Poetry
Eleven
he runs mac ‘n’ cheese through a coffee cone
I run mac ‘n’ cheese through a coffee cone
but make no special shout-out to irrelevance
it’s Thursday and my boy’s gone
ants slip across a countertop
tonight I’m my own reason
for registering objects onto life
stars, go be the spangles
in someone else’s dancehall
a simulacrum of collective action
insensate at this distance
while bright somewhere for someone
tonight I’m my own Dresden
with the fires, and the pen that writes it down
we found in the sky an old remembered thing
Through the ribbed hall I move continually
with my armored team, my
armored team
exuberant satellites:
fall anywhere,
break anything.
real widows
though lynchings don’t happen
exchanged for new spectacles
still there’s the mite
and slot where you drop it
affixed to the palace
that darkens the boomtown
in night’s surly dreaming
I went to resign there
“you’re not a real widow,
we gave you your money
to spend on the pleasure
you could have abandoned
how great was the pleasure,
to die for while living?
Now leave us the money,
that box is our box.”
aloneness
The stock’s eye shut and it yawned
Always their tranche is used badly—their dove
Is a creature with little of the love.
What they and their ken can cadge
From the bower, they cadge. But I
And my foot will make them work,
Stamp to upset the spirit lamp
Whose flames unpeeled our ceilings
Singeing life in open rooms
Where greenness ought to wander
Blackened a little, but not unloved.
You go: unhook the latch
And call the lift. Although you have held
Up a household, it’s nice
To simply go now, alone in the green
That becomes you, that is awesome.
The thinkers who think
Have expended much energy—
At long last, just the opa.
in the backlands of the province
The bones each believe in the hollows of their sleeping.
Singing to them doesn’t work to wake them,
it’s sleep as shows up in the backlands of the province,
as it goes on in time and the scene develops tears. Why
solder sick hearts to sick raindrops? Falling downward
together, loosed by the rage of undoing the world
to its poles. How is it our sails keep up with
our sorrows? We are told we are led,
Now tell us how water is all the same water
since dinosaurs trod the world’s past. We last.
to an indie friend in havasu
They will not want you any closer here.
Of the many who may need you to administrate the ruins
most stand behind their desks and are pure business.
The sky, their sky, an escalation of lake
Shifts blue quanta from duct to dam to tap
while inside you relax with your images
as if in a floral blaze on a graded incline
to a mountain where your style,
upper item on the invoice, is a charging
for your coming as the obverse of their dream.
Film sitting in a camera, film is dead
though light still drops its Roman coins
for Roman kids to find. Because
the body’s greeds have come at last to bore you,
books bought on being happy and alive;
the sun, whose broad estate neglects the bookish,
it hasn’t left you even one centime.
a dimity, cottony song
Snake, be quick—excuse of words
to make me sharp and want to write
waits in metaphor’s sleepless taunt.
People use stones! Compose things
slow to weed sounds boys invent
from drone’s new low. Saxifrage
in young stands lovers meet behind,
nervous to dismiss significance
Ur-names inventing Ur-things
in the flowers, bees reconciling workers
to their combs. Quiet writing,
don’t strike ideas I let be composed
but through that flow of breath that is not
my breath, split ore from rock
that’s not my ore, my rock.
a recording of you singing
Just as my prosody
rose as excess
I smiled in the middle of it—
a recording of you singing
husbandry, meet sacrifice
tears collect
on the dirndl’s hem
the sleepy Brahmaputra
has swamped the university
its towers miss their gilding
I make no decisions
I’ve stopped asking questions
If I sit by this section
of riverbank, will it bring
my lost quanta of grace
thanks to the 2110+ participants
Because the mirror is broken on your Prius
I have come to believe more firmly
In the purpose of your conference—
A need to explain the broken
To the broken, a feeling of being uneasy
Looking backwards at destruction,
Boom dropped through the roof
Of tableau after gold tableau. I’m not so afraid
Of hands not getting dirty, the humus being rotored
In an academic field, but your dark hair
In its surplus, through the bent glass
On the Prius—I choose this to remember
From my visit to the conference,
The thingness of things
Yoked in shared obsolescence,
The structure of you moving
While structure itself never moves.
he accounts for the art’s current state
Either in spirit a mocking renewal
or attempts to replace the Alps
they make no sense
unless you should turn to avoid them
beside the tiny grains of intuition
squabbling there over who dropped them,
taught them to glow on the shrines.
Once dreams stop, then the coitus
it’s best to be polemic—
sun is sense is field is form
and after, all gets splendid.
in a cab with you in urdu
I am fed up with this world
And want to be somewhere else
But it is no problem—I have ceased to believe
In disjunction, the trouble over choices
In a too-short life. I want to go
Outside the snow’s dominion
In a cab with you in Urdu, singing
Through the beatific traffic, ruining
My housing for a song. Take from me
Split heart’s two desires—
They support me no longer
They’re free now for you, you can use them
Use them to summon new blooms.