Something about travel
makes us lighter. We drive
to Missouri, and I discover
As families arrive comics rehearse bits. As
bar-backs fold towels. As napkins and bottles
are checked and emptied. As another ticket
The lack of an atmosphere, a planet
viewed against the blackness of space.
I didn’t choose to sleep at Taco Bell
When we learned
about the earth in orbit
and began to feel ourselves
In the side yard of an apartment house,
a length of twine extended from a downspout
to the trunk of sapling, and hung upon it
in the motionless air, an array of lacy
intimate garments, as they are sometimes called
Her jewelry always gets clumped
together in the jewelry box,
chains clutch each other,
odd earrings lodged in the links.
A quake bucks
against the flush plates
of my heel, up
New Orleans, you beautiful bitch, you.
When the shattered rattle of the road
ricochets too hard, you always
my father’s death wish)
smoke blown into the thinness
of my face
Timing is everything, as they say,
though who they is I don’t know,
but the fact that you didn’t see me
Like us, the hard-charging businessman is having dinner
on the terrace of the hotel at Mycenae, only he is taking
I live in endless theorem. I live relentless correction. You didn’t tell me that we could sell the art: fiscal touching, fiscal touching in the courtyard. It elicits a response. Looking around the house peeling the wallpaper off, all so salable.
Read MoreCrowded on a pull out bed, we
paired, hairbrushes and color palettes
in hand, going to work on the other,
pulled glossy rivulets from scalps,
is broken only by his Violet, Green and Red, 1951, the vertical longer than the
horizontal, I like its looming presence.
Where has summer gone so heartlessly?
I slept two sleeps, and in between
After we make love and you are asleep,
I try to hear your breath without touch, spilling
out of a closed mouth, or maybe see it
in the stomach’s slow lift or the throat’s
I claim the cracked up
City—high slit skirt
I am happy, I think, then wonder
what happiness is –– a crow
taking dictation or a schooner
He has made a comeback in my bed
like the last act of a lounge set,
perhaps a lover from a past life, reminding me
we once had it all, or nothing at all,
Well, I see it very much as a performance.
Well, yeah, I had to learn publicly through trial and error.