the ghosts who
assist us
walking out of the room--
even the light
reassuring us
we've nothing left to sound out,
nothing left
to be released from its debt.
Black ants float on the
nectar.
Bees drop from out the sunlight
like believers
doped over with love.
Darkness is an accelerant. Our own
breath.
Even the flat ginger ale always failing our lips.
So
is death like a stitch, the last knot to be tied
or the thread
at the start as we're slurped into being?
Don't repeat my
mistakes, it seems always to tell us.
But we ask to be turned
from the window again--
just the thought of taking anything in
more than our bodies can stand.
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