Last night we were together again.
You moved into my house,
flooded the living room
and stocked it with giant carp.
I watched orange and black fish
twist, swirl and peck each other
through water dyed brown
by the hardwood bottom.

I am in a city of wide avenues
and boulevards with island dividers
all pointing to the west,
where the sunset casts angular light
across the stern facades.
A few tall trees die
of dutch elm disease.
Most of the sky is stolen by rooftops.
One thin figure
paces, scratching his scalp, leaning
to sniff for wind, tossing
handfuls of meal
to hungry pigeons.

Sometimes I forget your name.
I will always know your face,
your white spiked hair,
the blazing morning light through white drapes,
how clean it all felt.
Your sweet sweaty nape frightened me.

The night before, we’d rode an hour on the subway.
Ocean Parkway, you said. I remembered that.
Now I’m back. There’s still no traffic,
like a Sunday morning, or an August evening
when everyone in the world
is at Coney Island or Jones Beach.

I
God Nine ***** his thumb—
the one with the garish topaz ring.
Even if you don’t know where to start,
you can pick him out of the circle.
Look behind each one’s ear till you find the tattoo.

II
Showing off to junior high school girls,
the skater fell
before he could commence the final turn
of his figure eight.
God grabbed his blade.

III
God prefers nine
The small girl watches traffic passing her house.
She estimates, in her childish way, the incidence
of accidents at one in five thousand fourteen cars.
On the bare, smoking engine block of the most recent wreck
she reads the serial number: G-O-D-9.

IV
We can train a hungry pigeon to scratch out anything—
God,
Lagomorph,
9—
given enough sunflower seeds and horses

V
The first thing I taught my son
was knitting. Then he learned God.
After that he was on his own.
He never could spell “Charles” (C-H-A-L),
and counted “... 6, 7, 8, 10.”

VI
In Corsica, they write the number ‘9’ on its side
to confuse it with ‘6’.
This pleases the Barbary apes, though
god knows the tin whistles are loud enough.


VII
... a hail of symbols. The stir-crazy physicist
hung from the groaning lower bough of the ash
pelting us all with umlauts and nines, shying
plomets, as the Herr Gott
sings through fibre optic cable.

VIII
Answer: God takes tin and fishbones.
Theme: the best inzulation against disappointment
in love.
Query: 9, as a hat with a lost finger?


IX
9> God< Opera > Charles < 9.
Which I hate, being left-handed —
I drag the flat of my hand across the tail.
The wet ink blackens the clean page.
And no, I will resist pencil unto death

Beneath the city we speak many languages,
none fluently:
in our solitude we cannot hear
how foreign words were meant to sound.
Liesl calls my window a "mercy."
To me it is a threat
or a tease,
a glimpse of the impossible
like ******.

Yes I have tiny hands,
tiny thoughts, hopes, dreams
beneath the city that is closed to me:
useless treasure,
an unreadable book in a foreign tongue
full of printers errors
and, like this poem,
a wrestling match with words.

We tried to speak,
we sat and watched each other,
shared mornings and nights.
But still we came here,
up these crooked stairs
alone and so small, behind warped glass
an oddity, a curiosity in a freak show.
And what is curiosity
but another way to cut myself
without leaving scars?

Before the fire
I could look out our window
to a warp and woof of city streets
rewarding curiosity
with graffiti, green grocers
and grande macchiato
in a bamboo cup.
We were whole.
The fire came
from a single precise cinder
that cannot be unsaid.
Now our city is gone.
What remains is tatters.
Shivering in the cold,
we find more holes between us
than what is left to bind us.

In the breakfast nook,
the sun falls aslant across
the paper, open to the puzzle,
scones and marmalade and butter,
coffee in white cups on saucers, steam rising,
motes dancing in the rays as he reaches
for the sugar
which is not sugar but stevia
in a pink glass bowl
shaped like an elephant's foot.
The smell of their exhausted *** lingers
like the motes,
detectable through aromas of the coffee,
the sage eggs and salsa fresca,
and the cut grass in the yard.
He feels his terry robe like a weight upon him,
dense and obscure, a yoke
or an anchor - safe
and brilliant white.
Her face never looks more radiant
than in the morning after
the Sunday ritual.
They could have been a sculpture
or a tableau vivant,
just breathing,
feeling the warmth of the sun
on the small hairs of their arms.

Before, the light of day shone like the gloss on a frosted cake.
Now, above the evening’s glow, silence sits like a cat
watching the world sleep, or most of it
and I sit imperfectly still, hearing your thoughts in the room below
as though I were lying beside you
and could read the rhythms of your breath
better than what’s spoken –
which perhaps I can.  So I am waking,

piecing out the puzzle of the day,
grateful for the still, cold air,
the intermittent ribbon of Mulholland,
coyote shadows under olive trees
that tick as old straw beds tick when bodies shift on them
seeking warmth or the cool of space
and, finding it, recall with pleasure

its lack.  Possession is finite while
what’s gone goes on forever.  With dawn, if I’m still waking,
the sea will stand revealed as small, supple fingers
playing at the edge of all I know.  In the morning,
as I leave the uncompleted house, I’ll find the Valley
blinking and confused.  I’ll turn
to listen for the distant ocean
or maybe just a parenthetical from a first draft

for all I know.  I know how to dream:
your flanks rose as I subsided,  you grasped
my shoulder, arched your neck, …  Stars watch like insect eyes
over this perfected future, that milky past,  the undone city
ignorant as I am,  brighter,
freer, satisfied with light as I can’t be
somehow, waking in the dark above the olives
while you sleep within doors.

First red stains on white paper,
fingerprints
a palimpsest of the future
when we will share books from one hand to
another.

For now, inkspots mark a thought’s hesitation
as it lingers in the white of potential
A child on the high board
measuring his courage in feet and inches and the blue
of water:  the first word will be loud
awkward and ungainly, of course.
Beloved, for being first, and remembered
but painful.

Here between the calculation and the pain
lives the moment that brings him back
and back once more
the moment where the soft air loves him
sibilant in his ears
a rush of love
new and clean as white paper
about to be stained


10/18/09