Lux Mundi
At the same time
a redheaded woman
sits down beside me
on a vinyl stool
and begins her disquisition
on the cigaret/tobacco tax.
It’s transfixing, and systematic
it expands to incorporate the state
in all its untamed glory
City Gardens
the disused bar in which we sit
the hammered copper bracelets
on her forearms
found in a deserted bracelet factory
in Buenos Aires
my light
and lungs
which I assume by now are glowing
her voice precursor to a madness
the whole world must participate . . .
* * * * *
In this dream you walk
in the City of Younger
and Younger Women,
end of June. The slant
sunlight down the avenue
fires your profile
in a bankface: not without
a rehearsed calm
and angle, a way
you posit your jaw against
an hour. The city in this
hour between two stupors
slows, kneels down,
takes you in its underwater
buslight–
the faces break tame, timid.
Night falls in the industrial zone.
You ride in
silence to meet your friends
but when you arrive at the marina
they’re already wasted.
They try to eat but the chowder
falls from their mouths.
Everyone’s staggering around
repeating themselves, so
you go back to your
decrepit duplex with
a view of the river.
* * * * *
| All of yourself impostured in | this house: deferent, perceptibly slumped. |
| No domineering father, | you wake up | long buried in his cancer, |
| inheres, rather an intuition that | under an antique desk |
| the floodplain delivered up this house, | its wired and levers |
| then this house itself its resident. | looming like | Mornings: noise the joists make settling |
| is beyond your infant understanding- | a map of hell |
| muscle memory, not understood | |
| but ringing just the same | |
| the movement of | |
| in the detached room your heart’s become. | the river lights |
| Where, sure only of the life of your own words, | the wall |
| you affect an accent, gestate wildly. |
* * * * *
The river of the world
don’t do much either
to cheer one up.
The calves are driven
over the stone
bridge into a door
like a smoking mouth.
Downriver
the pumphouse
breathes out,
a rowboat asks,
the falls applaud.
Downriver
in the venerable Teatro Real
great plumes of smoke
go up from the gallery
into the spotlight,
black and white,
life affirming.
Into this
breath visible the mesmerist
inquires: Good People,
why do you kick like
a calf with its neck split?
How do you cry
with your throat opened?
Doesn’t this world persist
in thinking your true name,
and the coy arabess
as she steps into
the small train that leaves
for the country
at sundown?
* * * * *
At night I shamble down
the wide pine planks
laid end-to-end
on sucking mud
past the stockyard
into a “town”
razed and rebuilt
four times by fire
At night the murderous
policia proselytize
by an enormous pyre
rising from the plaza
but the woman in
her tan cravat seems . . .
heterodox
I feel her
through the mob–a slight
expansion in her ribcage–
because the night is tactile
and erotic
The imagination also
holds her up
ferocious at her cache
of subversive material
and antiquated clothing
beneath a portrait of William Barret Travis
I follow her down
Her wild swale of red hair
In the morning the two of us
commit adultery in the sea
* * * * *
I don’t know when it started.
I was a child, that’s all
I remember. The power of
our small courtyard–
its plums, thyme. The shrub that wept
when we caressed it.
My brother Sacha
blew in his enormous voice
for more delicious lychee.
We played dead among the statuary.
At night
the sky got dark
so we could sleep.
One day in a film
my stone boat waits for me.
The sea is calm, the sky is
vacant. The sea is calm
and transparent. I have been
waiting to take the deep air
into my lungs, to saturate them.
I raise the oar–
look, a porpoise. A cloud with the night behind it
that’s all I remember.
Like a child I come to tell you
how moved I was, and am.
* * * * *
Nothing has really changed
except the streets you go through
without walking, making noises
like a voice you haunt/invent
the empty streets. A honey
suckle’s fog impels you
through the rusty backstop
breathing it, the bleacher’s
grooved aluminum, acre of entropic elms.
A vague area
beyond the elms, with bramble, coalesces–
onset of the other regions of our future
where I see you every now and then
denuded in the claustrophobic heat
peering in, breathing my breath.