sub
On overcast mid-mornings here the rain
comes down too heavily and too fast, like parmesan
on a small salad. An eidetic memory means
you can never forget what the word “eidetic” means.
Here’s remembrance: I want to run up
to you as if we were a leading man and lady
and turn you by your shoulders in the rain
to face me with your eyes like millions
of graceful mistakes, like two robin’s egg blue
plastic creamer mini-cups bobbing meekly
in your coffee, or like the intersecting orbits
of dour Neptune and owl-necked Pluto.
It’s different for you. My eyes in the rain
are two AA batteries in your dead remote.
My eyes are a pre-reception reception
held in honor of some awful thing you’ll never
care about and it’s catered by what’s got to be
the most bullshit Quizno’s sandwich franchise
that ever stuck an anything between two halves of bread.
But you know how to marvel at these anythings: at these
heaps of meatball marinara stacked in strange
orthogonal towers like Mondrian cells in
unbreadlike primary colors; like the labors of a toddler who,
sitting on a lint-rimed preschool carpet, layers woodblocks
neatly up and off into impossible space.
passepartout
Let’s meet in the overcast of ages
beneath the umbrellas like hills of Hergé
chinaman’s hats or the winnowed cloth
of circus tops grown indistinct
with distance ‘til they form a chitinous
turtle shell blossom of dandelion seeds in transit
because you forgot your glasses
and I won’t wear mine. Let’s eat soup.
It gets dark quickly here. You look beautiful
with shadows splashed upward from the underglow
of your phone across your features like red paint
on a fox fur coat. I love these lights,
I do, I love how these soft mechanical lights turn
the underbelly silhouette of our umbrella into something
like the long cray-pas shade of a hot-air balloon
on the illustrated cover of a Jules Verne novel,
abridged, for children.
marine biology
I’m dancing the jig that makes the trees grow
and my toes in this turf are like five and then five
and then ten and then five vultures submerging
their baboon’s ass heads into the ribs of the earth
and snacking. I’m a dead man in the earth and I know
every dance and I perform them while taking deep gasping
gulps of the soil, down here where you can’t see my feet
pronate at inelegant angles— I think I’d need to buy a special
pair of shoes to fix them. Who knows. Do I look like a podiatrist?
It’s a too-warm winter when I can shuffle off to buffalo
beneath the ground like this pondering
corrective footwear. February started yesterday. I love
you underground like pairs of dolphins nose to nose
on Valentine’s day cards, their vertebrae coiling into
yoga poses to form the halves of a heart
when in reality they’d likely just be fucking.
But I don’t know that much about dolphins.
driving
Your eyes that squint against the cheeky dawdling
glare of high beams in nighttime New York traffic
are Polyphemus. Your eyes are much-discussed by me.
I’m the songbird warble of your car engine
as you shift into a higher gear from whatever
the lower gear you were just on was. You’re the galling
presumption that I’d even idly pay attention to that shit instead
of listening to the radio or the ambient
noise on the street or any number of other things I might
just as well be listening to. You can’t surprise me, and you do, and you are
wander bluster aerie and a real ’50s pin-up knockout. Your eyes are like
those of a girl from a contact lens commercial with a budget,
and I want to look into your eyes on instinct
like I know it’ll kill me, like a goat being a goat in a fairytale.
eschatology
Well, you seem nice enough. Let’s spend the rest of eternity together:
in moments of weakness I think I’d quite like to see your shoulders silhouetted
against the dying sun, fat and blistering in senescence—the sun, not your shoulders—
and I fancy us sitting perched along the edge of the parched
basin that we half-remember was once the Atlantic Ocean, remember, before it
boiled away, transfigured into a cirrus slick of searing brume
which now renders the sky the worst kids’ color-by-number activity
in the long and illustrious history of bad kids’ color-by-number activities.
Color in boxes marked ‘1’ with slate. Color in boxes marked ‘2’ with asphalt.
‘3,’ gainsboro. Beneath stark gradients of gray we listen
to old ’50s rock and roll, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and when the relentless
bombardments of radiation have destroyed every
last recording we teach each other to stumble through
our favorite songs ourselves. You finally become an artist.
Finally, we both become artists. Among the ceramic loam
of every former pharmacy and pizza joint and in the dark places where the dust whispers
songs of five dollar foot-longs and thirty-one flavors of ice cream
we’ll fool around, and that’ll preoccupy us for a couple billion years.
Eventually the sun explodes, but that’s neither here nor there. Time goes on
and the universe increases immeasurably in scope
and we might discover, gradually, that we’ve grown;
you assure me that it’s because the forces binding our
atoms together have become steadily weaker, and even after
these countless trillions of conversations I still can’t get over
the way you say your “ums,” in “atom,” “wisdom,” “blossom,” “condom,” “maelstrom,”
how you manage to make them sound so earnest, so heartfelt, strangely,
and dwelling on that allows me to say, for a while, not yet
to what comes next: please, a little longer, before our matter
drifts so far and grows so diffuse that our bodies encompass
the totality of everything, and we encompass each other, too,
like a single image, clear and undistorted, seen through the lenses of binoculars.
posture
Today it’s like this: I am a pinata in the form of a celestial orrery,
fun-size Hershey’s bars and Smarties rolls stuffed into the womb of planets,
spinning through dizzying revolutions and retrogradations
relative to where you stand, a child blindfolded with a bat,
and it takes you several tries to get me to spill my guts out onto the floor.
Now you’re the girl from the anthology of spooky stories
who wears a crimson scarf around her neck
to conceal the evidence of her decapitation. Today it’s like this:
we are each something banal hidden beneath something beautiful. I want to stroke your cheek,
slide the belt out from the loops on your skirt, ask you how
nerve impulses travel up your spinal column to your brain
when the connection has been so indelibly severed. I want to ask you
if the electrochemical signals turn to fireworks
as they reach the disjuncture of your headlessness
and whether
if you allowed your head to slip off to the side
the fireworks would coalesce into distinct shapes in the night sky—
a smiling face, or Saturn, or a willow.
