Saturdays and Sundries
Three poems.
I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. It is my immortality box, my lay-away plan, my coffin. —Anne Sexton I wrote this book, and it is sentimental Because I don’t have a right sized reaction to the world —Hera Lindsay Bird
This would be tomorrow any other day.
A moment, preemptive as nostalgia, tangible as watered-down citrus drinks— a moment drowned in missed translation & sensation as tenuous as our dance floor stained by wash lights and acid hope: As you negotiate the new year wrapped in your second-best dress, remaking torpor into second kisses, I'm downshifting ahead of the E Street exit in standby blue jeans, cultivating motion like over-smoked cigarettes. Later, the Circle will be exhausted, it will heave its saturation patrol mundane and you’ll explain its language with precision—you’ll never forgive me for refusing to understand but I’ll misremember and remember you eidetic. For now, I’m stranded near 20th and S, a tracing paper fantasy in this barely-my-city on the verge of event horizon—but you believe, you say it’s time to put our prophets to bed, to become diplomats and dream like drunks. We know what happens next: Walking back to your car we’ll meet a man missing a girlfriend and a labradoodle with whom we’ll trade rumors for jimsonweed and flee through the towns along the Potomac and survive like January romance— we’ll become inclined to digression & conspiracy and too old to claim indifference, though naïve enough for these moments as acrid as the pharmacy and its shattered glass—these moments, rationed like falling stars at daybreak.
Reflections (as in salt, as in the cracks in the sidewalk):
12/12 (Thursday) – Positivism is, without a lie, impossible. Negation without desire is dishonest. These are things I know.
11/20 (Friday) – Lies without meaning approximate truth. Desire without loss is nothing. These are things I know.
10/24 (Yesterday) – Time (i.e., being) is a normative claim.
Nothinginsomuch
My skin into sleet,
My shivers into sacrilege—
the black ice cuts me
cross-sectioned, leaves
the seconds trembling,
paints me erudite:
I sink myself into the
pavement—I wash it away
with whiskey.
My emptiness into air,
My breath into transition—
dreams, then Capitol Hill at
dawn, city bus broken down
on the roundabout—I found
a t-shirt in the snowbank,
once worn by a mystic
who got tired, so
he grew up
and became hard.
Your star sign
into my viewless evening,
My shadow
into your paper-mache winter
when we sat lieless, hands
folded into simile like
paper cups and burnt coffee—
you, the silence of my morning,
and I, pollyanna-inert,
sharing a last stand between
tomorrow and careless
innuendo. A Soft Ending: When you finish reading and close your eyes, what is left of the character you barely met? Recall Ursa Major, recall the cruel mercy of her insecure god.
And the laurel, too—stalked by Star-hearted Apollo.
Like chicken pox or poison oak.
My birds find the dark imposing—it’s not properly abstract. You know how it is when we feel excessively real— or entirely present. They sing strange polygons, into and out like pretense woven through a plunging sky, dislocated parallaxis, cold and somewhat unlike storm gods. This is how I kill my time in our suburb-persistent cul-de-sac: I think I remember you were going to steal a Camaro, a convertible, transmogrified green & we’d name her something like Shameless Reality and she’d hold 115mph through Middle America 'til we hit the Rockies where the plunging sky becomes dry land. They say it’s different when you die out west. ~But~ my birds will never drown, they only shudder—they become the last moment to survive my windowsill the last moment into frantic dawn, muted, itinerant, utterly enthralled by unburdened second chance.
“This would be tomorrow any other day” first appeared in the Red Ogre Review.
“Nothinginsomuch” and “Like chicken pox or poison oak” first appeared in The Word's Faire.