Then the cicadas gnawed
the wrong moon.
And, for a few minutes, I was dead
to me. Of course
the past was on its way
back to us: turns out
our heads, split
and throbbing like cantaloupe
under the sky’s teeth,
would be just fine after all.
A map of Florida told me so,
the oranges and astronauts
meeting at the center.
I threw my window
through your window
and we met halfway
between the Alligator Motel
and a landfill
to have it out,
tearing up mangrove roots, singing
bones and numbers.
Our names began
to lose their touch.
Our hands let go.
Pretty sure every pier
is out to get me.
Incredibly I dissolve.
 
 
 
 
ARCHIPELAGO

Part propeller, part rock,
all water-music. Part glue

and the bruised stories
of winter I can’t shake.

Strange clouds plummet
behind the fence

of last night’s dream
where I held

a flower’s tongue hostage.
I house tiny

houses of shadows.
They buzz behind

my eyes, and never blink.
But me? These days

I’m losing more
and more of my goodness.

I’m scratching my ghosts.
Part of me decides

to split. Part of me uneven
and a razing new color.
 
 
 
 

There is always the door you just came through.
Some people will forgive you right to your face.

Imagine then a blue fog as the lifetime of your speech
and noises. From far away it would appear like an organ,

your most dear external organ, both dutiful and corrupted.
It swells faintly. Who is in charge now, it wonders about you.
 
 
 
 
DRAWINGS OF SHIPS

Some dimensions fall out of use,
out of the blue air, flat above you.

I didn’t need to know that light is old.
There is always some broken net

caught in some cold cogs, not extraordinarily
silent, why fight? I fought because

I was so far off. Because I am in a kind
of love, sheer & oblique as depth-long seaweed.
 
 
 
 

Alterity’s white tease
spittoon if you could
wallop us back to
the Lexington courthouse
but you can’t – we
stalk on, ungrowing,
or driven to account for
a history we’re deposited from.

See where the metaphors fail
where failure’s use marks
a shatterable window.

Animals get into the distillery
just fine.  A barrel fire.
A creek blocked for angels.
A snow dream.  Will you
come to bed with me?
 
 
 
 
POEM FOR BHANU KAPIL

You & Laloo climb into
a clapboard tent moon
brimmed as a rind,
water at the heart of
a cantaloupe leaching
it backwards.

A forest finds an edge
alright.  & the road is
sort of a bullwhip here.
I know the things I’ve
kept myself from
through your guide’s
guide.

Starry blight below us
chartering.

I want to slow this
ride down to a perverse
speed & get the
haunted off.  You
find a song & call
its words out like
an organ sack.  Drop
your belongings like
faulty landing gear.

The bottom plating of
the vehicle torn
clean off over what it
sped above.

That’s the sound, Laloo.
What the mountain crag
spirits to the birds at the sky’s
little bastard door.

The noise is a crusher.
I am along about the wires
under a plan to take the calls
& not pick up.
 
 
 
 

There is a white horse
somewhere without you
or you are the white horse
somewhere with nothing
to carry. Everyday the farmer
trucks out bails of hay
and everyday you are not
wild. Everyday you are
a circle of ice. Everyday
an absence louder than
the pounding of hooves.
The ground shakes
w/ it–you are not imagining
the metamorphosis.
Your body a deliverance,
a discard pile, an outreach
program, separation science.
You want to hear someone
say “that’s the one I want.”
You are standing by yourself.
Every morning you are on
the opposite side of the fence.
You don’t know how it happened,
you just know it’s happening.
If only it would snow and there
were time to catalog everything
that stayed the same.
 
 
 
 
ST. AUGUSTINE’S LOST ENTRY

I look up how to spell “moustache”
and then look at fake moustaches online.
As I age my desires start to feel less unusual.
Now I dream I am mobbed by the desert–
I lie so still that rattlesnakes sleep on my chest.
When I wake-up, I feel much emptier.
I levitate in the shower. Crows are making
death cries, so I check the trunk of my car
before I go anywhere in case I’m being framed.
The heat is intransigent, scrapes my face
w/ its stubbled chin. This is intensely arousing.
Summer you Goose. I’ve got your eggs
in my pocket and I promise not to break them.
 
 
 
 

Most days are all the days
we have, which isn’t deep
as a lake, it’s stupid
as a newspaper      I wear

in my hair a lot of lightning
and girl scouts     You go
to work with a face

on your dashboard     Tonight,
this afternoon, this morning,
the feathers leaking out
from underneath

the coffee maker make me think
that sometimes gravity
cannot be defied

and anyway the rollercoaster
is tired, so it would be
an excellent time
to stand with the telephone poles

for a ridiculously long time
and maybe every once in a while
we could touch

each other’s motorbikes
and consider some general
instructions     You need to do
whatever it is you need to do

And I need to not be
such a series of traffic violations
but it’s a lot colder today,

so my metal’s overwhelming
I can’t be expected to read a story
and bring up a couple of beers
from the basement

at exactly the same time     Nobody
can be in two cities at once
Standing in my yard I see

a red-yellow jet emerge
from the leaves of a red-yellow
tree without any irritable reaching
after fact or reason
 
 
 
 
FEELINGS BOTH HOME AND AWAY

Today after mulching the leaves
and running some miles
with a tired-looking smile
on my face
I suddenly, and briefly, had
the urge to explain myself
in terms of my contribution
to the greater good,
which of course I can’t do,
so instead I told you
how last night at the play
about the famous painter
my favorite part was
the complete dark
of the lights going down
before the play ever started
Suddenly consumed
with hundreds of others
and you and Eric and Alice
right next to me, an ending
beginning and everybody
breathing musically,
indistinctly     Maybe
that’s what it’s like
disappearing     Then the lights
came up and it ruined the feeling
I woke up early this morning
started reading a novel
set in Spain, but not
in any way about it
I need to tell Liz,
because I know
she’ll want to read it
I feel it’s time
to open up the giant
Cesar Vallejo
Collected Poems
and commiserate
and reflect
on how fraudulent
words always are,
especially in translation
Poems aren’t really about anything
They’re always and only—
or mainly—a demonstration
of a particular way
of paying attention, as jumpy,
disheveled, and drunk as it may be
The window of opportunity
is the first couple drinks
After that sex becomes
a terrible distraction,
and death becomes
the only thing I think
of your reaction     Now the dark
patches and the shadows of trees
Television football and no one home
to stop us     Alabama vs. LSU
Crimson vs. gold
on a hundred yards of green
Roll tide roll
Fighting Tigers
 
 
 
 

Kitchen
Open the drawer for the knives. Air out
the heavy glasses above your head.
Raise the blinds that shield us from
the loudest neighborhood children.
We only have to hear their stomps to school.

Bathrooms
Throw the doors open like you’re driving
away demons or birds back to their nests
or to Hell for the weekend. We’ve got
the storage under the sinks too. It’s fine.
Undress these places. Everything must open.

Living Room
Unlatch the TV armoire. Now isn’t time
to dust or to moon over that sitcom star
with the dimples you can’t resist. You watch
those dimples like they have speaking parts.
Let the DVD player keep its mouth open.

Guest Bedroom
Every drawer that promises generic clothes
from catalogs, clothes that are guaranteed
to be made here, in this country, must open.
Don’t close the door. This room doesn’t require
the privacy now that we’re accustomed to giving it.

Master Bedroom
Slide the double pane windows. The screens stay.
Let clothes on their wooden hangers whisper
in the closet. She’ll like watching this. We’re happy
for the breeze. I’ll unpin her chignon. This is how
to bring a baby home. This is how we avoid disaster.
 
 
 
 
LINED UP, READY TO LAND

Since no one’s dreamed about me so much
or told me they dream about me so much
and in such detail, I know it’s real. It has to be
when you tell me that we were walking
in a downtown that wasn’t ours. Cars crashed
soundless all around us. They were bucking waves
everywhere. They soaked the streets and I wasn’t
scared of drowning. After five wrecks, I stopped
walking and looked at you like I wanted you
to stop it. You tell me like I could. You tell me
I would if I could. In another dream we went
from party to party and we weren’t happy.
We were invited props meant to make
everyone else look normal. You tell me
we absorbed everyone’s tension. We took it
with us to the next parties. We tried pouring it
into glasses made for alcohol but it wouldn’t fit.
We had to take it all with us to your home
with the front porch. We fell back on your bed
like we trusted it was still there (even in a dream),
and we didn’t touch. We didn’t splash into each other
even though it’s what we’re so good at. We were still
and real. We were lined up. We were ready to land.
 
 
 
 

Anywhere but right here
feels severely out of place.

The way the sun attacks me
from all the wrong angles.

The flavors of parts of a pig
I’d rather pass on. Dancing

badly to amateur trance riffs
alongside some trashlit river.

Is her dingo in my baby,
or is my baby in her dingo?

I’ll never know. I’ll never belong
so far from home, but before I leave,

I always fill a suitcase with pad thai
from the place around the corner.

Then, once I get where I’m going,
I put your photo beside any

temporary bed, but I miss
Brian Wilson already. Maybe I need

a gold xylophone and a bathrobe.
Dear Loneliness—

know that every day away from you
is another unbearable party.
 
 
 
 
TWO SUNS

The people who live their lives
by the yellow sun
are called chicken tenders.

Those who love the red sun
and its lazy, loping orbit
are known as bone marrow.

If two people fall in love
and one is a chicken tender
and the other is bone marrow,

they have to meet in secret
when both suns are down
and it’s so cold that their

shared breath makes clouds
that rain ice on their faces
while they kiss in the cemetery.

That’s just the way it is—
two suns and forbidden love
and sad songs about oranges.
 
 
 
 

They are laughing in a tragic way.

I take up all the room in the river.

I bury a stone so you might lay your head upon it.

We attend a party where violins waltz, every table laid with bowls of cream.

No one keeps the time.

No one really cares about germs.

Everyone is wearing white and laying on the grass.

Soon you will discover how I always hide in public.

I fly around the attic drilling holes in your rafters.

Somehow I get stuck washing fruit for days.

Early in the morning, sunlight overcomes the porch with suggestion.

But a poem is not a gesture.

Today things will happen all around you.
 
 
 
 
THE RESOLUTION

I blink and arrive north of my apartment, turn my head
and sit at the mouth of a cave. I’m capable of folding
one moment into the next. Maybe I’m lying, but so what?
It’s good for the brain to be tumbled and confused.
Disappointment only works if the future persists.
Its conditions surround you, such as the possibility of bills
or the constancy of yellow. Everything strikes me
as important. My cat sleeps all day. I grow taller
at an alarming pace. Next door my neighbors have a baby,
they are harder to impress. The baby walks circles in the air,
is he amazing? You know the answer if you make a choice.
The last time I chose baby, creation was all taken care of.
What did I need with nouns? Everything was about to happen.
Press a stone to the windowsill. Create a single tragic mess.
Fight an animal for a patch of grass. No one told me these things
happened before. No one let slip the world moved
without my walking it. I loved only people worthy of love.
I stood on my own front lawn.
 
 
 
 

After the funeral we all took up hobbies. One of us would call
another of us and say My cereal tastes funny does your cereal taste funny?
and then we would all agree or disagree about whether the cereal
was poison from China and some of us had children with whom we were
increasingly humorless.
                                                     Don’t even play with me, some of us would say.

Others of us would remain alone, alone, and would stand in our kitchens,
hungry after a long day of being alive and would not be eating,
but would instead be writing poems that had to be written: Oh, Allison…

I was trying to record all of this with my camera.

When Allison left she was attached to a string that now pulled
many of our faces down in new ways, Oh Allison.

One of us was baptized at the YMCA and was given a new name that Allison
would have laughed at. Another of us also inched closer to religion,
lining his bird’s cage with scientology bulletins.

I don’t see spots, I see pulsating stripes,
one of us said on the phone with another. What does it mean
to not hear the alarm clock anymore? I asked her.

It’s 7:30, the one of us who was in bed with me
                                                                                                    would sometimes helpfully say.

Those eggs are expired you won’t want to eat those, I would say to the one of us
who could smell nothing but disinfectant these days.

I wrote in a letter that day
that we were not the body of Christ,
                                                                             but we were some kind of body.
 
 
 
 
HOW I LIVED FOR SEVERAL MONTHS

I lived for several months like Ok,
                                          no one trust the things I’m saying.

One friend calls
              to say that I’m a television show.

I apologize first, then try to be proud of myself
                                                                   for being so entertaining.

In the television show,
              everyone has decided
that the things animals want are worth
                                          devoting all weekends to.

My friends and I love animals,
              and love the other television show
where the animals,
                            with their plastic cups of beer,
              and their fights over
                            First with him, on the dance floor,
                            and now with me,
                                          in the parking lot?
              are only themselves
                            and only the most honest and innocent
spectacles of urge and acquisition.

I apologized to my friend for being the television show.

People love television, and people love friends,
                            but people will love their friends less
              if their friends behave like a television show
                            about a group of friends sharing an apartment
              who, in the span of a few drastic haircuts,
keep getting more and less

              friendly with one another.

It’s only when I see a friend from out of town
                            that she laughs and forms a kind opinion of me
              as our enchiladas arrive.

She has never owned a television
              and has never learned to hate
my stupid show
              like we do.