Our Nada Who Art In Nada, Nada Be Thy Name

Four Deleted Scenes from Noa Noa

2009-09-07T23:10:00.001-04:00

SCENE I (Matamoe, Landscape with Peacocks)
A shot of the water, which is still and the color of gunmetal. It is
rainy today in Matamoe. Gauguin arrived recently on the island and
can be seen huddled under blue branches, feet buried in pink sand,
wondering what peacocks might look like de-feathered.
Most likely just like any other bird, de-feathered, he concludes.

SCENE II (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?)
He addresses his diary once, thou mysterious world. In this entry he
says the women smell like vegetables. Fragrant, fragrant. I do not
miss the yellow house, he writes. He does not even miss Vincent.

SCENE III (And the Gold of Their Bodies)
Gauguin can be seen picking gardenia petals for monoi with four young
native women, all in white sarongs. He addresses the youngest one.
GAUGUIN: I helped build the Panama Canal, vous savez.
She does not know what Panama is. She does know what a canal is, but
she does not speak French.

SCENE IV (In The Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse)
A man looks downward. A horse looks downward. A figure is hiding
behind two shrubs shaped like wings.
He sits to paint his last painting. He does not know it will be the
last. He had hoped his last one would be the last. But this is his
last.

When Irene and Paul Eloped to Miami Beach

2009-07-19T21:06:00.000-04:00

The sun was a focused beam
flecked with dust,
a dirty projector.

Irene sat in long sleeves
on the shore. She could just make out
blades of coral scratching
a glassed surface.
Curving and hunching, all in a row
like vertebrae.

When the tide was low,
the whole reef lurked above the water:
a scattered skeletal puzzle.
Irene thought of it
as a living shipwreck.
A ghost ship’s great shadow.

Paul stayed in the room
smoking Cubans and eating
black olives off his browned fingers.
Paul was good at talking people into things.
Irene was very in love.

Untitled, After Edward Hopper’s “Rooms by the Sea”

2009-06-01T12:48:00.003-04:00

Of a front door flung open,
beyond the step is simple, open
sea. The light is milky.
Stirred by the wind with each
nearing current.

You know that familiar
mirroring: the bright echo
of glint and glimmer
bouncing off blue seawater.
But it’s better than that.

This light is a blinding
afterthought, the sun’s
consideration reflected as a favor.
The sea laps steadily
at the doorstep.
An eager dog.

Waves froth and curl,
tugging landward at the broad hem
of the sea’s golden skirt.
Her knees are pressed with sea oats
from kneeling so long.

Our floating house is getting full
of heavy light. A vase of sea holly
tumbles with the swell and unswell
of waves. The broken buds, like
little purple snowflakes, melt
into blinding white or crawl
like sea spiders
back into the ocean.

Two rooms by Edward Hopper, and some complaining

2009-06-01T01:07:00.006-04:00

I wish things still seemed as limitless as they did not so long ago. The reality of my life continuing for the next seven months just as it has been since the beginning of May (barely employed, in touch with a total of two people in this city, without school or any kind of schedule or structure) is a totally new and suffocating prospect. I've never been less excited about existing. It's not that I'm sad, just claustrophobic and really, truly bored.

From a distance, summer always seems like this huge block of free time during which I will regenerate and become the person I'm too busy to be when I have school and work all the time. I will be well-read, I will write all the time, I will finish the projects I've been meaning to finish and write those stupid thank-you notes to the people who sent me graduation cards. I have done almost none of the above in the past three or so weeks. Summer is just too wide open with too many prospects and I am turning into a big, lazy idiot. I pick up a book and get through ten pages until I decide to take a nap. I spend most of my day on the internet. I guess I've been doing okay with writing pretty regularly, though. Good old Ed Hopper has been a main source of inspiration lately.

And now I will tell you

2009-05-19T12:02:00.003-04:00

everything you want to know. Actually, I kind of just want to write this all here as a sort of mandatory to-do list of my life. Okay? Whatever.

So I graduated from college yesterday. A couple days before that happened, I won $1,050 in poetry prizes for some poems from my senior thesis. With that money, I am going to Lebanon in the fall. Before that, I will re-change my last name to Boulos, so I am not denied entrance into the country. After that, I will know everything there is to know about my heritage. DONE.

I'm moving to Jamaica Plain in September, to pay cheap rent and enjoy fall foliage in the arboretum (gay) until December 31st, when I will move to Los Angeles (Poetry Wasteland) to be with boyfwiend. Yesterday, my stepfather said Los Angeles is "blasé" so I think I will like it. Plus, I will probably work at the Paper Source in Beverly Hills, selling paper flower kits and obnoxious greeting cards to the stars!!!!!!!! Life rules.

This summer, there is much to do. First, I must establish a summer reading list. Then, I must find a boat and row myself out to the middle of a lake, to make myself read in total, watery isolateion. Also, I might get a tan. Jamaica Pond may provide these services to me. Otherwise, I will swim at Castle Island, road trip from Florida to New Jersey (with stops in Savannah, Asheville and many other hip Southern spots along the way!!!!), write one poem per day, and barbecue many things. Mostly corn.

And this is the summer of '09 jam, manditorily (maybe not a word).

The Yellow House

2009-03-24T09:20:00.001-04:00

Arles, France

In one breath, a block of stone
hollowed, windowed, and painted
yellow. Summer, watercolored,
soaked through panes
of the sunny house.

The sky was usually turquoise,
painted in patchwork and seeping
through an archway shaped like a keyhole.
Above the rail station, though,
it was sometimes indigo tinged
with warm gray.

Your rooms were shaded,
suffocated in green shutters,
drawn glowing deep cobalt
from the insides. Your brush
could breathe only in gasps
of fleeting curtain flutter.

Oilcloth bed sheets lie stained
in struggling slats of light.
Diagonally across the road, a garden;
beyond it, gleam of moving water.
From that open mouth
of the Rhone, you hear
only half of what always-flowing
summer water spoke.

In a mirror above the wash basin,
chin bristled by drying sunflower petals,
you watch you, formulating
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
A background of tangerine and blood orange
tells us it will not be there forever.
You sketch.

Colorado

2009-03-04T23:21:00.001-05:00

Listen, you said,
rolling the window down
in still morning, winding
the crank of the gramophone
of this cold new day.

First, just the hush
of evaporating sand,
crumbling adobe—
we’d been watching the pueblos
thin around us all week.
Orange wisps swirling
upward into quartz sky.

We waited in near-light
until, from the depths
of some unseen celestial cave,
it came shivering up the backs
of the snow-dusted canyons,

a careful copper light
inching over the vertebrae
of obsidian mountains
etched into the horizon,
sun finally flowing
over the bone-dry mesa
in one trembling yawn:

some god’s whispering
life into day.

Museum

2009-02-25T22:42:00.004-05:00

A swarm of stuffed hummingbirds
broke free from their pins and plaster,
flew quick and calculated, single file,
through a crack in their plastic casing.
Soon, the buzzing reached
a fully synchronized hum
as many tiny wings beat back
invisible dew above our heads.

At first we were all alarmed;
small girls ducked and shrieked,
parents yanked wrists and ran,
and some stuffed antelopes and chimpanzee skeletons
scrambled for the door just as the vibrations
reached a deafening level.
Most of them made it out through
the broken window or the fire escape,
but we had nowhere to be until 3:30
and still hadn’t seen the traveling mineral exhibit,
so we decided to stay.

The hummingbirds headed immediately
for the glass flowers. We conferred and estimated
that their ranks were somewhere in the tens of thousands,
and once their beating wings neared the display,
glass cases and delicate Honeysuckle shattered
in the vibrations. Undeterred, some birds
ducked into the mouths of blossoms
of a big blue Delphinium;
others headed for the delicate Columbines.
All the while, the Trumpet Vines shrieked
and some liberated Gypsy Moths
swam into the forgetful head
of one particularly hungry Nepenthe.

We found our way to the minerals
and took cover in the commotion,
hunching inside two halves of a tall geode—
all purple and sharp on the inside,
many-toothed like some sea creature’s mouth—
until the buzzing lulled to a distant whine.

Wading through ground diamond dust
and many fallen phosphorescent wings
in the dusty model of an abandoned museum,
we knew the futility of holding onto
something so tightly it turns to sand
between your locked fingers
and is a monument only
to disappearance.

LIFE

2009-02-25T22:26:00.007-05:00

I turn twenty-one on my last day of college (May 6th, 2009). At my birthday party all I really care about happening is: cupcakes, "Rosalita" by Bruce Springsteen and a sign that says IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.

I am Emerson College's poet laureate. Sort of. (I was chosen to represent Emerson at this poetry festival/contest/reading/jerk-off thing at Boston College in April. I will nervously read poems and then get published in a chapbook. Word?)

I want my kitchen to look like this:
Also, this weekend I think I might paint something. I have wanted to start again for a while. I haven't painted or drawn since at least three years ago. But I hadn't played the piano in more than that amount of time and I started playing it again a couple months ago and now I can play the first page (four lines or so) of Clair de Lune again. I am a prodigy. Except the lines on the treble clef are still Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Also, I am five.

And now I will stop this (LIFE) and post some poems because I haven't done that in a while. Maybe because they've mostly been big compilations of suck lately. Maybe?

Orchard

2009-01-24T15:08:00.000-05:00

Dusk sky draped loose
over arching boughs, its reddened ends
tucked deep into valleys
behind hills worn with age and rain.

Stained glass shadows
sprawled in the grass.
A light wind, sweetly rocking
the blossoms off the vine.

Orange, acorn-shaped:
heavy fruit hanging,
lunging groundward.
Some fallen, skin peeling
with innards slick
like the skin of an eel.

Picking one, the quiet ache of the unfamiliar
like the first time you saw the Pacific.
Like the first time you ate one,
overripe.

You came home cradling
a pile of big beating orange hearts,
one small persimmon flower among them.
White and silk, petals thin and veined
like the weaving tributaries of Sunday River.

Untitled

2009-01-14T21:11:00.003-05:00

We rose like two
blue balloons.
You, especially
full of hot air.
And blue because
that's the color
of bursts and flickers
I see when I close
my eyes from cold
and crying on the slab
of city sidewalk
I lost and then found
my coat's blue button on—
and the same small square
where I stood while you,
silent and still
on the other line,
deflated.

West

2009-01-11T23:41:00.004-05:00

Colorado was beautiful. I walked barefoot in the snow on a mountain and saw black swans and met his family and rode on a train straight into the bottom of a gorge.

Just so you know,

2008-12-28T21:59:00.012-05:00

my poems have been not so good lately because Joshua told me to write twenty poems before I go to Colorado. I go to Colorado tomorrow. I have six poems. The next poem I write will hopefully be about the Doppler Effect. I've been trying to write a poem about the Doppler Effect for weeks now. I've decided I'm going to start writing normal things (things like this, things like the thing I am writing) in here because sometimes I think normal thoughts, not always poem-thoughts. I can't wait until Colorado. I will climb mountains.

This week I read this

many times over.

The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
into the pink flesh of the sundown.
The end of another day
in this floating dream of a life.
Renown is a mouthful, here and there.

(sometimes it is almost perfect)

December Poem

2008-12-26T17:46:00.008-05:00

The last few days of the old year
are the most static by far.
Slow mold growing
on old meat; hard, stale things
days before the taking-out.

Nights before the new year:
gameshow re-runs and
falling asleep in my jeans
around seven. Waking in the dark, then
whole days of left-overs.

After dinner on
the twenty-sixth, we wound
each music-making thing in the house
at the same time.

Tens of simultaneous dings
rang together: notes
lonely themselves,
cacaphonous at once.

The last one left playing
Greensleeves, sole and eerie,
unwinding slow, stopping just
before the finish.

Frying Eggs on Christmas Morning

2008-12-25T20:22:00.002-05:00

Still dull blue outside,
a dawn drowned in
deafening street light,
blinding cricket-buzz.

Mornings I know
the kinetics of being
torn apart: stiff white,
bleeding yolk.

Lunch, the Day Before Thanksgiving (Revised)

2008-12-21T22:12:00.000-05:00

My grandmother’s skin hangs looser on her arms
than I remember. She tugs down fleece sleeves
when she notices I’m looking.
My soup has cooled, my spoon
forgotten and limp
among the onions.

Outside, vacant docks
line the Navesink in blank Autumn
and cold little houses huddled on a hill
remember the cobalts and cranberries
that painted their faces
in hungrier days.

Through the bright afternoon
picture window, I squint
over Sandy Hook toward Coney Island.
Brooklyn is tiny and fogged, delicate
from a distance—New Jersey
knows everything
through gray-tinted lenses.

Scandinavia (Revised)

2008-12-21T09:38:00.001-05:00

i. Coastal Conifer Forest

We took three quiet buses
from Stockholm to Sarpsborg,
each an inching gray caterpillar
crawling carefully over
the feet and toes of mountains.

Passing blurred scenes,
we watched the windows like they were
water-spotted movie screens—
The setting: streets stretched like tendons
between city and country;
the main characters:
spruce, juniper.

ii. Oceanic Boreal Zone

Our boat hummed its way
along the dotted line separating
Swedish and Norwegian Atlantic.
The motor quit with a final resigned sigh
off the coast of a windy, nameless island.

I skinned my palms on tree bark,
tying up the boat as your Norwegian cousin
told us, translating,
that only one man has lived here
in recent history.

From this archipelago strewn
sloppily between Sweden and Norway,
we dug a hole in the rocky coast and started a fire
as the boat's tethers moaned
against splintered makeshift pilings.

The sun set two hours after midnight
with the certainty of sermon.

Almost-Haiku

2008-12-21T04:20:00.004-05:00

The moon hung upside down,
spun strange in god's glass hands, limp,
curled soft into a frown.

In Days of Marrowless Youth

2008-12-21T04:05:00.005-05:00

The sky hangs loose over the backyard,
neon dusk: a faint and flustered pink
while the clouds cough snow.

Cold, drenched:
my bones feel too new to
hold much, pull their weight.

I am aging backwards toward the new year,
fractured afterthought
in limbo before the ice storm.

Nap

2008-12-20T11:28:00.005-05:00

I've been dreaming like jet streams.
White fading glints,
disintegrating in daylight—
most important are the shapes.
The dizzying arabesques of regret when
consciousness reminds me
how to properly
tread water and
wait.

Book of Hours

2008-12-18T11:33:00.005-05:00

i.
I don’t hold time
too close at hand.
I know minutes
are the brown leaves
of evergreens—sharp little
useless things, fallen;
I discard them
like fruit peels.
Never in knowing, but
slipping on the
mealy brown coils,
sensing it’s
time to go.

ii.
Time is a blenching bird
in the back yard of
the inaccurate.
It shivers and flinches, always
a moment out of reach, and
you beg to know
how the warm of its body,
how those feathers would feel
between your fingers.

(A pulsing thing,
smooth with the silk
of meaning never
to be caught.)

iii.
The face of time
is smooth with wear.
A shining silver circle,
a quarter with the visage
worn to dullness
from years in a
warm pocket.
When I come late I’ve been
polishing the shine,
illuminating
the gelatin print
of months and
years of
holding onto.

iv.
The opposite of gray
is gray. The opposite of time is
a swollen river in shifting autumn.
A lying child. Ash that floats on water,
the aching moan of
wet snow beneath
bare feet.

v.
Sometimes I can feel time
with its bare feet
folding and refolding itself
inside my stomach
because it means for me to.

vi.
The opposite of time is
time in negative,
time living
a life its own
without numbers
somewhere in Western Illinois
among the cornfields,
maybe sitting, maybe pacing,
always just
taking its time.

Lunch at the Molly Pitcher Inn

2008-11-26T15:59:00.006-05:00

I squint against
the brightness of early-afternoon
beyond the picture window,
because the man at the table to my right
is alone and ordering for two: She’s stuck
at the train tracks. We’ll both
have the chicken, and the man
at the table to my left has
a tributary of dried blood trailing
from his ear. He is laughing,
which makes it worse
because I know he knows
what is sad about this place,
what is sad about a wife who
can’t quite look at you
in focus.

And they know
Autumn is poorer in hope
than winter, because
they know what will come.
The beginning
is so far from the end
that it is an end in itself.

My grandmother’s skin hangs looser on her arms
than I remember. She tugs down fleece sleeves
when she notices I’m looking.
My soup has cooled, my spoon
forgotten and limp
among the onions.

Outside, vacant docks line the Navesink
and cold little houses huddled on a hill
remember the cranberries and cobalts
that painted their faces in
hungrier days.

A Rainy Weekend on Top of Mont-Royal

2008-11-26T15:52:00.003-05:00

i.
Some plum trees, near winter:
hard, bald fruit and
six or so yellow leaves
shivering on tips of
twisted Van Gogh branches—
stiff shoulders, arms lifted
in praise: these I know.
And the bare-knuckle, fallen
raw wound plums: purple
pock marks on a dry lawn, rotting
in the churchyard. These
I know.

ii.
On the corner of Sainte-Catherine
and Rue Crescent: a lit match,
quivering ruby smudge in a
fog gray night. (I know, at least,
the smell.) Thirty dollars richer in gin,
I know the swimming through
crowds of chills. I know the
bar doors opening and
closing like coral polyps, and
I know their insides: a hollow sound,
smooth pink underbellies.
Sticky floors.

iii.
Yesterday was years ago, waiting
for the metro at Champ-de-Mars.
I knew the cold
smell, the eclipse of
black coffee in a white cup.
Today I folded words, days-old
into paper cranes and
set them forcedly free,
leaning and aching
in the hotel sink. I don’t know
words any more, I don’t know
a city, a November
weekend with
you in it.

The Day Before Thanksgiving in Red Bank, New Jersey

2008-11-26T15:48:00.008-05:00

My father’s dreams were
born and raised on Coney Island.
I see them from an overlook
atop the bluffs of Sandy Hook,
the familiar mix of forest, farmland and
billowing power plant at my back.
Brooklyn is tiny and fogged, delicate
from a distance, but New Jersey
knows everything
through gray-tinted lenses.

Nineteen Rosemary Drive
is a tan clapboard house
with two sets of stairs leading to
two different doors leading to
where my mother ate and slept until
the beckoning of exotic Navesink River Road
became too tempting to ignore any longer.
My grandmother sleeps in the bed
next to me, a little less nostalgic
and probably remembering lightly
how hard it was to leave here
for a sunnier kind of run-down town.

My mother gets lost on a country road
and wonders aloud when
trees began outnumbering street signs
in Monmouth County.
About a mile down, after some railroad tracks
and more blank Autumn,
ten deer stir next to the road,
a sign with an arrow pointing West
and a slight and peeling RED BANK, 2 MILES
just beyond them
in startling green.

cigarette break

2008-11-16T00:33:00.003-05:00

the moon, opal
smudge on fog,
just a reminder
of what to miss
once it's gone.

Parkland, Florida (Revised)

2008-10-25T17:37:00.002-04:00

In a town sinking
inches each year
back into the Everglades,
we spent summers plucking petals
from wild orchids, drinking
brackish water, testing luck
and trying hard to get lost
on roads we knew like old adages.

Loxahatchee Road was wild,
following the curve of a creek—
a streak of dirt that cut the county
clean in half. Once at the end of it,
eighty ounces of Olde English in,
we found a baby alligator tied by its neck
to the trunk of a Live Oak
with pink fishing line.

Ankle-deep in black water,
you cut it loose with your car key
in the light of headlights and a half-moon.
We watched the sawgrass
bend, strange curves and angles
as the gator swam free. The thin vein of
Loxahatchee was pulsating with no real
conviction to our left, and the glades spread
strange and flat everywhere else—
half a peninsula covered in damp carpet.
With quickly fading flushed cheeks, we were

two ghosts, stunned and disappearing
as daylight seeped slow over the brim
of marshland and
into puddles at our feet.

parkland, florida

2008-10-22T03:47:00.004-04:00

in a town sinking inches every year
back into the everglades,
we spent summers plucking petals
from wild orchids, testing fate
and trying to get lost on
roads we knew like old adages.

loxahatchee road was wild,
following the curve of a creek,
a streak of dirt that cut the county
clean in half. once at the end of it,
eighty ounces of olde english in,
we found a baby alligator tied by its neck
to the trunk of a live oak
with pink fishing line.

ankle-deep in black water,
you cut it loose with your car key
in the light of headlights and a half-moon.
the everglades were strange and flat
behind you, and sawgrass swayed
in the slow-motion wind
as the gator swam free,
cut loose. we sat and watched the trail
its tail frantically carved in the water
from the cold hood of your volkswagen.
shaken into sobriety, we were

two ghosts, shocked and disappearing
as daylight seeped slow over the brim
of marshland and into
our open hands.

paris

2008-09-27T09:57:00.002-04:00

we are drunk after lunch
and lost in the latin quarter—
your footsteps counting cadences,
quick ticks on a metronome
walking us eventually
to the end of this movement.
then, the boulevard saint-michel and
suddenly the seine, opaline in the sun.

after cinque arrondissements
and four or five da capa al fines
in the form of platitudes like
paris is laid out like a nautilus shell, spinning
out from the center and
in barcelona, the buildings looked like
they had hangovers--

finally montmartre, with
the smudge-faced men tying
loose green and red and yellow strings
around the wrists of gullible tourists
in front of the carousel
at the bottom of the steps of sacre coeur.

and at the bottom of those steps i am
at the bottom of a canyon,
with a fray of strings around my wrist
and whines of ghost accordions echoing in my ears,
and flying, dipping, expressionless unicorns
spinning in front of my eyes.

zurich

2008-09-11T00:33:00.002-04:00

on top of lindenhof,
lime blossoms and tiny green fruit
hang delicate from tendrils, thin
yellow ribbons strung from the lindens' branches.

we sit, silhouettes under the tangles
of limb and leaf, and in silence
we assume we're alone,
but birds shoot out from under the deck like arrows
at the start of a car engine
like the clearing of a throat.

and they are silhouettes, too,
suddenly so many feathered shapes,
flapping and flying around us against
seamless blue: the sky and
lake zurich, an open mouth
circled by rows of pointed,
snow-capped
teeth.

chapbooks

2008-05-20T13:08:00.005-04:00

(hand-sewn bindings!)

i've only assembled four so far, but i have enough supplies to make about twenty. email me (regimes@gmail.com) if you're interested!

(not a poem)

2008-05-06T04:19:00.004-04:00

hello!

i'm going to be making about twelve hand-assembled chapbooks of a bunch of my poems this week. they're $5, but i'll also accept really sweet trades! email me at regimes@gmail.com if you're interested in buying/trading.

or, if you just want to exchange poems, i'd love to do that too. you can email me or just mail one/some my way:

erin berkowitz

198 tremont street, box #141

boston, ma 02116

i have a really sweet typewriter and will whip you up a poem to send right back. so fast!! promise.

i'm not sure anyone actually reads this, but thanks..!

how i spent my spring break in one-hundred words or less

2008-04-25T23:57:00.005-04:00

i collected your words like they were winning ends of wishbones. i dried them out on the windowsill and i bottled them up in water-spotted jam jars and i shelved them and labeled them and watched them turn brittle and useless as dull toothpicks. you had a laugh like the hands of ghosts, though. those never stayed in the jars very long. they'd creep out under the lid like they knew the process of evaporation better than you did, slip back into me through the backs of my hands, sink into my bones and

stay for a while.

bridges of bones

2008-04-15T22:04:00.004-04:00

i am building bridges made of bones with my bare hands. a yawning sunrise smiling like it's made of bees is spitting up all over the window but i'm keeping busy turning mountains to molehills, testing the ice with my pickaxe. your thoughts are constant paper airplanes in my airspace, though, so i know: she had legs for days and the round mouth of someone you kept your secrets away from, like weddings and widowers. but you spend all your time with typewriter keys now anyway--you'll sink like lead through that thinning ice.

maybe it'll wear off, maybe there'll be an eclipse

2008-04-15T21:53:00.004-04:00

the flight of the bird in the egg, your heart rattling in your chest. (it just wants to shake its wings a little. it just wants its feathers caught in something other than the bridge of your brittle ribcage. it just wants to shake off the arteries like hot air balloon tethers and float float float until it finds a happier home, maybe in the poconos.)

i tell it to shh, shh but i am just an outline of something that could be worth listening for and my breaths and hums and sighs are just books you've already read, just static on the am radio.

marlboro twenty-sevens, or the first warm night of the year

2008-04-11T13:23:00.013-04:00

still

sometimes: i want

a cigarette between my lips and my two feet back on your back porch, but i am not

soft like cement.

i am not smart like the

me of one month ago, since

i am sure of my faults now but not sure of much else,

, , although more times than some times i wonder if i look as

flimsy as i feel, since

i don't even know myself when i am alone, since

i know this is just some cinematic sprawl of a face and constant

quivering

vigilance

you are a parachute that never opened

2008-04-09T01:27:00.010-04:00

without anyone-elses, winter and spring are just two different kinds of gray. one slithers like it's made of scales and silk and the other slips through your fingers like sand, shellacs like sea glass. baby, i've had empty mailboxes and inboxes and bedspace for weeks but my belly's too full of words to care. we all have cocoons made of cracked egg shells, anyway; we are barely living/still fluttering butterflies in glass cases.

now i collect post-sex poeticisms: intentional movements of trees in snow storms, parachutes that never opened. we can laugh until they feel like the tiny silver glints in pavement that are those good moments in Life, but i sleep less and hold my breath longer underwater because of them. and all i learned this summer was how to build bridges, fix transmissions, ride without my hands on the handlebars. one winter i'll settle down in the middle of everywhere, with more no-ones than someones as long as the no-ones don't have teeth as sharp as yours, hands as familiar to so many as yours, witticisms as naked as yours. (sometimes i know from the very backs of my knees that there is no more space left in my body for nothing but the flat spot on the back of my head where i hit the tile falling from my father's arms as a baby with a thick mop of black matted hair implies otherwise,) so this gray may i resolve to be better: eat better, sleep better, speak better, love better, love less--

you felt full of reasons. now i think i made them up: digging between the spokes of the wheels on my bicycle and your tired, squinting expressions in dull light in dive bars. but i don't sink so deeply into bathtubs and mattresses now, now that i have my own raisons d'être: listening to the rain and the radio, egg yolks that shine like opals, winning ends of wishbones, mottled sunlight, people called charlie, a slanted c'est quoi? carved on the tree in the yard the june i turned twelve, your cheeks (pink as peonies).

denouement

2008-03-25T21:38:00.010-04:00

we have clumsy names for one another,

asymmetrical and always

in limbo.

we break nails and split seams--

nothing is plumb, level or

square, just

cracked like a cratered half-moon.

brittle like

dried nautilus shells.

forgotten like easter eggs.

i want certain names

back beneath my tongue, ones

i called when your face was too close to mine.

instead i've started misplacing your

palms--stained like

little glass chapel windows--

from memory;

i gave numbers different names as

those hands slid on skin and

peeled back layers

i didn't know i had.

now i count backwards

to fall asleep,

a disappointing

denouement.

Symbiosis

2008-03-16T23:00:00.011-04:00

(After Marcel Dzama's The Course of Human History Personified)

We have overcoats made of moth wings,

they said. And the cowboys told us

they'd be here around three, Peter spat

as he mashed the phosphorescent wing of a hummingbird

beneath the left heel of his brown wingtip.

John shot one of the low-flyers with his rifle

and the gunpowder exploded in the shape of a little grey tear.

He made a whistling sound between his two front teeth

as a tawny owl fell to the ground--it landed at his feet

and John forgot the definition of symbiosis

as the brown leather of his shoes was coated in a fine dust.

Four bats circled overhead, shivering,

their swoops causing little windy crescendos

like the tinkling of pianos

in the stillness. They wondered who would wear

moth-wing overcoats and wingtips to war

and whispered to one another

about countries without armies since nineteen forty-eight.

They realized they'd forgotten to pack the white flags--

Another grey pop, just three left now.

Matthew lowered his reeling rifle

and snuck a glance at his wristwatch. Three-oh-five,

he whispered to the other men. They looked west;

no sign of the cowboys. Paul wiped his glasses on his coat,

told them Keep shooting. Don't let them see us sweat,

he said, lowering the brim of his cap. They nodded and snickered.

But then their neckties exploded into red flowers,

their hands turned into closed clam shells

and the bats flew south.

les arbres

2008-02-16T12:03:00.003-05:00

when your redwood arms wrap round my thin birch frame, i can feel you reading my thoughts fresh as ink on shorn raw bark. my skin is paper, thin and damp, glowing white like exposed pulp beneath husk. your fingers, quivering like branches through breeze, read my goose bumps like braille. you can tell how i mess those dense, green forests--the ones i've never seen or smelled or sunk roots into. i am used to the thin and tangled limbs of mangroves, their shallow root systems in the sand and fickleness in those everyafternoon rainstorms. i stutter to explain: i don't believe in much besides strong wind and salt air. but i could reach my roots far into this rich soil if the songbird that hovers in your branches would stay through the winter, and if you would still whisper me to sleep when brisk air rattles your sturdy branches--even after autumn when we're both bare and brittle.