capable of feeling
while in contact with another?
I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles
facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini’ s angel’ s
silver-blue dress, Tintoretto’ s white one
that’ s practically transparent in his
Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!
Then the bells start, flood the void.
scent of myrrh on the handles
when oil is in the lock
silken is his mouth
when he is hard upon me
young heart, green bed,
his fingers are in the stream
he eats of the bitter honey
the sweetness of cherry
sacrament of the blood
and of its winding
sacrament of arrival
and of its binding
Chewing slowly,
Only after I’ d eaten
My grandmother,
Mother,
Son-in-law,
Two brothers-in-law,
And father-in-law
(His big family included)
In that order,
And had for dessert
The town’ s inhabitants,
Did I find, says Kabir,
The beloved that I’ ve become
One with.
We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’ re sitting close to, and above,
is an opening, is all
we can see
of the long
strands that make
the pathways for
rays, bisecting
annular rings,
the most
vulnerable door
of what makes
the holiest of
things.
The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir
licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint
of hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust
sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back
to where it was. The whole room swells
with the scent of cinnamon & desire.
How imprecise the smell of desire.
The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss
the grain can live behind without worry
of being forgotten. A single knot blinks
out of the small block and becomes
Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored with nakedness. Moments
before he was weighing your gallbladder,
and then he was staring at the empty space
where your lungs were. Even dead, we still
say you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no
mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician,
nothing that suggests that a woman loved
Knots like two dozen fists
swayed with want from the boy’ s
kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf
with its useless hands clopping
against the wind in protest
against this boy and his somebody
lost, against their own swaying
in a dance the lost body has lost.
A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied
in the lights of inauguration night
when every light in the city flared
with hope. Always losing, always
a boy left with a dozen weights,
small circles on strings pulling
his head down to the ground.
He was just some coked-out,
crazed King w/crooked teeth
& a teardrop forever falling,
fading from his left eye, peddling
crack to passengers or crackheads
passing as passengers on a train
chugging from Chicago to Cicero,
from the Loop through K-Town:
Kedzie, Kostner, Kildare.
I was just a brown boy in a brown shirt,
head shaven w/fuzz on my chin,
staring at treetops & rooftops
seated in a pair of beige shorts:
a badge of possibility — a Bunny
As a boy I bicycled the block
w/a brown mop top falling
into a tail bleached blond,
gold-like under golden light,
like colors of Noble Knights
’ banging on corners, unconcerned
w/the colors I bore — a shorty
too small to war with, too brown
to be down for the block.
White Knights became brown
Kings still showing black & gold
on corners now crowned,
the block a branch branded
w/la corona graffitied on
garage doors by the pawns.
