Time & Brevity

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another

pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls

in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last

heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible

stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit

in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched

Each man has a quiet that revolves
around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing

hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka
and toast the gray wall. I say we were

never silent. We read each other’ s lips and said
one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’ s lips to uncover
the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka

Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’ s tobacco hair.
And whoever listens to me: being

We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’ s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’ s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders —
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,

Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,

pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books
the flowers he picked all morning

in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;

reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;

lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;

secrets botanical
description could never trace:

The startling pleasures all broke down,
It was her first arthritic spring.
Inside her furs, her bones, secure,
Suddenly became a source of pain
And froze on a Saturday afternoon
While she was listening to “La Boheme.”

Strength had been her weakness, and
Because it was, she got to like
The exhilaration of catastrophes
That prove our lives as stupid as we think,
But pain, more stupid than stupidity,
Is an accident of animals in which, once caught,
The distances are never again the same.

The night approaches. Dusk drafts on buildings
their future ruins. Dusk deepens windows
and apertures. It hollows stones
with shadows like with water. It foretells
the near death of a hundred clouds
to the shining host. A thin layer of dust,
the seer leaves his footprints on the roofs
as he walks home from the future
not his own, swallowing his voice —
in its rays, fat blood flows down
the golden armor. Wet
blue entrails. Large heads
have rolled down the shoulders.
Speech has grown silent in deep mouths.

I.

By the road she hovers in heat waves,
propped up on a cinderblock wall,
revived by mixed house paints,
fending for herself like wild mint.

She is behind your shoulder,
a blind spot, your city's poverty.
A figure waits under a freeway ramp,
gesturing as if she knows you.

Now, in a breath, we’ ll burst those gates of gold,
And ransack heaven before our moment fails.
Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old,
We’ ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails.

Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;
your office door closes behind you and at that moment
you turn invisible — not even a ghost in that hall
from the hall’ s point of view.
If the halls don’ t know you, the halls and the rooms
of the buildings where you worked for seven years —
if the halls don’ t know you,
and they don’ t —
some new woman or two new men come clattering

Life, like a marble block, is given to all,
A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’ s gaze,