Dancing about Architecture

Some one once spoke to me with scorn

of writing about music; “It’s just like dancing

about architecture—ridiculous!” he said.

I didn’t understand. Is it ridiculous when I write

my paeans to love, these quivering Sanctus Bells

that ring out despite the steady drumbeat of dissent?

And anyway, I thought, surely the majesty of a cathedral

has stirred a sacred dance out of someone.

And if the hubris of a telecommunications tower

has not inspired a physical cacophony of some kind, somewhere,

then post-modernism is a bigger joke than anyone thought.

I will investigate,

but either way, I make this vow;

one day I will commission an expression

in the tangling language of long allusive limbs

a celebration of the vaulting structure of my love,

now just a vision of offering song

but which one day will give shelter

in the well-weathered house of eventually

built with stronger, more confident arms.

(I tell you this story in lieu of writing further on the dissonance

            and harmony my lover orchestrated in my tongue,

all the sweet chords that were struck,

through all the false notes that were sung.)

The Wound and The Bow

 

Such glistening beauty

in the texture

of the necessary

blistering scab;

the thick protective crust

            must be allowed rest

to heal into reticent scar.

            But how inviting it is

to split memory’s skin—

            cracking oneself open,

seduced by the siren again

what stench festers inside

these hands as wicked quietude?

            while delirious I

frustrate the silence

and muscle my stain into song.

 

Crave

"craving sex with her mate was one of the things she'd given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together" from Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

6,000 miles is nothing

that can rip the pitchfork

hunger I have for your body

from my clenching hands. Words

fall like stony soil between

the wasting space of this impalement,

this desire to be the forever

innocent throat for your ignorant growl. Why

do I crave this silencing

violence of another tongue

making meat of my own?

Voices

I suspect my lover
of everything: hands on
the hands of an exotic drum,

listening for a stranger
rhythm, one I cannot intuit;
words are my skin,

and I inhabit the whisperings
of a rival language--I say
you are, I am, but it means nothing

in the moment of music;
the questions of soul
mating mind and body

are impossible and inherently
unspoken in his expression.
I desire the abstraction

in which he is fluent and he flows
without the weight of words,
never listening for meaning

but knowing how to feel. Is it impossible
to understand what is possible? My articulations
are inescapable, a fate wrought with inquiry,

a demand for explanation, knowing
words are the curse
beating me down, beating me down.

Now

The sky slides by so fast
we can almost feel truthful
in the turning of the world
to stillness. Birdsong and I

float in the space between
the traffic and the talk
of credit cards and sky
miles. Distances. We are

a silence, emptied of all
the music of fact and faith,
their clumsy rumba. Lying
in wait as time swells

and diminishes what is
previous and yet to happen--
the hope of holding onto this
or any moment is futile, is ecstatic

Coup de Foudre

 

If I met you, in Paris perhaps,

what would we say? I don’t speak

French, at least not fluently—

I can say Où est la piscine

and I like how the word champignons

works my tongue and lips, it’s soft

but muscular, leaves me waiting, open-mouthed

but for what? A mushroom? What’s the point?

And if you must know, I don’t much like swimming pools,

not when there’s any kind of ocean to be had—

I myself peed in both as a child

but no one ever noticed when it was in the ocean,

that’s the thing about oceans, they’re huge, everything dissipates,

and so I didn’t feel bad at all about doing what I was doing.

But now look—here on a dull day in Paris—

what’s happened to us?

So far, all we have shared is a fungus

and my views on oceanic urination—

I think we should forget France and meet somewhere else

like the silent language of the library perhaps.

The reference section. You are looking up

my skirt (a rarity but okay I shall wear one that day)

while pretending to look up the etymology of “etymology”.

Still inexplicably loitering around conventional thinking on love

 

I purport to be investigating French phrases,

(specifically ones that begin with Coup—

I have always been drawn to the words “blow” and “stroke”)

d’etat, de foudre, de grace, de main, de theatre, d’oeil)

but really I’m investigating the potential of your upper arms

for a sudden forceful unforeseen occurrence, some explosion

of inelegant gesture that might lead to the defenestration

of both our decorums. As your sudden force 

backs me into the stacks and threatens

the orderly volumes of

REF F-K,

you fall to your knees

and you thrust your face

into the folds of my skirt, (and if in this fantasy I am

to wear a skirt, you must wear again the hat you wore

when first we met) fingering the backs of my soon-to-give-in

naked knees as your hat tumbles to the non-descript floor and before

I even get a chance to notice our matching haircuts

we are being rudely interrupted by an irate person of some apparent importance,

mouthing something about silence and threats from the authorities, but we don’t care,

we’re just too excited by the sudden sharp taste of life,

all citrus-y and slippery and smelling of what sweats

and later still, as I lick my way through your back catalogue

of etymological investigations, boy oh boy you invoke my origins

as you whisper to me as many variations of liqourish as you can think of . . .

and when we’re done, I tell you, breathlessly that I will leave you

if you ever speak to me of Paris or swimming pools

and I immediately regret it, all of it, especially the reference

to the hat you wore when we first met, but it doesn’t matter

because you’ve gone to sleep already. Or maybe you’re just gone

back to whatever you were doing before

I imagined you

would want to meet like this, surrounded

by dictionaries so that like fictionaries we could pretend

we don’t know what is always going to happen,

we could pretend we don’t know that

we will always strike one another

as deeply familiar, we will always know

how to blow one another away

from the calm center of timeless desire

we could pretend we don’t know

how we always keep ending

a bolt suddenly, as if out of nowhere

a locked face, a fist of wordless absent thunder…

where will we meet and pretend in words anew

that our origins won’t speak as they always do?

Sotto Voce

My child kicks and screams acrobatically
in the middle of the living room.
Opposite, much to her chagrin, I sit on the bed reading
“The Way of Zen” and occasionally look through
the French doors that open calmly
onto the afternoon of her sunlit hissy-fit. The world
continues its vague business outside, some birds
chirp, a motor vehicle of some sort honks,
something unknown accelerates,
that most disturbing of sensations while one is still
resenting the telephone that does not ring with promises
of adoration. I look to my wild-eyed child. She is now
scrawling on my walls with bold crayon, blinking
furiously through her forced tears, whimpering
and yawling half-heartedly, willing me to join her
in an angry display. Instead, unable even of shushing her,
which would indeed only aggravate the piquancy of her supplications,
I try to concentrate on the simplest of ideas, the breath,
another sip of coffee, another mouthful of cereal, and eventually
the next page sees me wondering why the yogurt tastes differently today
but I am assured no amount of conscious working
with the muscles of the mouth and tongue
will enable us to taste our food more accurately
and I consider whether this is ‘true’,
and of course, ponder again what that ‘means’
and soon I am in a whirl of such succulent thought
that I am allowed to ignore the wayward child
for the exact unspecified amount of time
we both needed because when I finally look up
from my book (as all books are when one finds oneself inside them)
I am smiling in recognition of something I am not sure of
and this makes me feel removed enough to feel connected again
and so when I look around for the lost child I remembered I was
to tell her that we might as well go on together
to the kitchen to bake some cookies, she’s gone
from her destructive walled-in cackling corner
and instead, has climbed inside the mirror I can't quite ever find
and she is quietly carving out an intricate impression
of a harmony happened upon when she finally fell asleep,
at least I think that’s what she’s doing, I think I hear her humming
something to herself sotto voce, she seems happier now,
even with her blunt little knife making such scratchy noises.

An Imperfect Host

(Still sick, I found myself without the energy to engage in the many and long-delayed tasks that have awaited me these last few weeks, so instead I surrendered to an afternoon of resting my cough on the couch and watching the wonderful film that is "The Remains of the Day". Afterward, perhaps connectedly, I wrote these lines. Who knows why or what they mean; one of the perks of of calling oneself a poet, if one is so foolish to believe in poets or perks, is that one cannot be asked to explain verbal arrangements in terms of literal meaning. Does that mean poetry is a cop-out? Very probably, and maybe consciously so. In any case, these words emerged and given that these days my inclination to write has been indirectly proportionate to my desire to write, I am grateful for them and so I send them out into the world to be killed, surely a fate more exciting than a slow desiccation in my dusty notebook)


Fate always precludes
peace in our time; and yet

we hope for a prosperous future
and the quiet wars of everyday

are dumbly side-lined
by our appeasing efforts

at gentle amusement and gainful occupation.
We avoid our lives

in black and white
newsreels that deny

our confusions, preferring the clean direction
of a sharply cut corner,

and thus embracing the empty arms
of the entertaining acrobats,

we flip our frequency of thought
to polished signals of simple display,

we switch off the sweaty noise
of knowledge, we cannot face

the intricate book of complicity
so we bury ourselves

in the soft wools of soi-disant success.
We avoid our lives

afraid of what they might ask
of us, in our own voices

we ventriloquize one another,
busying our small attentions

with minor perfections--I too
aspire to drown

out the putrefying howl of the inexorable
imperfection.

If we feel ourselves at all, foreign
as we are to any essential action,

we are naturally terrified
and if at all we do anything

about this so-called fate,
we pontificate—I pontificate here,

now in the cowardice
of sheltering line-breaks

and the hubris of thought-
fully chosen words, idleness

in these illusory arrangements,
such pitiable consolations,

all disregarded in the real world
of easy rhymes, catchy rhythms

salty allusions and sexy conceits
and everyone would rather make a joke

I myself would prefer have a laugh, my ego
would enjoy the adulation of such applause

but my treacherous inclination
is to slight such an imperfect host.

This is why I pretend I am invited to the gatherings.
This is why I sit alone and write my excuses.