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?

From my balcony I can smell the change of seasons
wood smoke and salt and damp leaves,
long-sleeve shirts stale from the bottom drawer
and clouds bunched like sailors to the west
promising whisky and a hornpipe.

who will mourn the hot sun’s scent on plastic
the pallor of long afternoons
bored blind and dull as paint
spattered on old shoes
beside the door

leading to the courtyard
built to watch summers with disinterest
and clay tiles, the perpetual chat
of water in basins with wind in branches
plump with crows.

light the candle from punk
left over from July Fourth,
unstop the bottle of strong water
then scent your neck with the old apples of it
the wise apples and the flat ones

and the pears of autumn red as a nun’s wimple
soft as wet hay
sweet as a kiss in the shade of fruit trees
the sun arching into evening
the insects silent and dead

and your hand
with its long fate and short, tight girdle
its quick Mercury
resting upon mine
as if to say:  here is the work of winter.

Say I was a sea captain in that life.
Say I sailed a barkentine, the Eloise,
on the Azores run out of Lisbão.

I was a sea captain in that life.
I sailed a barkentine, the Eloise,
on the Azores run out of Lisbão.
I found a green disc under my bunk
and instantly knew its use.

You have taken my books.
You're no sea captain.
The color you paint your toenails
is that of weathered brass.
The salt on your neck
and in your navel tastes
vaguely impure, like spray - delicious.

Say I was a sea captain.
Say I had a dinghy named 'Alouette.'

I was a sea captain.
I had a dinghy the crew called 'Woody.'
She sang when the wind stroked her ribs
and the spars rattled. Never mind.

Never mind the night breezes off Mosquito Island,
the roll of the berth as we lay
at anchor in North Sound
plotting our run to Anegada
so you could see Pomato Point
and what the chart called 'numerous coral heads.'
That morning, with Fallen Jerusalem
to port, you said four prayers, one each
to your gods and a last one to Sunday,
which you had neglected for years.

The swell in Drake's Channel is rising.
It will rise all through the night,
and if we are not too drunk on this fine black ***
we will rise with it.

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

I roll a marble down Market Street
from the hillside
looking over the dusty city
while the sun sets.
It finds a central channel in the cobbled street
and rolls beyond my seeing

past the Kurdish boy on the curb
plucking a tick from his stiff
homespun trousers.
The boy chews a sliver of wild onion grass
he has picked from the feral garden
behind the abandoned mosque

my marble passes now.  Across the street Kastorides
stamps the tin lids on liter cans of olive oil
bearing his name.
From the corner of his eye, he sees the flash of my marble
like a wet pea, wonders when they will pave over Market Street
in macadam.  He shouts for Andrei,  
out of earshot,

marking cards in the alley behind the coffee shop
downstairs from the flat of the student
who glances from the yellowed wall clock
to the Swatch watch on his wrist, then tenderly
lifts the flap of his haversack to peer inside.
He has smoked his last cigarette,
is poking through the butts in the ashtray for a long one
when the phone rings — only once.
The student pulls a sweatshirt
over his bare torso, grabs the haversack

and dashes out.  In the street he sees my marble,
almost slips on it in fact, and stops to watch it
running down its course toward the fountain in the square.
The driver of the truck, distracted by fears of his wife
and blinded in one eye
by a speck of dust which was once a dog’s skin,
takes the corner too hard,
the left front tire giving imperceptibly
over the rolling marble.

Imagine an overused sickroom,
an army hospital in a war zone:
the reek of sulfur and saltpeter overpowering sweet rotting meat,
a periodic shocking light of casual bombardment
reveals brass colored walls.
And, and, and ...
the noises—too many to catalogue
or differentiate.

A fever feels better,
opening a dream flower—
transfiguration follows death, we know this,
now. We know colors, liquid figures
so familiar somehow.  
Isn't dying a familiar act?

The nurse laving ice water
on my puckered brow should excite me
(bedraggled, blood-smudged,
her hair loose, lips slightly parted
from fatigue or an indisguisible loathing for decay).
Think:  in this given moment
five billion people are doing something else.
Even those also dying are dying in a different way
without ice water.
"Quel dommage," you'd  say, Liesl,

making the bed of a morning. "What're the rich folks doing?"
The sun hot and blinding through the east windows
The room so white, the sheets green, your brown eyes
never averted
aromas of grass, exhaust, drying ***
where is it all?
where does it go?
what brings it here
this polluted room
this anti place
this hole where a stomach used to be
resides a memory of a stomach
recalling hunger
as a good thing to be assuaged with pleasure
Nurse, close your mouth before your soul escapes

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

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.

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.

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.

The moon is watching through the window.
She sits low over the low hills,
daubing the housetops and lightpoles with silver.
In my drowsy mind
in the cool air of the first moments of tomorrow
I confuse her name and my state,
“Selene” and “serene.”
I think one must derive from the other
though which came first remains unanswered
like the first question you asked me.

Her silver spills into our darkened room
across my legs
bare and exposed on the white blanket
still damp, my flesh still bright and warm,
your head black on my shoulder,
your breath just one element of the silence
as are the neighbor dogs,
the mourning doves,
the passing cars on the hillside.
When dreams turn your face,
gibbous in black hair,
white as milk in her light,
I want to sleep like this forever.