Kitchen (4 Poems) |
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Kitchen
How I break my head against checkered tile I love on your kitchen floor break again my ribs your rocks my surf your shore the very words on your illiterate shoes there as I crawl happy see your own head taped an old vase I broke in indifference of my childhood self my love makes me careless of The Man in the Bear Suit
In here my vision folded and sewn shut at the edges the sun fills my whole broadside eye and I am half blind and through the other everything fallen golden as this sweaty hide I wear this misery there is some breaking beauty between the land and sky but I am stumbling zipped and stitched anonymous glad of it Outer Darkness
Driving the yellow truck home across Crescent City like the moon beneath the feet of the virgin my head was filled with all the things we’ve made our world, the stuff and nonsense born in talk but realized as a single thing that forms the third part of us, that keeps our eyes lock-stepped, our voices soft: Florescent monkeys and coincidence, seawalls, lakeside levees, the continent of North America with all its coffee shops and bars and beers, all things resplendent; insects, quetzals, tard frogs. The places you laugh and think I’m a fool; in music, math, my cups, the Russians. And I of you; women, chastity, lies, more kindness to strangers than yourself. Faulkner, Rulfo, Vonnegut, angler fishes attached each to each, the males becoming vestigial, testicular bodies on a host with common circulation. Your twin, our city and our spot above the town, a rental car, wingtips, stitches in jeans, absinthe. Hotsprings, the language, looks, and touch of love, a smell, no smell at all, the fragile flower of jealousy blooming again and again then crushed down, desire in me as in the city a dangerous street to walk and in you some mystery. Mystery itself, springrolls, ginger ale, conspiracy, animals with mouths full of animals, falling and being caught again and again. The anatomy of the past: coral, stars, oceans. The presence of the moment: a kiss deferred again, drunkenness, sobriety, lists, silence and speaking at once. The nourishment of the future; plans, revisions, memory. All this we have made and lived through language. All this has made a place in me as between us, and still I cannot write your poemOn Elysian Fields Avenue
Where the live oaks make a tunnel of the boulevard tonight storm wind
stirs the branches extended long and twisted like your hair.
I’m coming home from a session with your absence, writing a letter
in a coffee shop. The truck catches a gust of wind and as if some will were pushing
I’m ready to fly up into those branches, tangle there and hang,
let the double barrel of the avenue weigh the roots below while I
wave bound above in branchings past choosing tied in knots. |
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