Follow my nose, eh? As if I were a narwhal whose tusk – my helix of sharp sorrows – was a compass pointing true north. Did you say you heard me clicking and singing late into the polar night, our saga of when mermaids rode whales to war? Or just my silliness again, getting on in years. We sit together at the table and talk about the ice floes. Will we will remember the way? Or will I make a wrong turn, end up at the mall again – at Sleepy's laid out on the white expanse of king-sized mattresses, holding hands in our parkas. While they call the children to come get us, I wrap a sheet around me – a body ready to tip into the sea. Returned to the water – the two of us whale and seal. I test my tusk if its point is true, and you riding the surf in joy.
Category: The Sunday Muse
TSM 181
You there! blackened gum on the sidewalk –
I consecrate you. A dark host
for a dark celebrant.
And you, man walking your dog at 6AM –
I bless the parables in your teeth,
clacking to stay awake.
For at this hour I am the Bishop of everything
diagonal,
cater-corner,
proximal,
but never finally touching,
that doesn’t hang together, connect.
Slip sliding away to infinity
I raise my arm in Taxi benediction –
the Blessing of the Fleet
a checkered yellow –
I am Pope and cornerman to box shrubs
in my square priory, my tiny park.
A voice pulls at my elbow
from a window far above:
"Take off that silly paper hat!
What are you doing out there!
Act your age just for once,
and get back in here before it rains!"
My mood darkens, whom/what
will I excommunicate
with a wave of my crosier, my
wind-broken twig?
Congregants pass unrepentant
with their strollers and scooters.
How will I bring the morning
its salvation, like an everything bagel
warm in the bag – when it refuses the wine
of my poems, so cross-eyed with gall.
This crucified dawn. This Sunday that slants
to salvation or damnation.
TSM 180
Eye for an eye, lip for a lip: my love not retribution but desire – just now, just this, our kiss hanging in the air between us like a mirror flashing the sun, flaring SOS to pilots flying low out of LaGuardia in Manhattan's endless, island search party. Form: "NY Minute." A NY Minute is like an American Sentence, but doesn't give a crap about syllable counts or anything else. You got a problem with that?
TSM 179
It's no secret, our old place needed a tonsillectomy – drafts wheezing down the front stairs, horsehair plaster poxed and patchy like a sore throat. I know you hated it, your sleep uneasy for twenty years, a bad wire smoldering in your dreams. Ours the only family that had to practice fire drills. The new bracelet for your birthday has one stone for each squirrel that died in the walls, and one for the feral cat living in the porch roof. Let this autumn exfoliate our memory, shed old tissue for new – the leaves drifting down like dead skin, like paint peeling from the siding.
TSM 178
When you let me sleep-in this morning I dreamt three tornadoes set down with wood and splinter, untangled brick from mortar – whatever color I had imagined blinded by the Sandman's fury – a grit and rubble sutra of a black and white world. What of it? I was three faces of Adam to the wind, threnody for the lost brother of the Bible – I had stood between Cain and Able in the field, suffered the first blows as they fell, for my failure, my exile greater than Cain's – I was wiped from human memory. Thus saith the Lord, thus my name blown and scraped from the page. If I chamber three bullets in the cyclone, not one, and the wind spins them hard, What game am I playing?
TSM 177
Any final appeals to you gaoler, joker, Earl of Poughkeepsie? That my hips and knees, shoulders and elbows, their ball and socket truth – Would become mortar and pestles, the crucible of age, turning, turning in a widening gyre – daily grind making meal of me Hangman, oh hangman, did you have to save every fallen strand of hair, weave life's every twist and turn to the end of my rope? Strike me this, Jolly Rodger – as I drop from the yardarm through empty air, wind and rigging creaking in the wooden blocks – let my soul unfurl to sail
TSM 176
Brown and mottled, hints of green and greasy, a dog turd on the pavement shifts, wriggles, takes flight – Was after all a bird, evolved to urban perfection, camouflaged, a gum-wad and trash chameleon – Jersey side, city tow trucks bag abandoned cars, their rusted fins like clipped wings – A windshield's three bullet holes: me, me, I check my rattlesnake boots in the mirror, my Colorado birthright, Eden and Genesis with fangs – As if the whites of my eyes still hide my mother's pearl-handled revolvers, dangerous and cordite as her smile – What did you ask me last night at 3AM? Are our dreams just a thin paint job on the rust of my ambition – You and I who crawled back from the sea and returned to land, a reflux of salt tide – rises in the sullen river, lapping at the pier.
TSM 175
Shotgun ravens awaken the forest of your hair, blasts from air conditioners wing memory, our flight or fight or dance response of bees hummed and hemmed and hawed in this new glass hive, hexes your scent of ocean as curled and waved as the crow flies – anything but straight, anything but the fleeing from there to here with even bubble wrap from our boxes packing heat, night falls, collared in a noose of 100 degrees, hits the pavement, pops and wheezes, and we've yet to plug in the lamps, the apartment a shadow of wings, while across the river cop cars and firetrucks strobe – a dark angel, you shimmy in your underwear, the lights of the city our disco ball
TSM 172
Baudelaire slowly chews another handful of coffee beans – Flâneur-in-chief of all Paris, dandied dregs of the Seine, he wrote: it wasn't the caffeine (of course it was always the caffeine) but the grit, the grounds the dirt in his mouth that brought his tongue to press into earth like the taproot of a dark flower. He lines his cockatoo's cage (all flâneurs keep cockatoos) with pages from his books he tore one by one saying to the young Rimbaud the bird sang a better song out its ass than its beak, that all poetry was merde
TSM 171
What does it mean to be spaghetti-hearted? Boiling at full, yet slippery and tangled – Oh my Siciliana, my dark-haired wife, who conspires at love like Mafioso plotting a heist
