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
Hurricane Vows
At the ACME supermarket
a cyclone hit the tuna fish, water, pasta isles,
like Nantucket shoals that will not be spared.
I find a few bouquets of flowers left in a bin,
choose the least beat-up roses,
and bring them home.
On our wedding day, remember
the hurricane blowing down the arbor
while we said our vows?
It is our anniversary tonight.
We celebrate, as we must,
the maelstrom.
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
More Dead Stuff
More dead stuff now it's those crabs with eighteen eyeballs – skyballs on stalks, periscope glass-eyed Mary's, body parts litter the beach like cracked faces looking back from the sand I shake my claw at the sky, defiant old man still skittering sideways through life and you let go my hand, slip into the tide a fish – school away – sunlight echoing off your laughter, your voice receding in sonar pings Because I said it was time to leave this place, return to the city, reverse migration of the gannets – streaming in flights back to their roosts in the tiny rock warrens of Manhattan Searching for you from above the water, my wingtips brush the tops of the waves hoping you feel my touch like cool sheets drawn back from your shoulders. I dive, transform, but you are not fooled by my clownfish act, my doll-fish face a lethal disguise – how I would pull you from the safety of the sea and leave us both fighting for breath. If I fail us, then return me here. When at dawn the dogs come to leap in the waves and devour the broken promises of crabs, do not deny their pleasure – leave them to roll in my ashes.
TSM 169
Your hips the road trip rock skip hip-hop refrain of the sea 40 years our wild ride, side by miles sliding by the passing time on wide open roads Until here the sand-path ends in beach plum kingdoms taste on your lips slipsliding needs Speeding curves my mind has the bends brain wave ocean staves octaves higher and higher Like rose hips winding trellises tethered to the crux of you, communion of the journey's Madness that heat rises, your wide-brimmed laughter at the speed of light When my whammy bar transmission went in gale-force winds we watch the crash the curl listen now to the metal seas how you drive me to distraction
qbit 