Untitled Short Story or Prose Poem?

"I've been thinking a lot about refusal. Take a baby, for example: a baby refuses to eat, or go to bed, my baby, for example, when she eats or refuses to go to bed, she sits and thumps something or says 'I don't want it' and the 'it' that she speaks of, this larger 'it,' refuses to give itself away to meaning--it could be dinner or bed or the bath or the shoe strewn on the chair next to her bed. And that thump. The thump and the sound and echo of the thump, caused by the refusal the hard wood of the table or flooring or chair to break or bend or even give an inch, rings in all of our ears. It's almost like--it's almost like there's a refusal in practically everything we do. Even an agreement is a refusal of something.

"Two hands meet in the air, pierce the space between, and meet, grasp, acquiesce to each other's presence, and shake. And for that moment, there is an acceptance of refusal: neither one will back away from the upward-downward motion, the quickness or slowness, a small social contract made sudden and true between two people. They push the air and make it move around them. They refuse to let that moment go undone. And in that agreement, they refuse all other options. They're one. For that twenty, thirty seconds or so.

"There are moments in a person's life when refusal is everything. Your teenage years. Early adulthood. Or now. Now is the best time to refuse. That refusal is the one true thing you've seen in your life. It defines you. People tell you, I've heard people tell me, that if you only live in the negation, then you'll live in comparison and contrasts all your life. You'll measure yourself with what you will not be, not what you will. But how can that be true if, when I walk, I am constantly refused? That's what physics is: things keep in motion until they've been refused by some other force. Forces so strong, you never knew they existed. People call them walls, but I know better. I am the sum of the refusals of forces. There's been a wind whipping at me since before I was born and it refuses me. People talk about it. They philosophize over it. But all it is is refusal. I don't shape myself by saying what I'm not. That's already been decided."

Don stood up from his chair and exited. His hands were dusted opal in the sun. Everything was a sharp breath in. And the first shot hit him square in the leg.

Day 7 (because no one needs to read Day 6's poem)

Thought Experiment

Delinquent dinner, pesto mozzarella. I believe I have gone to the edge of the film, the firmament and gone back. This is in prose only because it has to be. Because the hour, the slow molasses of the bulge of my eyes, digs into the rock of the brick house, the plaster moulding and the possibility of hornets in the bright day of sunlight coming. I have visited the time. I have been ill. I have rested and sat up late, like now, and weasled away a good enough try. Have you taken the pill yet? Has spring bottled its smile and then opened it like a fire cracker or a buzzing rocket? Where does the question mark lay when it tires of figuring itself in the air? I am almost certain it is too late. I am almost certain that, in the moment when the lily pad, like an outstretched calla lily, bursts into tears--and it will only do this because of the morning dew in combination with the pellets of water careening into it from above--the sun will wake up again and feel its right arm flex, then its left. And it will be spring again. And there won't be any sirens, any longer.

Day 5

The Ground Round

Finally, in the effort and effrontery, in the wake of ceremony
and lack luster buster, thistle and thin, butt of the joke
pickled quick, tickly wind: lift up the mouth and freeze the thought
lock the effort in the colon: preface to the period,
a jocund moment—where is the flyer, where is the youth
of the mind, the minute difference between the infant
and the toddler, the spring magnolia and the flower-petaled
sidewalk—it is easily hide-able, a hyphen’d myth
the disappearance of it is inside the between-space, the figured
circle, the ouroborus of space and minutiae: have you seen
the figure of it standing on the snout of the rock in
the midst of thought—be bigger than thickness, round like
a boast at midmorning, fingering the tingle between finger
and thumb. I am gorgeous in the morning. I am a felt feeling.
I rub the patterns of the index and lines of excitement wave
frequently out of my mouth. I believe they are sentences.
I believe they have rounded the corners and gone into the world.

Day 3/4

Sound Poem (33)
Passover, Night 1


Platter as a sound: trussed and spooned, three
syllables of meats, vegetables: what would be pickled
what would carrots amount to at a single
notice. I am careful to ring my finger around
the glasses, design wings and floating careful
things that composite like jellied candies
this meal this laughter like a clarified soup
beautiful the smell of pleasure and
ruffling conversation: a choice of two kinds of kid
and the questions of a child, of a child
of a child, of a child: all of these are the rolling
clicks and clatters and the ones that hang
above waving at us and calling us justice.




Sound Poem (34)

Delivered again like the previous. This time faster. This time
I am searching for memories. This time pick
me up higher I am the child I am the wonder, fuller:
the crook of my arm the infant yawn sound
like the back of a chair parting the air behind.
What beyond this: the crinkling of body of face little
arm like new plant and almond skin
pin me to this one pin me to this thin wonder
something newer is to come. To feel her:
to breathe breath of expectation, lemon in water.
How like a tail this all feels. How like balance
in water: a ripple, once central, nothing single.

30/30 2015: Day 1

Facing It
after Yusef Komunyaaka

I look into the bulge of my wife's belly:
there is no reflection, though there is one
inside: this pregnancy, this moon
with face and arms and kicking
in it, shifts me. I cannot
let it go: it shifts me. I turn--
I am contained. I turn once more--
still contained. I am flesh. Inside is flesh.
My wife brushes her hair back,
licks the tips of her mouth
and her eyes are stone fires, golden
brown. She is my teacher, she shows
me how to hold myself, to hold
the belly. How we hold each other
like leaf in wind. How we
need to clasp against the other
to prop us up when one
chooses to fall.

This is in spanish...by Antonia Torres Aguero

Hay una falla en el centro
una fruta podrida al fondo del canasto
un rostro quemado por los agentes del horror
un rastro que supura bajo las vendas.
Hay un error en todo esto.
Una piedra en el engranaje
un mecanismo desaceitado.
Son objetos, cartas, llaves perdidas bajo la alfombra
basura, quebradas que esconden cuerpos bajo la cal.
No hay sagrado corazón que redima.
No hay oración que enmiende ni explique.
Hay un pinchazo por donde se cuela el aliento
un desastre por donde hace agua la embarcación.
Hay una grieta
una trizadura en el centro
Allí chorrea la comprensión
el alquitrán ardiente de la palabra

Love Poem to Hannah

Pie and your countenance on my birthday, your hand slightly bristling

from the contrast of cold inside the bathroom against the heat of your body temperature

after sitting next to an open oven for so long, listening

to the flames wrought and cinder and caress and singe and melt.

It is almost glistening to think of how you will look at me

after I take one bite, after I will taste the apple that you’ve baked for me

inside a crust so luscious with butter my stomach ache will sing gravely and loudly

of the benefits and drawbacks of sugar--it will be glorious: you

will be glorious. You with your simple hair that leans back and forth

when you tilt your head forward and back, kissing me with

the eyes of your tongue, that bright red lipstick I love,

you are my birthday present. The crescent of your laugh, the chatter you bring

to the table and the bedroom, a sudden and gentle touch

on my shoulder that bewilders then calms then huddles everything close.

Do you bring this much into the world as you give? Bake crusts

that envelope an apple like organ music? The hair on your sweater twists

and falls onto the carpet every single day. I’ve seen pieces of it twirl,

curls of butter on a hot pan called air. What other pieces of you can I steal for myself tomorrow?

Similes

Grief like cloves mistaken for honey, like a

ship inside of a bottle, like bottled molasses,

like the sudden sharp knife of February,

like December, like March in mud season, like seasons

like the rapid vaporization of liquid iron

that seeps into the vein that marches on like militaries,

like militaries, like edges of quilts that

stack upon the smallness of the body of you,

like a million and one bricks smoldered onto one shoulder,

like one shoulder, like one initial tatooed

onto your eye, like an eye, like the iris that quivers

like cadavers when the morgue shakes with rage,

like the numbers of millions that moan

into the mouth of slavery, like mouths, like the mouths of babes,

like the equivocation in the voice

when language is underdeveloped, like unfathomable

illnesses that scratch at the belly

at the rocks that empty out onto the toes

like broken windows, broken books, broken doorbells

unanswered mail, cacophonies that

do not dispel the sadness, the road that elegies walk on,

the yellow and dusty dirt that etches

an ink mark down the troughs of muscles

on the bodies of crying mothers, like blue and blackness,

like the emptying out of rivers, like the movement

of time on the body, like grown arms

and legs and lips and speech, like a pencil

or bell that both echo like footsteps.

In the ecology of personal suffering, the world

passes by like a bi-plane, turns and gyrates and gives and gives,

thirsty like a philanthropist for its giving.

There is love and there is the hand that trembles like piano wire when the hammer strikes it, there is memory faded and there is memory that is a permanency, grafted onto the skin, a kindness like a beautiful body. Once I woke

and thought you had gained your body,

but if that were true, your hands would not be whispers

nor your whispers and smile drips of water on the edges of my eye.

This grief like a cushion I rest on, like a bread I dig into when I am thirsty,

edges away, returns and leaves.

There is no distinct reason why a memory is like a caged crocodile,

but there it is: silent, motionless, mouth

agape, breathing.

Today the world is bright,

is drier than most other days: it is fifty degrees

in February, almost fourty eight in the shade--

the cool breath of the wind

so thoughtful on most days in springtime

whispers in haiku syllables

five, then seven, then five accounts of how

global warming will not end, that we will suffer,

and the glaciers will melt

and I will die and everyone will die

but we will be warm, and our shoes will sink

into the loving earth that cushions us,

cradles our bodies as we lie onto it,

breathing in the breath of eternal summer

and honeysuckles and disappearing bees

and bears kept in museums and poetry

kept in museums, locked in glass cases like

so much fruit in the grocery stores

and the grocery stores filled with bright, beautiful

yellows, pinks, purples and oranges,
vegetables and leaves will forever be green

and green will be the flag because there will

be no nations, there will only be earth

and water and the few people

who populate this world,

as we dangle our shoes over the edge

trying to remember what winter

used to mean when it took us over in February.

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.

#13: Rain (rain rain rain all day long)

A dance on the garden for three days

rain you are my Rubix cube of night

tell me once again why, on facebook,

your relationship status says single

when my eyes married the sky and

your blackened clouds. I expect,

in the middle of August, you'll

be gone--flightless fox of April.

Let light carry you away moreso than

sour memories of no-fun Sundays; let light

break you apart like exhalations

#12: Rhyme (this was a lame-o rhyme...)

Last night she Topeka

Tonight she'll tell her secret.

#10

Knowing full well that the earth, lizard crawling

on a tilted axis,

would spin upon the sight of her

would that the earth would spin at the sight of her.

She controls the pits of him

the riptides and pools of him

the entrails of him the trails of him

how they blink, would that they'd blink

and set wind lauding the bricks and windows

of city buildings, wings that spin circles

City of spinning circles, would that you

Would, in light of love, int he light

And love would contest not

of its amber vision again,

that is to say, its amber vision is the power

that fills the canyon river and paints it amber.

II (#9, written by people on the street who were kind enough to write something, and a little weirdness at the end)

I would like a life

full of Love

full of expectations, dreams

and hope above all

with trees, rivers, dogs and rain

In a world with trials and tribulations

I find myself searching

Looking for an answer

There once was a girl

who had the whole world.

My most favorite never

have what elephant

Butt: big crazy asophagus

Cherryblossoms, see.