You squinch your face as if I pulled your nose like a knob opening the drawer of cities – that sliding memory where you junked it all – toy cabs honking, rubber-band commuters, loose screws and nuts out on the avenues, our noodle soup of take-out menus – metropolis errata you'd whisked and slammed, then locked the door behind us. Now walking along the harbor, the sea lies flat and grey, shorebirds motionless, even the sand quiet, the dog's scented crossword of seaweed and crabs, we hear the rain moving towards us, the surface of the water starting to rattle like a box of cracker jacks whistling through the air at Yankee stadium – the bleachers, the barker, the crowds, the crack of a bat, lightning, memory, buildings falling like a game of Jenga from the back of the closet, apartments that slide out from under us, our plans tumbling down, the rain over the sea tumbling down, your forgiveness of me that we must go back now, comes tumbling down until again the bric-a-brac streets, again jumbled jars of hours and days, nickeled and dimed – can you hand me those pliers my love? The ones that pull teeth when the sirens wake us anon at 3AM?
TSM 167*
Beatbox rain riffs on the hull Belowdecks, we lie together, listen – afloat on sleep-tight caulk and lapstrake dreams – you, my storm anchor
*A Nantucket Sleighride: 7 syllable “Harpoon”, followed by a 25 syllable “Rope”.
TSM 166
All along it was just a typo –
Shakespeare wrote "put your nose
to the whetstone," it was really wet stone –
fluidity and hardness as one –
water & earth keen
(their pals air & fire high in the cheap seats) –
which explains this morning cutting my foot
on a razor clam, the waves stropping
mother calcium until honed and shaving the beach
of its seaweed beard
Chorus of Stone:
Schist, Breccia, Shale
Chorus of Water:
Sliptide, necessary words
snake like rivers past your tongue
How pushing my nose
ever harder into the future
never sharpened my focus but the world
giving way like a parting flood –
each day standing on the high-dive platform
of the bathroom shower, looking down
into an empty pool –
shocked by cold spray breaking,
a rain of hard water
from spigots cranked to no surrender
Chorus of Stone:
False eyes are made
from glass and agate
Chorus of Water:
Return to the sea
as a walking fish
Always awake to the grind,
the drip that percolates and filters
earth-coffee-tygers-eye brown
through eons of dream limestone,
washing away the strata
until nothing left but fossils,
residue, and silt –
yet another to-go cup, to-go, to
going-going-gone high-kick Rockette fuel –
the world balanced on the edge of our noses
Chorus of Stone:
Hammer, pick, dynamite
Chorus of Water:
Bloodstream, velocity, knife
TSM 165
Even Charon on the grift –
pennies in the eyes to die
were fool's gold –
no more scrimping off deadbeats,
no hustling poor-mouth shades
in their scarecrow burial suits:
The Lethe now full Disney,
theme park’d thrills and chills –
the Daredevil, the Hellfire, the Screamer –
"Look ma! No hands!"
Folks can't get enough.
Grab a BeelzeBurgerTM with cheese.
One more time, pretty please?
Lucifer's Crash Cars, the Dirt Nap Fun House –
"Step right up!" – midway shooting galleries
with rapid-fire, drop clip nightclubs –
and over here: nine-layer Inferno Sundaes,
sno-cones cold and blue as lips.
When night falls, take the River Ride.
Premium death wishes
and first class cabins on the boat,
or just fly over private jet –
enjoy casket-strength bourbon
chilled with whisky bones.
Oh Miyata, Miyata my love,
you can't take it with you, no.
I've called for your car,
and filled your marble suite with roses.
Your chauffeur holds his cap out
for a tip.
I'm so sorry, your purse is empty –
the white one you never used
from the bottom dresser drawer.
The driver will take a kiss in lieu –
Your mouth, a burnt offering.
Your eyes, payment in ash.
TSM 164
Throwing a clay
pot
is how you stick your
thumb
in the world's muddy
eye
Yeah, smash it down
good
grind it in and let the earth
turn
you're a weird little angry
god
There you go, that feels
better
now right? Scrap it all and start
over
just like poems, better luck next
time
So here goes: I pound it
flat
and scrape in a gyre of
grooves
with my unclipped finger
nails
welcome now please the
crow
to drop its beak down a record
player
and caw, claw us all back
to kingdom come
TSM 163
Trio for Cello
(Musician Conspicuously Absent)
The Bow I am high-strung of horsehair, racehorse-quivering, all nerves in the gate, this quarter-horse no quarter nor quarter note but eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, galloping sixty-fourths furlong over furlong into a split finish – curry me with favor or I will buck and whinny across your course of notes The Strings Yes, yes, I hear you say catgut is passé, yet you want purr and yowl, and when plucked hear a lion provoked – then lay your finger lightly on my neck, grimalkin vibrato or black cat magic might be yours, become a familiar – would you trade your soul for this taut beauty? The Cello My ribs were bent in heat on hard forms, my chest carved spruce as if the jackknife of lovers on my bark were not enough, love's idea chiseled by steel deeper and rounder until you say this shape will carry song, this will make a moan for two lying under the branches
TSM 162
She said to me: "your ode to the moon is a bird pecking frantically at light in a dirty puddle – futile but for its shit on the pavement, which was at least warmer and brighter, than anything you had to say." And I turned the words over in my hand – what I had imagined was a sparrow – was indeed without life, its fluttering not a heartbeat nor untested wings, but the wind blowing scraps of fortune cookie tropes from the empty nest of my pages. The terrible sound that followed – like endless boxcars empty of thought rattling across the plains – the sky a million points of darkness as locusts of Haiku descended, ravaging and leaving only stubble in their wake.
TSM 160
Fun Facts in today's paper,
an obituary from 125 years ago –
one Lottie Porte , 21,
"for whom the Angel of Death
has brought her spirit welcome release."
I think yes, that is it, exactly,
no soft "passing" –
when I go, leave me to a winged avenger
with her flaming sword,
my mortal coil severed at a stroke.
Do not then write about me gently –
leave my shadow spiked
on the sharp hands of midnight,
my last hours and minutes
spear tips pointed to the sky.
Thank you Lottie, may you rest in peace,
you lead me to the gate
where a language of dying swings –
leave me now to mourn and grieve
the loss.
TSM 157
Spring – what a comedian! warms up on stage, daffodils crack like a joke through gaps in the pavement. We wait for it – but today's punch line a slagging, obscene wind – the crowd boos. Gardens are a three-ring spectacle – clown cars of tulips fill the planters, roses snap their whips in hoops of flame. Soon the flying trapeze and magic act of Summer – 'til then I rest my head in the jaws of tiger lilies.
TSM 156
Narrator: qbit, yours truly, marking his morning rounds of the salt marsh
Chorus: A pair of steel-rimmed spectacles
Lightning cracks one hundred years of sky –
The faraway docks of Gothenburg
are made of stone, made of stone
its boats are moored to iron rings
So lightning goes to ground
comes around, comes around
and ground returns to lightning
Finally then at sea, mornings
among the deck hands calling
back and forth, back and forth
Gulls suspended off the bow where you stood,
fly neither forward nor back,
waves are waves are waves are waves
A century's wind holding them in place –
over the harbor I watch them marking time
neither sky nor water have that answer
I turn from the ocean to a path of hard bounty –
stone and sand held out to you,
simple dirt floor of the world
this was known, this was known
Poems in your journal untranslatable, yet
I carry them with me still,
and mine, a stranger has put to wind
of foreign tongues
Iceland come, Croatia come, Kurdistan come, and on
to the East, to the West, North wind, the Southerlies
Heirloom flowers that grow from gristle and tendon
blow like seeds, blow like seeds
from across the ocean
Could you have known then,
Could you have known
one day my hands
would be so cold?
