Evening at Applebee's

"And this," you said, "long beach at Haat Plaa Muk,"

Blond of your brown right hand becoming that damp

And trash-dappled sand in the air above your mug.

"And this home I," pointing at a callous on the puff

Beneath your little finger, probably a place

With nervous chickens and broad fluorescent blossoms

Bobbing in the yard. The light surrounding your face

Is the alien green of the grass on the screen the TV

Looks through to the bar, and about a nautical mile

From the curve of your hand you are carving a double-u reef

Where the cuttlefish teem and the scattering moonflashes pile.

I swam in that water, renewed my interior flesh

Which mixed with that air and that cool and that slippery food

And reverted to gray in the blown static spray of home I had left.

Memories

Quivering fire

Mirrored in a pool of wax

Glows devoid its heat

Despues del adios

Es dura la noche y larga

sin tí,

como vías ancianas de un ferrocarríl.

Y es como un grito vivir la tarde

(algunas con nubes,

algunas rociadas

de sangre);

y al levantarme - mañanas frías,

sol de madrugada -

escucho quejar la espiga,

llorar la guitarra.

Refinery

Evening Anagram

-To A.B.

Another day goes by;

useless, all that I have said and done,

standing near you when you looked away.

The light – and the light looks brighter on you

in the evening, just when you begin to mind.

No - but the light begins to fade when I walk by.

Life flows, though, as the Greeks and Donne once said.

Another sunset, another moon without you (I’ve seen so many),

never to see one (as though that would happen) again.

Could you understand, then, if I told you?

Everything would fall upon me, then, and everything would fall

because you couldn’t understand.

Unless the skies would breathe it,

tenderly, as though they didn’t care,

leaving room enough for the merest escape,

everything (I guess), then everything - tenderly -

returns to you beneath the night-light, and your hair.

Twenty, II

They were two men and they fell in love for one night.

A secret romance. Neither gave the other his real name or age. They traded false histories as they would business cards – the older man claimed to be a doctor and the blond boy said he was writing a novel.

But their hours were scarce. From the bar’s dance floor, to the fumbling for apartment keys, to the bed covers tossed aside, to the towels where they scattered the refuse of their love, the men could feel the minutes pricking them like careless fingers.

They saved their words for last, when the dawn came, and even then it wasn’t enough.

So instead they spent the last hour of their passion sliding hands over each others' thighs, microscopic hairs swirling round the mazes of their fingerprints.

They parted ways when the sun peeked in through closed curtains and demanded to be let in.

Later that day, the blond boy would say – when asked about the dime-sized bruises on his neck – that a chick he’d met at the skate park couldn’t leave him alone. In perfect detail, he’d describe breasts he’d never touched.

Being Sunday, the older man would pay penance in church: twenty dollars slipped into the wooden coffer.

He’d then leave, quietly, awkwardly, as if he were slinking away from a former lover’s house.

(Photo by Sooreh Hera)

Spring

Water falls in syrup strings

From icy roofs that were.

A jacket sleeve hangs from a crate:

The hobo bares his shirt.

My desire is a little light

In a house of ice and snow.

I feed it New York spectacle,

The fire for to grow.

Yes, one more thing ...

I feel like riding a balloon.

I've never done that.

I should put it on my list of things to do.

When I start that list, I'll put it on there.

I'll never make a list.

I'll never ride a balloon.

Warm are the still and lucky miles

You have a camera

You have a camera you point at the screen on which I've distorted the things that I've seen. It takes what it finds and scrambles the lines and routes to a screen that I point to with mine. When my camera's bent all the light that you've sent you capture what's left with your misshapen lens. When the sequence repeats to the hundredth degree we have authored the movie I'm living to see.

Malinowski

A name remembered or unremembered through student halls,
it may be that his portrait still hangs in some collegiate junction.
Somewhere, his voice remains, perhaps behind book-littered walls,
muttering the complicated elements of origins and functions.

I read him now, as though I would read the accounts of some explorer,
Remembering his life because it will show up on an exam.
Because the times demand it, I shall forget it all tomorrow,
Like the scholar’s footprints on Polynesian sand.

He’s gone. Used up, his esophagus closed some time ago.
I look at the sunset — part of him remains in the book between my hands.
Who else would hold it? The sunset makes me wonder, though:
is his savage-sounding name still remembered in far-off Trobriand?