Plain American Language

I cut a sliver/of WC William's finger
and placed it inside/my philosophy...

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

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.