On the Bed, On Vacation

Sometimes I would rather not begin

by stating the situation in which I sit,

neck bent. Nightly, instead,

I will go to the pool hall

and play half-silently, admiring

broken fans that,

perhaps, cooled a great number of players,

cues in hand, important, blue chalk dusting off their shoulders

like drifting children; they tumble down

covertly, ethereal near the construction site

Oh construction site, in the town in which I was born,

you light up the as if you

were hosting a Hawaiian barbecue,

or perhaps celebrating Channukah,

though that is slightly troubling

as your candles are innumerable and scald

a fantastic after-glow

on the dashboard, dirt piles

and football stadium, drifting children. So, then,

the problem: light, being.

Beams beg for walking upon and

you are months from completion--

no night-watcher will touch

a foot on you, blue-black whale whose mouth glazes

open like candle wax,

except in the future when

children roll their fingers on your cavernous walls.

Trains (completely unfinished)

Opening wide the mouth of night

light is not an oracular ghost,

rather factual: stiff as military starch,

a lampost

trips the dark.

Morning you are woken with

clouds bombastic and purple night

a healed blister

a wisp of cold aluminum

drifting downward from the sky.

A loud breath, the throat tightens

as the whip of an opposite train goes by.

Not Really

Driven like a nail through brick

stick dark as unstuck mud

on the boot left cleaved on the basement rug

a knife poking through a pumpkin

something like breath, a drachma unearthed

by a four year old, cloaked,

shivering: hexagonal,

seemingly gorgeous, a dream--

the picture of horse, the faint upward motion

of coin bounced on the pocket's

inside, it climbs without bearing

right or left, thumb coolly caressing

its image for more than ten years--

time passes, as a pear.

In the thinning, subconscious night

light enters the room like a horse's canter.

Not tomorrow but soon I'll teach my students

about nuance, nooks and crannies

like a young child's hands, clenched

and dripping with fudgicle sweat--

meanwhile the child drips, content,

accepting. I used to think that silence

among two people was awful--

not knowing how to move from one end to

another, thinking, then, about sex, attraction,

interlaced eye contact like gradations of

color. I was constantly adrift. Now,

when I think of things and am with someone

who blinks at me like crystalline winter,

which is her laughter, which is, sometimes,

cold, I don't mind silence: it is part of the process,

the coming up with the idea, the forming,

then the coming out with it: firestorm

of I think I love you or we're missing

soap in the bathroom. Transient night

in Washington, D.C., such transience in this town:

we are constantly disappearing, books

being written, only backwards.

(no title) (i think this is unfinished, and could be added on to) (inspired by Arda Collins "Over No Hills")

And in the deepest

sense, I am looking

for companionship, which for days

and, perhaps, all of March til May,

I had rationalized or

imagined as the recollected

amalgamations of the hands of

two old lovers--

I'm a bit of a cat-burglar in that sense

and freely admit

this at a coffee shop next to

an opened computer

finished latter and two strips of paper

curling around and over themselves--

I read through

so many of my old college papers

looking for something scholarly--

thinking of language and love,

now and then

thinking of the inconceivable

facebook status (wintry,

porcupine-esque, desired, fulfilled,

scared, rounded out,

proud and reasonable, pencil-

thin, as a mollusk

climbing on thin blades of

grass, looking at pretty

girls) but punctuated--

I think I should not eat my words

anymore, I think

I should be putty on the wall:

don't you use it to hang

things, to maneuver and tear

into use for the pleasure

of making your

house a home?

The Unknown Bird (I saw this phrase in an Elizabeth Bishop poem)

The unknown bird sits atop leaves

and leaves of green--jays, pigeons

scooting up against the windows

the swooping, leaving

imprints indicating: birds, birds

this is the oven of us all,

four hundred degrees we simmer

in juices savory with lemon and dill.

Summer bakes us and will never treat us well.

~

Beneath the daytime, people pass each other

on the street. "No one smiles back at you,"

my friend complained. "No one says hi." We

watch as the ladies and gentlemen in

seersucker and fashionable period-dress

cycle by--we snap photos, imprint our

eyes on each gaunt hat and they are

changes as wood drifting down the river changes,

becomes the last sign of life, entering the ocean.

~

If I can swing it, my next lecture

will be titled: For My Next Trick: Residual

Patterns like Electricity Buried beneath the Wood.

Each word will contain sequences,

like bath and both and bother,

path, pith, patter, late, loath, lover.

Judge whether the path in the woods

with broken branches that are stormy weather,

leads out or simply further. The way

gets dark. It is an unabashed lover.

~

The most extreme weather I can think of

is a tornado. When I was young, I looked

out at the tail of Hurricane Emily wagging

darkness and almost filling up the drain pipes.

To have ripped off the roof of a school, to

gauge out the lungs, veins, of trees makes

nature seem overlordish, though it is not, though

we are making it be this way, us, caressing

as two pieces of used uranium nestled in their bed of shale

forgetting, later, that they never had known other than this.

Dating Scene (last poem of the 30 days, one day late)

There is a box that I kept, cellophane

clear plastic sheet, blue exterior.

Inside, a brachiosaurus and water color

of the Hudson seen from Hastings-

on-Hudson. Where is the world you've

built--sapphire stones in groups,

dark seasoning on salads, apples

that break the silences of November.

I'm looking for a Jew, who speaks in

dialectics, whose hues range from green

to the browns around the pupiles, with

hair so curly it is its own forest

and she sings like glory-bound diaspora

like shapes and wavering trees or,

when June hits, dripping popsicles,

her power lies in electricity, her font

is Helvetica and the care she heaves

for the comeliness of things brings power

to this city, she is a glass building bridge

that frames an old post office

she is the camera, the typewriter,

the ribbon stretched across the park,

she slow motion, she is the tide,

she once was. I'm looking for a Jew,

a world to build; can you help with that.