Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center
of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,
an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut
at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the
curtains ormolu:
I miss you
is what I want to say
like a rocket
stocked from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,
wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows
Tonight is a drunk man,
his dirty shirt.
There is no couple chatting by the recycling bins,
offering to help me unload my plastics.
There is not even the black and white cat
that balances elegantly on the lip of the dumpster.
There is only the smell of sour breath. Sweat on the collar of my shirt.
A water bottle rolling under a car.
Me in my too-small pajama pants stacking juice jugs on neighbors’ juice jugs.
I look to see if there is someone drinking on their balcony.
I tell myself I will wave.
The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree.
We did not want to send it away.
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner.
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house.
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light.
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizon limits at its nest.
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
on life's stream sail.
I would have heard sorrow songs
in groves where the road was lost
long
where men foot prints mix with other men foot prints
By the road I wait
"death is better, death is better"
came the song
I am by the roadside
looking for the road
death is better, death is much better
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
I would have found the road
and heard the sorrow songs.
That night he came home, he came unto me
at the cold hour of the night
Smelling of corn wine in the dawn dew.
He stretched his hand and covered my forehead.
There was a moon beam sparking rays in particles.
The drummer boys had got themselves a goat.
The din was high in the wail of the harvest moon.
The flood was up gurgling through the fields
Birth waters swimming in floods of new blood.
He whispered my name in far echo
Sky-wailing into a million sounds
across my shores. His voice still bore
We dreamed of glowing children,
their throats alive and cancerous,
their eyes like lightning in the dark.
We were uneasy in our skins,
sixth grade, a year for blowing up,
for learning that nothing contains
that heat which comes from growing,
the way our parents seemed at once
both tall as cooling towers and crushed
beneath the pressure of small things —
family dinners, the evening news,
the dead voice of the dial tone.
The giant takes us
down. A man with no arms.
Unbreakable.
What made today
is concordant,
transforms
the brief decisive phase we call fear.
I look to that whited-over part and see a face.
Then I look to the black and
see the same face.
There were tunnels… chambers
beneath some of the sidewalks… page after page of places…
The last thing you think of.
Won’ t be my fluffy blonde hair.
