I mistook an afternoon for an alligator.
I mistook my name for a drink and drank it up.
I mistook her hair for my longing.
I mistook my waking for some legendary harrow,
streaming water down its back.
These mistakes were easy to bear when I was fifteen years old
and twenty feet tall and twenty five years old.
I mistook this morning for a joke about tomorrow.
I mistook the frown on papa’s brow for luck,
folded like paper and secreted away for when I am fifty years old
and nine feet tall and thirty years old.
Easy mistakes, easy as summer powdered and stirred
into a golden tea poured by a tidy chinaman who likes me.
seven houses look like this
seven houses in a row
seven houses rubbed with cayenne
seven houses full of babies
seven houses caught in flagrante delicto
seven houses going 70 in a 35
seven houses stopped the war
seven houses running late
seven houses meant well
seven houses having a drink, staring at the tip of the Cape
This poem has special
spacing and line breaks
so you know I’m serious
plus obligatory reference to homeless man: ( here)
o yes and sprinkle wretched callosum
there how’s that
I was told last year I had young hands
They are haunted by Minnesota
They are marred by punctuation
riddled and dired
like dried ripples appled
killed by fascination;
ridden
verdant and voluptuous, verdant and voluptuous,
A story of backs and beggars
burned alive
such great hands
dired
for gary m my favorite
succinct as born yesterday
watching you tired watch me
sing the best mercies cryers of dull dark bore
sing the best mercies of dark palindromes
sing ourselves
I cannot figure out my favorite disease
scalding cauldrons of rage
clip
clip
clap!
burden, burden, betroth:
what I say when alone
words fell over the bridge into the car, once,
over and over
words fell over the sodden lips of rock
into my
crushed
fallacies of might.
It was stormy
outside
and bright
I. Mercury’s in Retrograde
I can only process a few puffs now,
before the war,
before the hejira,
before the sudden onset of an inspired lethargy.
Without it (money? liberation? the first person pronoun?) you could go crazy,
crazy like Crowley, inspired, crammed with sorrow.
And with it, stark raving sober.
Just now, I’m processing.
This morning I passed the stillness of a finished car accident,
surrounded with people
jostling among the feast of interruption.
This image I contrasted with mountain silhouette, urgently calm,
like an unmoored grief finally given name.
Everything stopped going wrong
when I quit paying attention.
I can only talk for a second now,
shed a morsel of mentation;
I can hold out my crumbs of certain.
Because you didn’t ask.
Because I cannot sleep.
Because I noticed ions in the sky,
swaying with the immanence of intuition.
Because I won the bet.
Because I gave up knowing.
II. The old man I will be tomorrow
I am formless and void
in the lair
of contingent ego,
using only sparsest words
to refuse to pray for or against:
“Thy will be done.”
I am eschewing the manufacture of loved ones,
abstaining from city,
absorbed by city.
I am made quiet and motionless in the street,
seeing the old man I will be tomorrow.
I cannot speak to him;
I can only pry at him with my eyes,
satisfied
to observe my future
lack of encumbrance.
When the moments return to order,
I can walk again, fluid and slow in the heat,
as I shake stillness from the knees of my belief.
Feeling the cool finger of light in my lungs,
telling me I could be happy.
When the moments return to order,
one following speciously upon the next,
the old man crosses the street,
blinking in the sun,
smiling at the near-memory
of the daughter he almost was.
III. Have mercy (the satisfaction of denial)
Considering a chocolate ice cream kiss,
bewildering in its complexity,
I crashed the market.
This is green:
My shirt is warm,
I have found a bone to rub across my tongue.
Sun on blowing leaves.
This is green:
Tires, a fire
made of wrong things; silence in a cup,
beans this morning brewed and clean.
Light on folding leaves.
And this:
Watching the comments of the dogs
sting the air;
the bray of people walking
out among the radio waves.
Summer of cold leaves.
This:
The giggling mountebank of winter,
with all the normal symptoms of ghost.
Leaves.
