Instructions

This is how you stay together:

tap your fingers against something

inane and ambiguous, something

inanimate

Linger in your memory

and let it whisper

against your skin like the silhouette

of a man in a photograph, a shadow

dark and drab and compromised

Pry out your language

shovel, pick-axe, bothersome hatchet-

any tool will do.

Just levy that stick and raise the roof

you are up on top of,

gleaming.

Some days will not be easy.

Some days won’t even be right.

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is how you stay together, this is how it stays so long:

don’t depend on the fragile

vocabulary built from silence

Don’t break out the bricks until

the cavity lets loose the gizzards:

heart, liver, anus and other visceral

organs

Rough, tough, tangled firm

Lay down against your lions, contrary

Let the drift outlast, lie fallow

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is the record you make:

of an event, of a smolder, of any simple

stilted sweep of the hip to a beat

Solid, unsanctioned

in tiny rooms with little sounds rasping against shrunk-up stones.

Your heart cannot get bigger, only

it does.

You bet you would

You bet he would

You bet the sky won’t be blue

He bets it will, he bets

he won’t, he bets

you would

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

He does it,

you do it,

loudmouthed,

in spite of each

other.

09.24.2009

from then

Your eyes live for splashes of light sinking

into wave, for

that instant when the water boils

so you know to throw the lure

to cast your arm

against the wind.

I'm flailing.

No good poems come from me.

I am not emptied.

I am not a vessel of light

just a husk of who we were.

In smaller moments I find

you on me, a finger here

slight touch there. I take it.

Legs like tree trunks rooted

firmly into your ground

never toppling, only undulating.

Sturdy arms never meant to row,

only cradle.

And yet they are too often

left circled

but vacant

like a lot on a street where weeds

grow over and smells of anise bloom against

the grit and grime of a city littered.

Those two blue storms, so grave in the recess of your brown

and set to narrow, they

trace the contours of a horizon, the impression 

of wind, the crevice between stacked rocks--

but never the stalled breath of a lover

the contrast of skin to skin to skin.

Still, there is comfort

in knowing the phases of the moon

which coincide with the tide

which shift to bait

your glance

this way.

05.19.2006