Metonymy on Lookout Mountain
after Robert Lowell’s ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’
Here the jagged earth pays homage to the sky;
my hands, you flit and flutter and confer,
fingers purpled grasping at thin air
until I, a stuttering firefly, collide
with a sudden wind of hard words
from the fire door of your chest. Compare:
Isaac has been bound up, wrists rubbed red;
my hands free and dithering. On Lookout
you only say the word, my see-saw soul in drought.
I am not worthy of the blessings on the bread.
Lookout, a name to warn with: O sky
with a paucity of breath, wild sky that touches
where the lazy river dries, sky for eating
but sucked bone-dry, sky for goodbye,
sky to stretch and lull the sun’s brief blushes,
alibi to a hand’s absurd retreating.
On Lookout, sky, pull blithe fears from my head.
My hands, murder and create. Cry out
for the things you’ve learned to live without:
we are the only words that can be said.
Isaac bites his lip and bears his neck. On Lookout,
my will bottlenecks. Some summer evening, hands,
against the knock kneed viscous wonder,
find another. Kyrie eleison, squelch the doubt
that trembles toes and rattles light — my hands,
fist and hoist the sky like fat lipped thunder.
Ways of Counting
after “Floor Standing Art Deco Clock,”
manufactured by IBM, New York c. 1938
I’ve been counting on you.
The twist and spin of your limbs
in prearranged patterns, your
face always counting, collecting
the moments in spools of light,
marking the spaces in between.
Matter is malleable under your
careful touch, finding and found,
confounding. My thoughts in
black and white, decimal, sun-
and-mooning, angular against
the languid saggy landscape.
Watching you move or begging
for release from the humdrum
pendulum or the definitive dial.
Relying on oscillation, the minute
movement of the mainspring
dancing on the diaphragm, while
breath is splayed and collecting
in wooden April pools. Your hands
shadow and coccoon, cradle and create,
lump love out in fractions and wholes.
For those of us who have measured
kindness in crumbs and crayons
the steady tick is disconcerting.
Summary of the poems in that book of your poems I told you I read and didn’t hate
You want me but I don’t want you. Sex
is drippy when you want me. Women are made
by men’s words. I miss the stale sex smell
you rubbed into my sheets (I don’t miss you).
A play on lay and lie and sex. Sometimes I write
because it gets me laid. Strange light.
Loud orgasm. Women’s bodies punish.
Women’s bodies as receptacles
of my words, my longing to be known.
As good with words and women
as paint. Homeless wandering and writing
like a worm. A play on Eve, snakes
between her legs. Sex and can I keep it?
Lonely dachshund sex. Orgasm. Woman
beckons and I follow and her body is dirty
again. Sex on a trampoline. I’ve gotten better
since then. Woman who sleeps with me
and dreams of women who are not me.
Fat women thrown on the fire after orgasm
(mine). Hips and typewriters and rejection
letters. Scotch and money and lights
flashing and my first time. I’ve gotten better.
A tumblr site called “Songs You Used To Love.” I keep thinking I’ll run into a song I disagree with, but I haven’t yet, and YES! I listen to them all the way to the end…
http://songsyouusedtolove.tumblr.com/
Speculation
The pattern is clear: wear and tear,
tear and grin, wash your face, cut
your hair, wrinkle and curl up and die.
Body a bag you knock around in,
heavy without the thrashing of skin
and the ballooning utterance of air.
Body a ball of kick and shove, hustling
the sidewalks and buses and streets.
Expand, contract. Rinse, repeat.
We push at the edges of each other,
awed at the demarcations of cells
that corroborate. And still tenderness,
this, and bodies that strain. Draw us in
the tether. Etch my letters in granite
or bark, with nothing in between.
So a little while back I put together this little flash movie for a class project, and after I stumbled across it again today, I got quite a kick out of it. Quiz: what do you think this little gem showcases most?
a. my utter lack of drawing skills
b. my love of goofy seventies cartoons
c. a bit of a weird sense of humor, really
d. all of the above
Check it out:first there is a mountain
(Music “There is a mountain” by Donovan)
Just talk she said
her voice a bone sucked dry
if I think anymore
I’ll crawl out of my skin.
Crow
Impossibly imposing, dark
even at the beak. Cawing
at the sudden spring,
pulling tufts of feathers.
Mold or moss grows
on every thing, everywhere,
even the curtained nape
of hidden hair. Why have you
forsaken. Even this scratchy
patch of dermis. To say nothing
of. To instead say nothing.
Seconds sift through
apple blossoms on the
slow curl towards brown.
Twice you have denied.
Already askew from the stem
while the wizened dandelions
stare eeriely at the fading sky.
Tags: poetry month
particularly
litigious is not how I
struck my orthopedist
Never up earliest,
curled in the blanket
for a better-sized dream,
a barely-lit moon
in the brightening room.
The gears of the house
startle the mouse to a
miracle wake, lazy lurch
to the lung and a lithe
start, purring. Well-oiled,
soon groomed
in a shatter of water
a taming of loose hair
a scrubbing of matter
chattering at the cold wet
in cold air.
moth at your window
drab and exposed
in my underneath flutter
and widening stare
count the tiles
the seconds the ways
you are not with me
the heat of your breath
at my curious neck
I am a statue exposed
and froze to your adamantine
gaze, a quixotic question
true and amazed, I am thin
at the skin to your whims
that you wear in your
precisely mussed hair
unencumbered in thin air
which are whims alabaster
and I am exponential
beckoning in.
Bleary-eyed sleepdragon.
So many ways to say
you are not with
I am not your
there are things we
and you said that
but it was your
yes. your no. your yes.
It is generally liable to wrinkle or cause cracking.
Use only with adequate ventilation.
Heavy applications are too massive to age well.
Do not store or use near heat or flame.
Mouth the lyric.
Parse the air.
Beckon in.
I’ll be counting
the wind, again.
