Looking back at you in the mirror,
I think I look pretty handsome
standing there in
your new blue puffer jacket.
I think she would find him very handsome too—
looking like this,
she might just give me back a few inches
after she all but lost interest in loving you.
There is something of a dignified shade of grey:
his beard, a noble lichen
growing on a soft-skinned birch.
Your hair looks dark and rich,
not that mousy brown
of rabbits and rodents,
and who will know
it’s all because you haven’t washed in three days?
I put patchouli under your arms;
patchouli and 3-day-aged,
air-dried sweat mix well,
and everyone comments
on how wonderful you smell!
Keeping down appearances,
the cracks show,
and I see you wonder how many people know.
But we still look forward to Friday nights—
with our burrata,
vine-ripened oxheart tomato and oregano,
and a soft-pillowed pie
of cheesy, chewy una Napoletana
brought back
bubbling on the pizza stone
— three minutes after his clapped-out Beetle
drove off smelling of stale sweat and diesel.
My washing machine
froths and foams, just like the ocean.
Ruminates behind its oversized viewing window,
filling up the kitchen with the smell of ozone,
dissolving everything back to itself.
Living here with you,
you wonder how to solve
the problem of me—
but I know it’s you I must dissolve,
bringing our thoughts back to themselves,
and I back to
I… don’t… know… who.
At least we both agree
on your ridiculous belly,
****** in corset-tight
until he forgets and it all falls out!
But when I look at you in the mirror,
I see your shame—
how did that lithe, lean boy
end up this way?
He’s tired of holding up the torch,
but I remind him that even Buddha
had a paunch!
But, as you say,
his appetite was for truth,
not Friday nights holed up
and hidden away
with a bowl of unctuous, oozy cacio e pepe
and a glass or two of long-cellared Cabernet.
Through the window, the ocean rolls,
erasing every vice and sin
and all those virtues in disguise,
but last to go before the rinse and spin
is this conviction in
the fiction of you and me:
a flare bursting out of the abyss
that frames a figure in the mist,
a spasm and a fear—
yet, every time I turn around
there’s no one there…
Empty and opened wide,
we mingle with the surf and spray
that lays its cheek upon the strand,
dragging up its foamy frock
to tiptoe back and forth—
with no one to become
and nothing to be done—
just the dunes rolling on and on
beneath a moon’s faint hand.
In the warm night air,
lizards lick beneath its lids
or flee the rasping voice of gorse that
grasps the wind within its claws.
The tangled roots of mountains
groan in the solemn languages of stone,
where purple fists of amethyst
await the light in infinite quiet.
Freshet and stream whisper in the
silk-soft cant of silt,
yet I,
blind and mute,
deaf to silence,
heir and author of disgrace,
remember you in my amnesia,
ancient of days!—
in your new blue puffer jacket
with carbonara on its collar,
brought back beaming
as though there had never been another—
a loving hand
embracing every solitary strand of hair,
counted among the agencies of galaxies
and the brotherhood of a grain of sand,
oblivious that we were ever there.