Poetry
you have so much
wealth in your flesh
oh, you
abundance spread
oh, you
exult in
arch and stiffen
in whoop and heave
swallow tempt
and jubilee
be vain, be glorious!
shy but
you resplend
dare gaze on
your own shudders
touch and secret away
the finger’s lovings
let none love you
less than you learn
to love your own wealth
of flesh and light
I do not know how to tell you
what I am feeling.
You ask, and
my tongue strangles itself.
It chokes itself silent.
Under my heart,
there is a wellspring
of things I wish I could
tell you, and my tongue
is the cork stoppering
them up. It is the sentinel
warden at the gate, letting
none of the prisoners through.
I wish I could drive a spile
under my ribs
and let it all pour out for you.
Five bright birdsongs
hop and pop on the lawn
waking the neighborhood with music.
Silent tail swishes
in the underbrush,
yellow eyes,
a dash, a pounce.
Last one in the air
becomes a mouthful
of feathers and hush.
After the shackles are on,
everything goes quiet
and he begins to sob.
Pick up the cast down dresser.
Kick the torn t-shirts into the hallway.
Inspect the fist holes in the sheetrock,
try to remember which are old
and which are fresh.
Inhale his unwashed body.
This is the way violence smells:
adrenaline and sweat and piss,
a fruit of exhaustion left too ripe.
It smells like muscles tremble,
like carpet burn on a cheekbone,
like tomorrow’s bruise and ache.
You will never forget this smell.
A year from now,
it will wake you in the middle of the night,
a hot burn in your nostrils
with the memory of a punching fist
and your name shaped into a scream.
Your wife will ask if you are okay.
You will roll over and pretend to fall asleep
without hearing her.
The officer speaks static to her radio,
white scramble and fuzz,
she has to repeat herself
before you realize she is asking you
What do you want to do?
Hey, hey, what do you want us to do?
There is no answer.
Every person in the room knows
there are no solutions here,
no cure-all snake oil,
no jail cell or group therapy
or medication cocktail
that will make it better
and introduce this soul
born with his powderkeg brain
to quiet thought and serenity.
Stroke the sweat in his hair
and tell him you love him.
He cries into your hand,
says I’m a good man,
I’m a good man,
I’m a good man,
I don’t know why
I want to hurt you all.
I think you are a kind of whale.
Solitary giant, gentle beast,
you feast on seawater
and storms. You croon
to the barnacles that cling
to your belly and try
and try to love them,
pockmarked and ruptured
though they may be.
You have been poached for them,
prey creature, ocean queen,
lacerated and scarred by
harpoon barbs and propeller blades,
the tongues in the mouths
of the people who birthed you
into the black jewel of the sea.
They have churned you
into a mad eyed migration
towards the sand bars.
You are an entire species endangered
and I keep expecting to come home
and find you’ve beached yourself,
that you writhe helpless on wet sand,
grit sticky with sea slime and tangled kelp,
that you drown yourself on air
and give yourself up
to wait for the black market men
with their buckets and knives sharpened
to carve out the precious parts of you.
You are too great for that.
I would break my bones
trying to haul you back into the sea.
Do you remember
the time we walked
after the rain?
Earthworms slunk
up through the mud
and the crows in the trees
shook droplets from their wings
before swooping down to eat.
You hopped like a child
through the puddles,
so proud of yourself
with every splash
and I thought of winter,
always rainy here,
and maybe we’d have to
bundle up against the chill
but there might be more days
like this in store for us.
I used to think a hole in the heart
could be patched like drywall.
All you had to do was
cut lines of poetry out
of a library worth of chapbooks
and weave them into a mesh.
Place it careful over the hole,
don’t let it bunch up and fold.
Stir up a spackle of music
and nature: rainstorms and Vivaldi,
maybe, or crows and The Crows,
trowel it on thick and layer it
over the sorrow hole,
over the ragged edges
of the leaky wound
and seal your worries in,
seal your fevers in,
seal your rage and your love,
remind a heart
it is the thing that holds it all,
and when you are done
sand it all smooth,
cure it over with a coat
of the most colorful paint
you can find in the art shop,
red if you want to be traditional,
but damn, just go with whatever,
if it strikes your fancy.
That’s all a little wrong, of course:
you heal by days,
just days and days,
but it doesn’t hurt any more
to beauty them up while they pass.
You can feel a city ache
if you stand on its streets
in the middle of the night,
when all its citizens
sleep quiet in their beds.
You can feel it, a creak and a groan,
almost titanic, almost tectonic,
a body of concrete and bone,
every street light clicks automatic
through its colors like a heartbeat
and you can stand there in the stream
of it, learning to loathe yourself.
Understand you are not the only one
hating yourself into the asphalt.
You are not the only one
pulling skyscrapers down on your head.
You are not the only one
crying out to the newspaper boys
on their early morning routes,
read all about it! read all about it!
Here is a man who breaks his ribs
from the inside.
Here is a man who gnaws
on a mouthful of teeth.
Hush. Hush.
Oh, it hurts,
but the whole city hurts,
you are not alone in it,
and even if they sleep
while you wander mad-eyed
and awake through the empty streets,
remember:
You are a fine thing.
You are constructed well,
brick by brick and bone by bone,
remind yourself how tall you stand,
how many people scurry into you
to find shelter,
open every story
of you and let the breeze
wash the stale out of you.
Tell the newspaper boys
to rewrite that goddamn headline:
Here is a man
who makes it to sunrise again.
I.
I cannot write your name
without tearing the paper
and now there are piles
and piles of torn pages
and nothing of substance
written on them.
II.
Your name, spoken,
is to lick a lit candle:
fire and light and
the taste of wax melting
into the haze and snap
of pain.
III.
I would christen ships with you
to sink them. I would make
reefs of them, teeming with
the life of the sea, and then
I would slash myself open
on the coral in the deep,
conjuring sharks
and the teeth of sharks
into the blue-red-blue.
IV.
I would chisel your name
into foundation stones
to bring castles to their knees.
V.
I would bite your name
into the skin of my lover’s wrist
to break the bones beneath.
VI.
Whisper it;
scarce out,
to tear tongue
from the cave of mouth.
VII.
Think it;
aneurysm
and burst.
My love for you is an ocean,
fathomless fathoms
of blue black sea,
but if my love is an ocean,
you are a shore of crags.
You are a snuffed out lighthouse,
a vacant tower on a beach
of rocks, lightless and hushed.
You cast out no warning
that I should not sail near.
You shipwreck me.
You claw my hull open
on the sharp corpses
of dead coral, on shark’s teeth,
on the glass knives of obsidian
islands belched up in smoke
from the volcanic deep.
All my treasures have spilled out
into your treacherous shallows,
swallowed by surf and tide,
to sink and whirl in the eddies
among the hulks of others
who ran aground you before me.
My love for you is an ocean,
and you have a mad captain’s graveyard
where it meets the earth of you.