Two If By Sea

I held up two fingers for my father
who tested helicopters--a peace sign
to malign the naval carriers
he shipped aboard: they also launched bombers.

I hoped, however, that the rotors cycloned
upwards--my father's maintenance software
functioning and keeping him hovered.
He was super-aquatic: I worried about air.

Below, the waves splashed as normal
water is wont to do--pulled by the moon.
My father's night-flight experimented over
an ocean that was already tested and approved.

Regretting Youth

Mostly I lament the tame and nondescript
moments: the playground splinters; the generic card
I bought my aunt for her birthday, and mailed a day late; the extra time I spent
studying for compulsory, state-wide examinations.

Wildfire, you dug a hole for yourself, with your late nights
and incorrigible alcoholism. And yet that cavernous
impression you left in earth became a den—it was warm
where you were, your walls were solid.

By the hearth you remain. Where was I then, where am I
now?—outside in cold, lying in snow, my back tarnished
with melted flakes. Here in stiff air I flail my arms,
successful as all hell, trying to impress angels.

Cave-in, no echo

Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
you can stop shouting, I can still hear you.

– Simon Armitage, “The Shout”


I thought about it and thought I heard it—
the shout of a dead man resounding in
muted echo, a murmur like the tinnitus
haunting the ears of my deaf great-uncle.

Uncle Harry heard the suck and build-up
before drums, just the whoosh of the percussion,
mallets falling and throttling air—never striking.
His ears were hollow, lacking anvil to transmit

throbs. I thought the deceased’s yelp resembled
this—the blast of emasculate bellows, coals
already put out, fire unfannable. I thought about it
and thought I could apprehend that sound.

It was more like a pistol: angry retort
with genesis too swift and mechanical
to be heard, or understood as music. The air
was absent: lungs, drums, woodwinds

decadent. Hardly tinnitus and more like
a ton of bricks—constantly falling, burying
a chimney-sweep in his work. He expected
to be coated in ash, and not hard-fired clay.

Cacophony was no echo, nor was it phonic—
the shout of a dead man incomprehensible,
tortured, whimpered, howled. It stole my hollows,
my ears always suffering, precisely caved-in.

Infidelity

Arsenic was a dust rock-men could grow used to,
their mettle processing the poison, depositing it
in crevices and coeloms. It did not produce the same
harm in them as it did in fireworks and bark-women—
realgar was mined to color clothing and explosions.

Roots slitting into the cave seemed to exorcise
toxins, sucking them, quelling their pollution. And yet—
though the trees that grew from bad earth
towered over the others, they were flushed by stone.
Pressed hard against rock, their insides reddened.

Quiet were women who grew with roots. Seeming
to be stable, cave walls moved when the ground shook
or when new plants cracked them. It was rare to find
flora that clambered like tunnels through mountains.
Stone-men were addicted to dust, that subtle poison.

pedestratum

her mangoes grow and the good things also:
she is kind and beautiful and somewhat pedestrian.

yes this marvel this humble two-footed thing
walks on dirt without floating, she leaves
average footprints.

sometimes she trips in puddles. she laments
shallow bubbles (enjoys popping them, hates
how they have to explode) that appear in gas spills:
fragile ramparts—fish scale—iridescent outgrowths

sprouting up from an oil slick. she is pedestrian,
she slips. now she too is covered in viscous—
it is not unattractive, it colors her curves
and makes them stick. on a minefield

she would lose her toes. this might impede her
normal: though she is much more. it takes a certain
commitment to walk on the earth. she shoves her feet
in the seashore: they lay eggs, become turtles.

burn from a lightbulb

she admits the glass
she has squeezed too tight—

somehow she cannot bring herself
to speak about it, this accident,
to anything animate. instead she caresses

herself. her splintered hand. she tweaks
the platelets of glass, embedded—
her hand sparks, it whimpers

pangs it cannot bury in nerves.
she admits glass but only to glass.
she hides from her parents

the silly thing she did (squeezing
a lightbulb, tainting her hand,
letting it heal over. burn from

a little bulb’s touch, yes, but mostly
from breaking it. sowing beneath skin;
letting it grow in her.)

second song of la jeanne

above dark earth my body is a pyre
trim rosaceous fire I upright and firm

a woman shall not wear war’s iron armor,
that which pertaineth unto a man—

first in winter a steel strap set to sunder
in May slick layers that tighten cackle burst

my skin fine jaws that clutch the guilt of sinners
I slice them up the Lord he is my shepherd

and we mortals shish kebab our bodies staked
up on wooden platforms man such easy murder.

one unit

how much passion powder
possesses one clove garlic
bitten into

how much for that wellness
core curing bodies’ aches
spicing diseases

how much growth and effort
for one clove—a parceled plant-life
—division of bulbous, a bundle—

do any of us know what it took
to nurture that vegetable fraction
what it took to ensnare it

(to get you well?)

Love

Growing up, my mother
broke her leg. her father
was in the other room, stayed there.

Sadship (below water)

The Dawn Treader named as much only because it sinks at any other time

—hush the child

is sleeping. your mouth flaps
will summon locusts, unbury
your silences, dried-up and weary,

allow them to falter less heavily. the earth
layer rests. should you. do not scrape the shovel
as you go to uncover, quiet, a heart digs
with caution. and rhythm. extract

the pulse from the beat, take the tempo
but leave the bass drum behind.
remember violets. pergolas. the drape

flowers and grace. the vine hangings.
how fragile the moment of rest
cyclical but breakable
always. prohibit botanists from studying

the unlikely event. what hangs
in the balance—its existence.
shattered mask of closed-eye unconscious
brings grievances to redress. a child’s

wail. even the knock of wooden footsteps
will give up the ghost, of silence
and sleep. exorcise often, if you want

to disturb spirits. here we keep our mouths
shut. we pray only for rest.

A couple evening shudders

Walking the bridge at night in Prague,
riding the trolleys—buses—trams—
I had your coat. It was left like you
an Australian visitor to the five-story
dance club. Checked in. We went together and you
got lost in the mouths of myriad tourists.

We didn’t agree on much except
we hated the Sicilian man whose grease
stuck to the air he accompanied us in.
We did well to lose him first
and then you lost me and your jacket
somewhere in light-up tiles, pounding music.

At four or five a.m. the lights shut off,
bodies sieved out the bottleneck exit
with some dropping off to pick up
their clothing and drunkenly “forget”
to leave tips. If they tip in Europe.
I am not fluent in subcurrents of Czech.

Cold in November: the first snow I’d seen
over the Atlantic was that light and white-webbed
drift that descended my skin. Decocting pimples
as I disembarked a small airplane. The night
I lost you—snowless—but frighteningly cold
reminded me of this. For no reason. It was dark

and frigid unlike the arrival moment. Perhaps
the poignancy of both shudders struck me. Later,
I missed the changing of the astral clock
though I heard it from afar, many days of my visit,
and sometimes from anear. From an almost saw;
a frustration.

Hear where I am now, an almost saw of Prague
making mulled wine in Boston to warm my stomach.
I recollect you a lost Australian wandering:
we went to the little red stands for tourists
and for a few coins (what is the currency called?)
we bought spiced drink, gluhwein as the Germans call it.

Curved as your nails are, from being shut in a door

You have tried to talk to you six times, and six times you have failed. The first time, you mutter I’ve got to remember, got to remember… hoping that the echo of sound through your own bones will lodge somewhere, the temporal bone, or perhaps the incus. The words stick in your head and ear but block them up as wax: what goes ‘in one ear’ in fact originates on the inside, has no reason to proceed outwards, or to pass through to the brain where it could be more securely stored.

I don’t know what you are trying to recall, father, as you stand there, assembling computer parts, resetting micro-switches on an already-dusty motherboard. You’ve just purchased a new slew of electronics, and hovering over them, a near-sighted tinker, you fret over instructions commuted from paper to brain cells, a manual you have repeated enough times to know by heart, but now misplaced twice: the book is gone, its contents also missing.

The computer will tell time, and so I reason you are a watchmaker. What time will tell you I am not sure: you have hidden the secrets of your head in strange pockets, places where even you, a manipulator of tiny gears, may not be able to fit your fingers, regardless of the strange places those arcing digits have explored.

another fragment

pastoral of grown organs



they fathom a lung and make it function


in the glass casement
it huffs and puffs and fills

Kindness

Archdioseizures, metal coeloms,
parhelia, muted affection, metastases:

You have misapprehended my lack of acid
approached my null hydrochlora and fauna
as normalcy

I am a basic being
do not compound me or assume
my absence indicates enigmata

or deeply-mulled feelings
(there is nothing fermenting
if anything lack of anything spoiling)

No, I am simply squandered regions
excessive reflections
limbs of a plague-bearing tree

I am elemental I can be read as wild
in fact I crave the domestic emotions of books
and human apathy

stirring in my weak breeze