Let us write a poem about love.
Can we be holy?

When we love - do we become holy?

Well yes - and absolutely -
when we love all.

Something softened me.
Too many yesterdays,
all those invisible tomorrows.

I look for their footprints
in snows not yet fallen.

a brown cabin -
wintered up - ready for
bedtime Westerns,
mexican standoffs -
sleep
and  perfectly empty

Pile in with me, where it is warm.
A marvel! How your hands rest, your perfume Ivory soap,
the shiny skin of your pimpled back,
a glaze of hair on your forearm. Designed by heaven
to be put behind my neck.

I am not made of sparks -
I am made of soft slow fires and
sunsets.

There is nowhere to hold this, and it is heavy.

We drink coffee in white, square mugs
on the fifth ***** step.
I am sick and the coffee pinballs in my stomach.
You do not care about hydration.
You are covered in so much paint
you look like Matisse in a fender-******.
You look sore all the way down to your fingers.

The bed in the opposite room won't be yours,
but could be.

I lope around nauseous on the mornings
I don't work. I light candles that jump
with a stench of French Vanilla. Dogs bark
unholy early.
I tire of the anxious sleep of the newly living-there,
the newly living.
The loud neighbour,
the considerate neighbour,
the ******* dogs.

I open the bedside drawer.
No Gideon hotel bibles.
Condoms, picture frames,
instructions for a washing machine.
No Bibles.

Sometimes, I find it in my shoes - this envy -
or in my pockets.
And sometimes I drag it behind me,
like wedding cans on a bachelor's car,
filaments of grief and filthy broken dinnerware,
threaded cotton of towels
too often used without washing
and wine bottle bones.

And somebody once told me not to paint a
room in it, but this jealousy is sage, not lime,
and I could **** well sleep in here,
and sometimes do.

A message to the boy minding the pastry,
one finger in each the webs
of cosmic lust and mercy,
waiting to be told it is fine to want
the best for everybody:
It is fine. It is fine.

What are you?
Were you born here?
No, I was born on the banks of the Seine,
beside the boneyard of the nameless,
in the pits of Delhi with
the blood of roosters on my toes,
***** who pecked one another
to their entrails because the
colony of the living sunrise was
shrunk to a pocket of feathers and fire
by some wire, wood, and staples.

I was born in the Academy of Athens,
where Socrates made salsa with hemlock
and danced into a dialogue,
because the grocery habaneros were all too tender,
and St. Augustine could offer no alternative.

Never forget - we were born to unfairness;
unfair as long as our appetites differ,
or we exhaust sooner than one another,
or we grip one another differently and come at different times.

The only person less fair than me is God.

But my justice - that is perfect,
like my voice, which has none of a gavel's
authority. Or my heart: which was manacled by giants
and sentenced to be pecked by a flying poem, a girl
with hair she won't comb, a song about Jerusalem.
Fair. **** fair.

I am fair as long as I can wait, quiet -
silent as the sand, sunburned and happy,
to be drawn into
that kindness, the Atlantic - - -
the flip and twist of the sea.

There is no God
If there were, every smell would be sweetgrass
and lemon.

and

If there were not,
we wouldn't have noses.
So there it is.

It must be that
I failed to notice the shrinking days,
the ever smaller liaisons,
the patches of silence.

Then there came the equinox.
Everything was eight hours long,
and you were nowhere in sight.
Who is responsible for that?

If my skin is soft to the touch
and unwrinkled
if my hands work faithfully
and my heart also,
then I must be blessed.

If I have my heirloom ring,
if I have a blightless history,
if our galaxy is still cold in the
right places, and hot in the
right places, then I must be blessed.

And if I remain troubled
with all those gifts -
then I am doubtful, sour, ragged.
Not worth the love I crave.

I am a child at a magic show,
second-guessing the theatrics -
There he is, behind that screen,
with a dove and dowsing rod.
With a tiger, and a cage, and a key.

So I am troubled-
it seems that everything came
in the lapse after a kiss,
where everything which could be touched
could be ignored.
Then the kiss was gone -
and there was the world again
stark and unholy,
bright and blue as a bruise.

How brutal it is to live
on that third planet under the
sun, behaving poorly. How failure
meant nothing, in that orbit.

How brutal it is!
never to face the thing that sustained us
(not even to thank it)

She is scared by the
long slow dwindling of
the heart's manouevres
towards the end of the night,
or of life.

So she tugs on its clammy fingers
tries to get it to waltz again.

I tell her:"Live with me between
a name and anonymity."
I say nothing.

There's no foyer in a one-room kitchenette,
but I stand in the foyer anyways,
holding half a poem -
or half a person.
And tilting at windmills.

She is a page and then some
a rough border - shaggy corners.
Glue chafing from the binding.
And maybe she is older than me.

But nobody ever learned to hunt
by watching vegetables being chopped,
and we both agree that since we're
pledging allegiance, we can put our hands
anywhere, right? I just haven't
mentioned which country.

The point is this:
Tomorrow is a mystery creature,and I refuse to guess
whether it wears fur or feathers.

You have tried calendars, and
a house bedecked in post-its.
I know. Try to put a collar on time,
it sheds all over your furniture.

You think time is:
You think life is:
The sun goes down,
the dew comes up.

You think time is:
You think life is:
Two hours with a movie.
Four hours with an amusement park.
Six with a car ride.

You think time is
an anxious pet
fed and watered
who lives in the same house
and sleeps in a different bed
who sometimes needs to be let outside.

That is not what time is about.
Time is about
a rusty cabinet door that squeaks when you open it.
A squeak you never noticed before.
Time is about,
when you have piled enough leaves enough autumns,
your heart makes the sound of a spoon in a teacup,
and then where do you go?
Sweden?

He loved it when she slid up
to him, as sweet as a sprinkle doughnut -
but now, something has befallen her,
she's been burned or frozen, tastes more like
cinnamon raisin; but by virtue of his
firelit face and tall tales,
he still gets invited out.
_________

He creaks upstairs an hour late, we
are already tangled up on the
back porch, smoking, and the
liquor has made everything
an economy of scale.

He is a ray of sunshine. Tells us
all the old groaners. The big fish.
Ultimately says, "Happy birthday.
Never let your guard down."
and hobbles off, with barb-wire chafing
his heel, and the rheumatic suspicion
that "rest" and "wellness" are
the fables taught to us by
bogeymen, trying to convince us
there are no bogeymen.

I am a tender Twenty tonight.
I want to twirl my fists in Muhammad Ali speedbag-spirals,
saying, "I am the champion. Never undefended."
But I am too drunk, and maybe
too humiliated.

God! He floats like painkillers. He stings like loss.

There he is, the tall order, the iron giant:
a two-story brainfreeze milkshake.

I shudder, a pipsqueak of a prizefighter.
The bucktoothed squirt at the icecream booth,
too short to notice that there are only three flavours.

On my bed night after night I
sought him who my soul loves, I sought him
but did not find him...

I sought this morning
a handful of domestic tools.
I raked, I shoveled, I let fly
a gust from my mighty
two-stroke gas blower, which
shuddered to death in my hands,
before all of the leaves reached
the end of the ******* driveway.

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem
that you do not awake my love until
the motor has had a chance to cool off,
or you might flood the engine.

David was anointed with the
oil of myrrh and cassia. My wrists
are caked in Havoline from
1998. Solomon ate banquets,
loved Sheba, three hundred
concubines and boats of perfumed wood.

Ramen at lunchtime. Sixty yards of two-by-fours.

If I never resemble a king,
let me sup of television dinners
let me work my hands in the valleys
of a clogged fuel line, let my bed
fill with the twin odalisques of
leisure reading and ***** sheets,
and give me never three hundred concubines.

And if I go about the city at night,
pleading with the watchmen, have they seen
she who my soul loves, let them answer:
"There."

The driveway is clean, now,
all the leaves left at the end to rot,
or be swept away.

A little known secret of actors:
you can force yourself to cry by
simply thinking about how badly
you want to.

Here's how it's done.

Start with fertilizer. Remember how
you felt that first year you
did so excellently at school, all-year
struggling and so devoted, woke up
Christmas to your mother's purchase,
eager for sugar plums and hedonist
things, ripped merrily into math workbooks.
The seed comes next, budding in the
open tunnels of self-worth - when
he told you that the thing you were
best used for could be done by anyone, really,
the oldest profession, and how you
liberated your oils on canvas long exiled
to make a scene of Rahab and Joshua,
and cried yourself away on alien bedding.

Water it all in whatever leaves the garden hose.

When they whistled without a name.
When your first time hosting supper was a catastrophe.
When you failed to keep certain things alive.
When the housecat burrowed in your warm
motor, and you just wanted to leave so badly.

Funerals of people you never knew, and
bugspray in your eyes.

One neglected message stays: anyone can cry.

Most mornings are not clear.
Most mornings are not the type with a
ten-state view from the top of
Clingman's Dome, and two very expensive
tanks of gasoline. You're welcome.

No, most mornings are battered
by some kind of weather condition -
rains and drizzles and nebulous fogs,
unhappy bedmates, a productive cough -
or else the sun just remits,
stays dozing until it has slept enough.

Then you get that gray sky-
chalkboard, the punitive slap of
humid cold on your early walks, your
coffee rendezvous. Then you have
too many garments at 3 because you put
on extra at 8. Morning, in short,
wishes you ill.

Be aware that if you were born
this century, you lurched into no
midwife's hands, full of love and wet, but
a surgeon's, gloved and powdery,
who spanked you firmly, knocked you
down with a commanding stare, and gave you
the first of many cuts you were to receive.

But for having woken up, let's say,
on the wrong side of the bed (if
even there's a right one), I would
like to think we've done alright,
are not too warm or upset at midday,
not too disappointed in ourselves, our moments
of astounding social gracelessness
that we leave like bits of sneaker in our wake.

Still, though, a question:
where grows happiness? Where sprouts
the silver trunk, the cypress or birch? Or
ficus or orange or ginkgo biloba? Tell me.
I would tap that tree 'til it withers, and die
under its trunk, and the two very expensive
tanks of gasoline it took
to get me where I am.

I received the news, this time exactly:
Nine-thirty-two in the evening.
A Saturday, the tenth of April.

Listen carefully:
run beside the surf, but know
the ocean is not your friend.
There is no smile in the way the waves
drown swimmers, the way they founder
mighty ships and save the sum of our loss
at the bottom, buried with the silt.
But could you so quickly hate the ocean?

Pain grooms itself, wants to be known
unsolicited, wants to steal away,
wants to bury its cold hands,
wants to wail but also to hush,
to quietly bristle in a bed of tar.
To wipe its face clean. To
seek love, and then to forsake it.

I cannot calm it - could never calm it.
I have no balm to blunt it.
We stem our grief as easily as blood from a wound -
hold your arm where the shell cut it,
on those sharp sands, and nurse it 'til it ends.

I read a story to my son. Really,
I am composing it, off the cuff, but
there is no reason his mother should know.

One day, Elliott built a rocket ship.
His rocket ship was going to take him to the moon.

The boy sees nothing silly in this, and
for a second, I don't, either.

And every spare minute, Elliott worked on his rocket.
When he was at school, he drew out in
blue, and chalk-white, a dream for his rocket.
When his mother told him to do his homework,
he worked on his rocket.
When his mother left him
in the dining room to finish his carrots,
he worked on his rocket.
"I wish I could work on a rocket,
instead of eating vegetables."
Tonight, you won't have to.

One day, Elliott finished his rocket, and he went to the moon.

From the Moon, he heard the earth mumble.
From the moon, he saw the tide hug the shore,
and knock down his sister's sandcastle, left
on the beach from the summer before.
From the moon.

"He saw China!"
And Brazil. And India.
"And he got to see what his school looks like at night!"
He wouldn't know that, as a a boy, I went safely walking there,
and as a foulmouthed teen, I was drunk in the playground, at night.
That I looked down, from the hospital adjacent when my father was there.

He asks if, from the moon, you could see plain
the shadows of the craters on our planet, too broad
to behold, on sidewalks and soccerfields, during a game.
"You could. All the shadows, in the cities and the seas."
And his ruby face relaxes, deeply struck,
and musing, I think, that maybe
shadows aren't all bad.

Elliott came back, in time that his mother,
could wake him up, and he could loudly fake a snore.
And he righted his sister's sandcastle.
He went to Brazil.
He was drunk on playgrounds.
He saw shadows. They weren't so bad.

And often, when he would walk on the
sidewalk, his feet would feel light, like he
was on the moon again.

"Because the Moon has no gravity."
No gravity at all.

When I leave, and land beside my wife in bed,
I admire the helmet on my mantel,
I crumble old moondust in the paw of my suit,
I feel, still, the dimples of the sheets,
light, and shadowed, like the clefts of the moon.

See that little match-stick,
see that candle there?
See that hard-worn photograph
taken for a year?
Take them punches, boxer-girl!
Much to your chagrin,
it comes back in equal part -
hard and deep within.

Consider bonds between us heat.
And fuel, the time we spent
sleeping close in tousled sheets -
a sky towards us, bent:
gray and cloudless, quick and fleet.
Candle-flame is meant.
to take those memories, and to eat
the message that you sent.

Photo attachment 1: You, him - bottle of Cointreau. Bite marks on your thigh like only I should have left! Grass (both types), a camera. Wrestling. ******. ***.
Photo attachment 2: You, him: carousels, cloven-footed balloon-man (whistling high and wee). Hot dogs. Ocean. Wrestling. ******, ***.
Photo attachment 3: There was something about a penguin… and there was cake involved. Polarbears - must have been a zoo. Causing me to mope at the keyboard: wrestling, ******. ***.
Photo attachment 4: It’s really just *** now.
Photo attachment 5: Please stop.

Shouldn’t be so callous:
that password is personal.
I shouldn’t really have it,
Well, this is what I get for exploring the caverns of iniquity
(that’s slang for your hard-drive),
***** little …
I can’t … cuss you out.

All photographs marked 10/18/07 for devastation.

Now, this thing has ended:
sad, though brief and gleeful.
We were consumed by happiness, never sorrowful
and nothing meaningful;
everything beautiful, nothing painful.
Princess, that work was masterful -
breaking that, making great things hurtful.
But worse still?
I can’t hate you.

I get the hunch that the ashes of kindergarten,
Lunchboxes, the national anthem
Are floating from the edge of us
So many sophomore stars from a cigarette’s tip,

Somewhere down the mountain we lost our winter coats
And bicycle summers, and plastic sailboats,
No puddles and rainboots, or slick soft dogs
And paper flowers, captured fish and frogs

We try to jump in puddles, and we float

Deep-bright and hissing in the city chill
Childhood traded for strange soft skin
Grumpy cats and boardgames for mixed drinks and casual ***
And the cicadas gaily chirping fall away like

Fishbowl-helmet astronauts, lost without gravity
Mercury, Venus, Youth,
Maturity, Jupiter, Saturn

We are never kids again,
Nor adults until we die

wait until the phone rings
and the teacher goes inside,
under the slide at Recess:
you can put your lips on mine

When I first sold myself there were
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
All the marks of war
All that searing heat
With all that pretty malice
Spilling Paris in the street
‘Twenty marks’ I called
‘Twenty marks’
That was 1943
And Piaf was doing well

Nurse, do you know what it is like:
To have a man inside of you
that you could never love?

There was, once upon a time, a pretty little ****
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
Lying on my floor
And Maman was starving, and my sister, too
Dignity wasn’t half the tax it seemed before
He gave me a baby, and a disease,
That was 1944:
Piaf was quite successful, then

Doctor, can you fathom:
Having sores all over you?
Yes, down there, and
all up and down your thighs, your body burns.
Can you feel that?

Then, the Germans left, and the Allies came, all
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
All of that decor
Fleeing, running out
On the French horizon
Retreat
The Allies were the same
‘Three dollars’ I called
‘Three dollars’
That was 1945:
Piaf was languishing
Paris had died

Jacques, my dear:
Those were our times
smoky cabarets, sculptured croons, fine wines
your rifle on your back could wind my morning with worry
and with my scourges, you took me all the same
but what I remember is:
black cottons, brass buttons, iron crosses, steel machines
then:

nothing

“Monsieur Boursin - she has passed.”

He sobs,
it sounds like
war.

I long to talk to a stranger and ask them:

"

Ever worry that,
in your blood there are antibodies
to make you nauseous towards
every.single.person.you.get.close.to?
That we are peering - naked, wet, shivering - into an unfathomable loneliness,
balancing on our toes,
inching, with our mistakes, ever closer to the most personal,
most frightening,
most loathsome loss
we will ever experience?
That you will never reveal yourself
Never be vulnerable
Never be loved or
love the one person with the
right size-of-wrench to fix you?

Your infernal heat, to guard against probing hands, will scatter any hope that the right hands might intrude, and you will die inside, trembling, small, at the thought you will REMAIN ALONE FOREVER.

"

And then, grin, and pause, and they walk away from the unthinkable phrase that describes...
All our bad or separate moments.

I dipped my hands in the volume of an immense love,
once, when time had not yet folded my spine
and it taught me that even kinships born of so little as
a lost word or an early sentiment are written on us,
and in us, and their existence never quite erased.

I have dreamed of being a tiny cutter clearing
the ruined towers peering from your open surf, the ancient arches
easing from the waves. My ship's skeleton leasing
its buoyancy from the mercy of the tide - I became
so much flotsam at that structures' side.

This burning question put to paper hearts,
consumed so hotly tall dreams and false starts.
It ate us up, and left behind it, ash -
the ink left on us, as before it passed.

Commitments so quickly and easily made
burst with the heat of a gentle grenade.
Left in the wasteland, so brittle the fuse -
we burned all the quicker with nothing to lose.

she spoke to me, on the daffodil sweetness of the pasture
while the grasses, waving, muttered their moist message on the wind
of rot, and renewal,
(but hold your lips, be still for an explosion of intimacy, for a moment)

'Are those a constellation?' she asks.
"The Pleiades."
'You don't know that.'

she doesn't care where the car begins, exhaling gently, to stop
and she commends its forward motion
(the keening love of a sodium light
and forgetfulness in every bone of my body)
I love the thrum of it, below my feet,
murmuring vibrato in the pedals.

They have a Huck Finn cave display at Disneyworld. In Adventure Island, or somewhere, or one of us, deep in the vastness of spines and fingers.

Its fiberglass walls are a portrait of America -
the glean of dew a reflection of that spirit
that drove us over the borders, the rivers, to Oregon,
so we could love under a naked moon,
and renounce our lives of glee, and security
for the bright unsettled plantation of the starless fields.

'You don't know a constellation from a cloud of dandelion seeds.'

But oh, my relentless pioneer love, I do - I know a constellation
is made of stars, and rough determination, and I know that,
love is a today thing, and we are yesterday people
that pain is tomorrow, and we will always be children of the dusk preceding
destined, dear, to find our love receding

Are you prepared, or will the wilderness this time swallow you?

Underwhelmed with modern magic, I let myself be taken
to a party on a strange night.
Like you, I let my lips whisper abracadabra and
kept my fears in one subtle hand.
Like you, I wanted to vanish the crowd
under a napkin -
to palm everyone into a cup under the table,
leaving a beaming new face - radiant eyes and unfamiliar tricks -
to abandon all the showmanship
exactly where it belongs.

And when all the faces peeled away to
a lively midnight wilderness
you were there, a magician
and prestidigitated into smoke and mirrors
every artifact of doubt.

There is nothing I would like more than
to have a drink with you
to have a cigarette with you
to have anything at all with you
and learn your secrets:
A longing for names unmentioned and eyes still incredulous,
and a reverence for fairy dust.

Watching the room empty,
hearing the soft chatter of their private marvels
we are alone, as we ached to be,
here, to tell our secrets, and they are these:
we are in discord with love
skeptics, so unfit for
the careless faith and
grasping vigilance of hearts our age.

Now, in this cabaret,
"goodnight" is ensorcelled into a curse, and
"come with me," a necromancy uttered
to give to dead hopes new dimensions.

Here, I would read every book under the sun,
work my fingers into knotted idleness,
believe in every fantasy
to learn your secrets.

Under the snowfall, we kiss like Chinese rings
but you know as well as I do
that quick enchantments are a thin fable,
and instant magic does not exist.

it's not so hard to
ask anymore, these questions
intractable questions about
what we have lost and
where it has gone
and it worries me

maybe we have become
accustomed to its absence

I don't miss the suffering
and I don't miss
the uncertainty I don't
miss the clouds, whatever they portended
or any of the times that we pretended
that our love had limits.

but I do miss well-defended
winters, snowed in, knowing
inconsolable sadness, complicated
sadness, and the ease
with which you disentangled it

Look at this, you whispered;
It's like a cat's cradle.
You moved your fingers
and it was gone.

So we are left asking questions without
a voice to offer solutions
so we are asking questions and
they seem solutionless.

I don't miss
clandestine afternoons, and hiding
from confrontation, but mostly
from each other
and I don't miss
long explanations, and looking at wild
mountains, wondering how
they could be climbed,
and duplicity, and things that we resigned
never to mention, and turned from, blind.

but I do miss
sleeping, two to a narrow bed
confined, knowing infinite windows to
your own wonders, and the canyons
so dark, concealing cat's cradles
a kiss and
a question away:
repeating hopes that we could not abandon

but there were some too hard
for you, too hard for me

You moved your fingers, but
this one never disappeared
and while I pray for someone
who can solve it
I'll hide it away again:

An artifact, a tangled souvenir -
to remind me of the things you couldn't fix
to wonder why you didn't persevere -
a question about what I have lost and
where it has gone.

ONE
Adam and Eve were born of flesh,
and woke from sleep, when God addressed
them both.
"Here is the world - unsoiled, unstained
(The sheet of the sea hides her breast and her veins.)
The time is uncertain; the end is ordained
and when it is finished, begin it again."

They saw God, saw
Lucifer, saw the tree:
felt oppressed. The world
was young but the book had
been opened. All stories conclude
in words and in gestures, wild and crude.
(They left heaven, fled to
the ambergris ocean, the
silk hills.)

TWO
Mad, they went to Egypt, built
Cairo in the delta where
her legs met, Thebes where
her eyes beat on the cataract
made cities on
her body on
credit, faith, and lust.
Until the groaning hungry ibis
and the famine drove them out.

THREE
From Egypt to Rome,
Adam to Caesar,
In Pliny's manuscript, Adam said:
"Here is Rome
a senate in your sympathy
an orphanage in your heart.
Come to his flat avenue, can't you
feel how far I've walked, on every flagstone?
Witness beaten sandals, frayed thongs;
feel your posture sag? I want to rest,
and I want you to help. I sat on the banks
of the Tiber; has Rome washed into my lap?
The streets are the furrows of my skin.

She said:
"I like a fire at my fingertips, not
bellowed to me under the floor."
Rome fell to that barbarian.

PAX ROMANA
God reminded them again.
Adam said:
"The knowledge is good, but it isn't a cure
for an Eden that seems so unlike the brochure."
He pulled back the skin of earth, and found,
a beating heart beneath the ground.
He knew, for once, the world would die.

IV
They went to ***** London, unhappy with
the lot of Rome. Amid the stench of a filthy Thames,
his blood ran with offal, with hate,
leached from the baiting pit, and she
did, too, in the ugly city,
from Knightsbridge to the sea.
They fought like monsters, fought a curse
that God foresaw, and they rehearsed.
An ugly city, from Knightsbridge to the sea,
and full of bitter folk.

V
Such is the end, a world
embalmed in salt and sand,
the leaves burned away; no cities
only orphaned tenderness under
ruined arches and aquaducts, wishing ill
but wanting that world returned,
and crying, yes, but knowing still,
their end was near; for all they yearned.

We have read this story cover to cover;
let Eve close the book, and pray in her sleep while
Adam dusts his hands,
and God begins anew.

In the hanging kitchen, the smell-
cut cayenned sausage, ejective tomato slices
the whole thing in the back of the throat, inflamed.
Olive oil. Vinegar. Billie talks about her "girl
friend." She lives in Mayfair. (Almost pretty;
don't look too long.)

At times I feel sick.

American man he
strikes the figure of a half-God
broad-shouldered, burned
he does Not exist, John Henry
split his bust long ago and we
are huddled small boys imperfect
in the dust of his legacy.

Our fathers stood from dinner tables kissed
wives were kissed by children one last sip of old
wines and walked into the night looking
for burned-up lamps, the memories of mountains.
Ate stone. Drank mist.
(A thirst for adventure is close to your heart.)
Fell into the grit, the failure, fell
into everything.
(Little else has taste once the spice of life is on your tongue.)

I have nothing but my understanding.
I want to be swaddled, paralytically blind, shamelessly loved.
Or to go out in the wicker
world, there to find whatever our best
died looking for, tigers or ruins or
a life after adventure.

it's morning, you know
we could
paint a still life with our impotent fingers
or cook eggs with every
spice in the drawer
we could
dig holes in the front yard,
bury treasures in front of
button-down commuters get
smashingly drunk forget
where we put them dig
them up and be convincingly surprised.

we could pretend our hands are
****** hands our
eyes new canvases and record
like **** Rembrandts
the embarassing details
we could make a creek of
pillows from one
side of the house to another
roll the entire length of it naked and
end up tangled in each other when they
run out

There is a whole day ahead of us, a whole world ahead of us -
a world of misery separated from us by
firecracker smoke, by cannonsmoke.

We have the house to ourselves
we could duct tape cardboard to the
exterior and pretend its one big
refrigerator box we could
jettison old ball mice and fat computer monitors
into the driveway *****
a campfire in the living room and
imagine that we have rebelled against something
fittingly awful, the modern world scowling at
our rusticity we could
make a tincan telephone that connects the entire
cul-de-sac and dress up smart and
sell it as charmingly as Ma Bell door-to-door

But our refined brains think two things:
*** again, handcuffed to maturity, or sleep.
What a world. What a longing.
What our age must suggest.
What an excuse: your starched reputation.
What courage could come from your bleached conscience.
How lovely to be trapped.

I've said before that what matters is
never the size ofyour ink budget,
the fact that you can run thirty minutes
at a stretch on a featureless track or your
special attachment to decorative BIC lighters
but a kind of mute complexity
that turns suspended spirals
in the water of your soul

I want you to be at times a tempest
and at others a trade wind, staid and insistent.
I want you to lock eyes with stars through the ceiling.
I want to see a look in you that says they have returned it.
I want to see your eyes recede into a place
no reassurance can reach, eidetic and dense.

Send your mind to hell by mail
but come back when the post goes out
put your cheek at the root of my neck
and tell me that it's getting late,
and aren't you tired?

Down the lawn's decrescendo,
on the curb, a blocky Mercedes,
older than sound. I pull behind it, drop my things
like kick drums to the ground. The door
opens: a chorus of
can I help, what can I take?
And the quarter-rests of a fight
interrupted. The whole affair like
a sore wrist.

He has a violinist's chin, soft but
pallid, pocked, from losing
a battle with teenage skin, and
here is the ochre noise of his voice
a can on rocks; my father's was a stone in
a guitar.

So this is the new arrangement.
A leitmotif that trails at her heel, that tears at
every quiet measure; the whole hall
hears her uneasy with the next note.
This is no melody, I know,
but it is the new arrangement.

When she is old and failed,
her conductor's elbow fallen mutely to her side,
what will she think of
the first song she ever made?