Self Conscious
gaze / regard
The incident is trivial (it is always trivial) but it will attract to it whatever language I possess. (Barthes)
She has a seat to herself until the man
gets on and mutters to his kid sit by that
ugly girl over there. Stung, she has half
a mind to remind him she has beauty
for lunch, or to whisper to the child—
ugly is beauty’s aquifer, mineral silt
that feeds the creek bed before it
breaches the marsh. Not antithesis
of beauty but its ore, a thing known
not by example—wart, bent-kneed
cartwheel, gap after extraction—
but by need—prosthesis, proctor,
pore—a need akin to boredom,
to chagrin, the cringe in exposure,
the sediment in the cup. She is
uneasy before a camera or a corpse.
She hears the grunted “age” in
bandage, salvage, suffrage, spoil.
* * *
Crush
crush / engouement
Theatrical phase of infatuation in which the girl hoards signs of recognition and reciprocation, curating artifacts of desire and accruing their significances to herself.
Instead of a coffin, carve a six-foot pocket knife
with a church key & corkscrew, place
plastic ivy in a vat & paint a lavender man
with one sunken shoulder. Illuminate
toaster coils & paper lanterns, mount trout
on a yield sign, upholster a chaise
in faux mink, & dress the mannequin in two
boas & the stole of a beaded deacon.
Realign windowpanes horizontally & hang
several bicycles from the ceiling next
to raptors & hinged globes made of license
plates & glass. I should have warned you
I have the coldest hands. Set up some tollbooths
& salt licks, frame an old advertisement
for a bitter remedy that is no longer sold & never
worked in the first place, seat a mermaid
in a canoe & place a gourd in her prophetic hand.
We work ourselves up to the watery blues,
to the passage in Mauberley, & there’s nothing
to do but get off at the ninth floor. Look,
our game goes like this: you adore & I appreciate,
say thank you even, as if I don’t return
the emotion & then some, crushing in both senses.
Keep that in mind & go easy on me.
Give dragonfruit to the guy at the cash bar,
summon the tech crew to run puck lights
on a wire, envision a headless nude in tangled roots.
Devise a volcano that spews euphemisms
for war. If all else fails, park a Buick between
vessels & spread a pelt on the steel roof,
pick out the constellation you’d imagine if we
were looking up, languid with disdain
for the rest of a world we know will never live
up to the wistful ersatz aftermath of this.
* * *
Ceiling
dream / rêver
Sleep restores the girl to the domicile of fear.
I wake up smothering, pinned
in timbers, this time the beams of
the Hingham, Mass. meetinghouse
where they would have burned me
at the stake. Sometimes it’s girders
of low-end retail, or factory rafters,
or the pocked dropped-ceiling above
the berth where I lay naked, hot,
a boy’s flank blocking both fan
and light, saying restless prayers
to Our Lady of Byways. No use
trying to sleep again before blue
seeps through the pitch. And you?
In your otherwhere, are you trying
to fall back to sleep, to fall up
through a roof that’s a net, the one
you told me about last summer—
sieve for sky, celestial hammock,
colander to catch the errors of
the world? What errors—trinket,
ladder, dove? What sign, what
web, what sky, what world?
* * *
Enamor
fall / tomber
The lover’s discourse, from dis-cursus—originally the action of running. (Barthes)
She tries to lose herself
on a muddy path where
skunk cabbages erupt
from winter mire, birches
fill in with green so new
it can’t be natural. A few
bars into the third song—
that guileless triangle if
that’s what she’s hearing—
she’s startled by sweetness,
by some moody business
with a flute from the get-go,
the vaguely Spanish guitar
sidling up like the cringe
of existing at 17 in skin
too raw to expose to sun.
That’s desire—a whistle,
strum, chime (an interior
ocean’s rocking, in long
capricious fugues and
chorales)—mistywet, slip-
stream, cherrywine—
these are the words she’d
pick up to try to skip them
across the lake. She runs—
miles later she hears the song
again as she’s coming down
the west side of Eagle Hill
under ashen granite, and
that’s when she loses track
of her body and it feels like flying.
* * *
Unfinished Fugue
you / tu
I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others.
If I were you were waiting there
outside the door in a long coat holding
your breath, holding my breath,
if I were you were ruefully amused,
gathering trinkets in the night air,
moons & Mauberley, Burne-Jones’
boudoir & Delphinus & crocuses, I
would breathe the night air, observe
the row of stars above the roof, mis-
take moonlight for snowcover, snow
for salt, for a dune, a bolt of gauze
drawn across the moon, would know
you were (wish you were) asleep in
a white bed, or is it a white field
in Cezanne, shaded sum of colors,
as if the eye were I were you were
standing on an iron bridge, were
waiting at the door wearing cold
on your coat on your breath on my
hands if I were—there, this, a blaze
of summer straw, in winter’s nick.