She had a chameleon heart
And a wandering soul,
But there was a fire in her eyes
That refused to go out for anybody.

I made notes of docking posts
pointing out to murky reflections
of tourists that didn’t have time
for a souvenir mug or a picture
with a black trumpeter content with his brass,
and nothing else, blowing life into the seagull
sky, making the clouds pop and drop spray-
mist jazz, which accompanied his trumpet
with a gentle washboard scrape.
He beat his heel to the thousand pin-drops
of passerby earrings, crab sweatpant draw-
strings, and trawl nets dissolving into the sea.
Baltimore filled the margins
of a travel notebook alongside
pencil sketches of the Aquarium,
Prufrockian split claws
wrapped in algae bandages,
that homeless man weakly thumbing
through a pocket bible, the 32
cents wearing sea salt jackets,
and my cold girlfriend pulling on patron
sweaters in an art museum closet.
But it’s all a gimmick.
It’s $22 crab cakes
and paint-splatter-printed
sweatshirts that say New York
or D.C. or Everything on a Disposable
Kodak Camera.

Tired of the idea, I threw the page
over the edge, hoping to drown
it in green, but I never heard it hit
the water. I braced myself on a life
ring rack, leaned over,
and watched it settle into a natural
barge of dead leaves and orange peels
while sea foam circled
it like a bed skirt that’s only
noticed for the few seconds spent stripping
down before going to sleep
just to wake up to rain on the Royal Sonesta,
kids racing down the hall, the obligatory
alarm clock,
and the black trumpeter’s groove
four floors down.

I found the class fish wrapped in single-ply
tissue and pencil sharpener refuse,
her poinsettia-sunset scales picked clean,
gathered in a Styrofoam cup. Her coral
fins crumbled, leaving rough edges like split
chalk or hopscotch gravel. Her last ocean
was the cover of a Nat Geo from
1995. Easing my fingers
beneath the matchstick spine, I deftly walked
to my desk, and laid her on construction
paper. I casted her slivered ribcage
in glue before I poured the scales, hoping
she'd triumphantly flick some harmless fire
when she woke, but she just laid there, shining.

Remember, when you find yourself rejoicing for the rainbow,
that the earthworms rest below you on the sidewalk,
having lost their sense of being and direction,
having died but lived to feel it.

Remember when you're aching for the earthworms on the sidewalk,
there are some that didn't make it to the surface,
having drowned before the sun could take them slowly,
having died without a preface.

And
remember when you find yourself embarrassed by the cycle
that destroys and then destroys what pleads for safety--
--these are patterns that remind us we are systems:
Rainbows wax then die like earthworms.

Thin music played as we danced uneven
circles around tempermental light flickering,
a bonfire built lopsided in the metal bowl--

you handed me a glow-stick then broke yours,
shaking the torn end so the liquid spattered
your hair, head, shoulders, and the grass,

dew-wet around your mud-stained sneakers.
You reflected the constellations overhead--
mirrored as they were in your backyard pond

when we went night-swimming with silver
fish ******* on our toes. We spent the night
discussing first impressions and each other--

you admitted I was your kind of person
even though I thought you were weird,
too short a boy with too high a voice.

I soon learned you were a hurricane tied down,
and you convinced me I had not once been less
than spilled starlight--that’s why my skin

glowed beneath fluorescent lighting, untouched
by the sun’s aggression burning freckles,
cosmic dust dappling my nose and cheeks.

You said: “It’s always been the way of man,
born as living mirrors for nature to see itself.”

—Chet Baker, '88

I put The Lost Tapes
on while I shaved my face, inching
around two chin nicks turning
the lather into the remnants of a strawberry
shortcake paper plate soak-through.
I tapped my Chucks on the pink,
checkered floor to the cymbals.
Heel toe, heel toe strut,
stopping every few measures
to re-tuck my herringbone-detail
tie beneath my collar. I heard
his trumpet wail, and mimicked
it on the rusted shower rod like a cheap
snare, deep drumstick strikes patched
with meat tape. I carefully ran the flexed
blade beneath my cheekbone
like a piano-park saunter, trying not to step
on the drummer’s heels ‘cause he hits
it just right. And the brass birds
are just right. The bench creaks, the cinder
snaps, the twilit fountain dance, the pop-
skip needle, the slick floor, the jazz faucet,
and the shave
are all just right.

I write poetry, drink coffee,
talk art, dig cinema,
wear t-shirts without graphics,
t-shirts without tags,
and screen-print my to-do lists
on everything.
I say all this as I blow-dry
the temporary tattoo on my wrist.

671

She dwelleth in the Ground—
Where Daffodils—abide—
Her Maker—Her Metropolis—
The Universe—Her Maid—

To fetch Her Grace—and Hue—
And Fairness—and Renown—
The Firmament’s—To Pluck Her—
And fetch Her Thee—be mine—