In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’ s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
Dark thing,
make a myth of yourself:
all women turn into lilacs,
all men grow sick of their errant scent.
You could learn
to build a window, to change flesh
into isinglass, nothing
but a brittle river, a love of bone.
You could snap like a branch — No,
this way, he says, and the fence
releases the forest,
and every blue insect finds an inch of skin.
He loves low voices, diffidence
on the invented trail,
the stones you fuck him on. Yes
to sweat’ s souvenir, yes to his fist
We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.
In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.
I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.
1. X-Ray
A stick of carrot is equal to a gillyflower.
A gillyflower is equal to a drum of gasoline.
A drum of gasoline is equal to a stick of carrot.
“For the sake of my offspring, I think I’ ll marry an outsider.”
Tamerlane has been sighted in Northern Italy.
Jesus has broken out in Inner Mongolia.
They like to kiss outside and piss inside.
We like to kiss inside and piss outside.
Mudman in earth cafeteria,
I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear.
I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine.
“White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.”
(The other white meat is pork, triple X.)
Rice people vs. bread people.
White bread vs. wheat bread.
White rice vs. brown rice.
Manhattan vs. New England.
Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob.
“What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”*
To eat stinky food
is a sign of savagery, humility,
identification with the earth.
When I take my scissors to your shirts,
I am frightened: not that they will whimper
But that they won’ t understand the violence I mean.
That kind of violence is the other side of love,
Bright as a light-saber and permanent
As the angel’ s swords above Eden
Barring that couple with a final X,
That violence means a love strong as death.
Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me
And I took those words personally
And knocked upon the door of my heart
Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush —
The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug
say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.
The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.
The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.
Here is the door he will paint on the rock.
Here is the glass floor of the cliff.
Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.
There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.
She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.
She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.
The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.
She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.
