Once a great love

cut my life in two.

Yehuda Amichai

 Bring me your sweet oranges.  Lately,
 they are my only interest.
  
 Turn the lights out so I can feel your
 visible radiation.  Night after night after
 night.
  
 Remember when those house sounds
 were all we talked about.  Those—
 and other grapes we have eaten.
  
 When it was time to sleep, 
 we walked.  I helped you 
 into my skin.  You were a gemstone
 balanced on my anklebone.
  
   
 
 
 

Michaelkircheplatz

 You never knew any archangels,
 but one calls for you.  You sense
 summertime—feel the same heat
 and shoulder it with care.  Even the locusts
 cannot sleep.  Your name faintly 
 in their metallic hum.  Love and its silent bell
 watch like it will never matter.  
 Nighttime spreads itself—whispers
 Stay with me.
  
 On a map of the walled city, faded colors plead.
 Timid, sheer cravings stay away.
 Your lashes still wet from when you believed.  First blush
 is handed out with the trust of a captured swan—
 wrapped around you, its wheeled eyes mimic lunar exhaustion.
 It has been a long time since you have held a hand, and it feels
 like a clattering of jackdaws just before they snatch your coins.
  
   

 It’s a very experiential anything,
 I say, I know.  For the most part,
 borne of something else.  Unmeasured,
 but somehow lagging behind in
  
 massive subtlety.  All the new music
 is about Adam’s violent side.  Comes out,
 once in a while, like a driftwood chill.
 And when the hectic lean, oh,
  
 I feel wood.  I would separate frost from
 dog if I could swear on cold.  I want you
  
 to meet the others. 
  
 *
 The sound of incantations
 The sound of craving prayers:
 over one’s sun
 over one’s sun
 over one’s
  
 death makes flesh
 go up.
  
 *
 I think I saw you once—
 in that room—the room
 that takes so long to write.
                         (I think that gasp means you’ve guessed it!)
  
 *
  
 Different in Winter
  
 In this world of faulty shoes,
 eyes move faster than allegro & fall
 into laps of moist garments.  Skin
 sinks in—stretches and attaches itself
 to choir bells.  The martyrs, 
  
 with scissors, look over the water
 as the wishes come in.  Fish sleep—
 hiding inside a new approach.  
  
  
 *
  
 Si ne suis, bien le considere…
             I am not, I am perfectly aware of 
  
 how the accordion tore its rib
 and gave it to me.  (why complex(ions))?
  
 Something must be said—to end
  like this. 

Against my will, I fall
upon the archive, creating
a tension tight as rival verbs.
Although painful, this has the advantage
of not being dull.  Today I feel
all words as my space, but lines
are prodding beyond my space,
and what they touch is nervous.

The surface of the one I love
 forgets its feeling—whereas tickling
 used to define our bodies’ borders,
 now our flesh is merely an echo
 of its parts.  I have done

an excellent job of carrying out
your experiments—like the time
I found your heart by clicking
on the main icon.  It was at home.
Your heart, that is.

But, against my will, I dream
of illness through which we both will suffer
from very large nerves.

Spring, then summer, decided next
to abandon the body.  Memory was made
as an endless necklace.  

     (Is this.  Could this     
          be.  Or is this before—   
         the sky the color of hipbone) 

Expression digested 
into message.  The wind 
takes licks at us until 
we’re knock-kneed and pinched 
against one another—then  
pulled back from the pause.  Inner freedom 

is released from practical desire— 
that lapse into accent.  With attention 
on your tension, make intent your mind on me. 
We move about the moving tree.

Time opens the lock-box as we step out
into our hairnet jeweled
with black sheep.

Just now I’m wondering if
 I’ve spent my life wasting
 the game of poem that matters much.
 Everything always begins just as I imagine,
 and then, ideas leapfrog with aspirins. 
 It’s the meeting of distracted equals 
 each wearing the season’s newest. Do you get it--
 how this crossed my mind?  Rearranging things
 into chevrons, geese go where we won’t:
 to impressive elfin panoramas, shimmering mountains.
 Even the boldest risk-takers can’t sit still
 for that portrait.

 As my vitals leave my limbs, I come bearing
 enjambment.  I do not do laundry.  I do not launder.
 I throw wine.  By plugging-in the holiday machine,
 I think I’m overcompensating for my lack 
 of feminine feels.  I’ve never even known a horse.
 And then another thought—this one not as flashy
 as the one before, but just as soft.  My children
 will be named after salads.  Then, we’ll wonder
 how being female passed over me.  (Note, too, illogical
 pronoun progression)

 (I realize this has been a heavy exchange,
 a senseless zone.  But, my first version
 was overdone and not my own.)  One feels this way
 when voice fails.  The decision to sleep
 becomes some kind of heroic deception that chides:
 Live off the fictive bread of illogic…join abstracts
 with prepositions and never mind if we can see the thing.
 This is not a botanist’s life.  Rather our rhapsodic love
 evokes dull sequins not unperplexed by the absence
 of light required to glisten.  

 Sequestered after a while, once more I breathe.
 Cold air etches illisible sketches of medieval tortures
 onto lung dry wall.  I reject the advice to simply
 wear the air.  That is, be invisible.  (Raw bones, she likes them.
 But clearly absent these days from the lather-frantic milk club.
 She forgets to eat rounded meals.  She codes, then decodes.)

 Just now, I was going to ask if you, too, have slept
 on liquid grass—exploring the color of some life.  
 Surrounds you, life and all, but two fish don’t go 
 the same way.  It takes three to make fire and flood.
 Consider this:  If I owe you, I am sorry.  Melodrama
 drains cleverness with chairs pulled from under us.  
 Luck plus tricks blow the ashes from your face.  
 I’m not afraid of you.  I’m not against the wonderful planet. But,
 when the gifted plunder, love’s rate trails.

 Slow purpose by midmorning, and what’s wrong is 
 you once said the world is complete regardless.  Then,
 I was your swan, which pissed me.  Appeal, dissect.
 Harm. Correct.  A tree bears its own body daily.
 The weight of roots and earth press on 
 through the leafline blood.  It goes not where it wants.
 In chronic humid, one clear image emerges,
 and you liken me to a peony.  This is where non-friction
 leaves off, and if you touch my shoulder, then what?
 I’ll wait but not to wonder.  No one unforgiving,
 explicitly thin (for now, but not in months to come).

 We should’ve thought I may not
 leave this energy.  We should have found a way
 to liven up my look.  The room lets sun in, 
 slow purple by midmorning. 

Surprisingly, true misbehavior has, of late,
been difficult to find.  Flipping pages,
I discover I am still a failure.  Someone
always thinks he’s spotted a blushing rose
in my face—and I don’t argue.  Many times
I have watched the pastel pigeons—
watched them dent the garden.  Airborne orchids,
I like to call their lukewarm colors.
  
Attempting mischief, my palm 
peels back pages to uncover the smallness
of an ancient forehead.  I wonder if he—the first
who bore arms—smacked red out of veins,
leaving blue powder, little else.  
  
Of course, all this
is open to interpretation—between the alphabet & the calligrapher—
that is, between the calligraphy and me.
   

For in that autumn

after speech strange desires stir…

John Ashbery

 As for me, I distrust
 the more common seasons.  This fall senses
 what we have and what
 we will have—
 with no pattern,
 no matters.  The made up
 made real.
  
             (I don’t ask for anything
                  and you didn’t ask for that)
  
 ***
  
 Autumn and the loss of love,
 the days orphaned like the son
 of a difficult fiction.  Once,
 I was who I wanted—now,
 I have more friends. 
  
 Have wonder less
 lest the worlds of others bite.
 Ask you to say, Sonnet?
 Mean you to say, Pincushion.
  
 A hearty tongue
 that waits the day.  Heaven
 is open again—
 making its only mistake.
  
 Come and look 
 how beautiful we are.  Say
 you are lonely.  Say your face
 breaks at nothing.  
 You beat it like a scar.
  
 ***
  
 The definition of reticent is this:
 people often mistake it as a synonym for reluctant. 
                         
                         
 (Ask me what I have.
     Tell me what I don’t have)
  
 ***
  
 Verdure Erased
  
 Cold snap of twig and bark wakens
 the bud-lovers.
 The vulnerable summerfruit
 feigns childbirth or death
 to escape the gift of scab.
 As for me, I distrust
 the more agreeable seasons.
  
 Strange desires, carnival release.
 A laurel leaf staying green.
 In this pursuit of love and mirth,
 I don’t show up.  I don’t care.
  
 The minted moon team soothes
 the heat rash crawling on the arms, the back.
 A bed that wants 
 getting into.
  
 Once, I was
 who I wanted.  I wanted
 my lip to drop.
  
   

for you know who you are

 With a nudge from the sun, a whisper of plum
 perfect dark moon comes crushing, pressed
 against our chests.
  
 A skeletal melody plays, sensing life
 as it is made—greening
 across stars and blowing threads of pleasure. 

There is no best way
 to capture me 
 at my worst.
 My confused packaging 
 runs home every night
 without even changing costumes. 
 In my imagination, 
 I haven’t let you down.