43

Less joyful than it usually is.

 

The Goodness of the World, And the Sweetness

        

    There is no sorrow but loss. I lose nothing. I am no longer broke down by sorrow. I am afraid of goodbye, because goodbye is losing. And nothing comes back, anymore. I have perfected the art of loosing things. The cathedral in Prague. I no longer miss it. My mother. She is dead and I will not get her back. The night they burned my Bible and the ashes fell like snow. It burned for nine minutes and was done. I am learning to want this state called nothing. Loss is sorrow. I am learning this like a liturgy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing.

 

    I need you to believe that lack nothing. Do you hear? My world is made of this gravel path. The weeping mud, the thoughtless stones. Even though these solely are my world alone, I don't need them. There loss is nothing. If tomorrow I step shivering into the fog and this path has been replaced by the mouldering canals in Amsterdam or waist deep mud and shit, I won't mind. I have stopped minding.

 

    Please. Don't ask me to desire again. I used to understand yearning. Yearning is what one feels in the mountains in Austria, praying for the fire called Holy Ghost to descend on one. Yearning is what one feels for the warmth of your girls shoulder when she is out of the city on a university outing and one knows she'll be back on Sunday. There is none of that.

Desire is not the root of all evil. I have come to know at least that.

 

    When people are gone. I am learning not to mind. I used to believe that we were all essential cogs in some whirring productive machine called the world and also life. I had thought we together turned out loaves of crusty bread, babies, the curl of maple on the cradle my grandfather carved for me, potato dumplings, the ability to play chess. Now. I know this machine can run itself without any of us. I am not sure what it makes. We are no loss. The other day, I saw a man break another mans's ribcage by stepping casually on it, as easily as one climbs the stairs to go to church.

 

    Notice also means almost lost, or about to be. To notice is to take inventory of what exists without preparing oneself to lose it all. What exists in the world is nothing. A gravel path. Not even that. Once a thing exists, it leaves. Please don't ask me about the others. I want for nothing.

 

Forty Two makes me think of mr winkley

I'm alive and functioning and I feel okay. This means that I will write oversexed new gayer Greek myths

Like Pomona

What I really mean is that while you come to me like Vertumnus, in costumes to catch me, I am not so sure about the Pomona part (i'm irish, not greek). You wear nude Cuban stockings with black keyholes that lick your legs laviciously as you swagger towards me in the garden. I pretend I am interested in pruning the plum trees. I'm not. I imagine the ferny curlicules of hair between your legs beckoning, but something about the your pencil skirt and cocked hip makes me want to teach you something about hard work and responsibility and the kissing cousin closeness of delay and desire.

The next day, you try again. I'm in the vegetable patch where the smooth skin of the summer squash reminds me of eight year old golden Guatemalan girls, lined up neatly for chocolates outside the corner store. You present yourself in full femme array, your garter all steelgun gray and silk and snaps. The black patent leather of your heels is as slick as industry as the spikes sink gently into the compost. And, yes, I know I know I know you are the one I want to sleep under the earth with (even thought you drove me sleepless above it). I want our bones to moulder and the next gardener not to be able to tell whose fat feed these tomatoes. And I know I want to brush my fingertips across your cervix with the same prayerful intensity I feel for the first valiant asparagus of spring. But this, my sunshine, my springtime, my delight and my humus, darling blackberry bramble in my side, this will not do. You depart in a huff. You have a clump of horse manure on your right heel.

The leeks are almost grown before you try again. This time, you present yourself to me as some splendid hipster city nymph, artfully slouching on my seven hundred year old olive tree. The olives themselves are still as green as absinthe, a comparison I want to share with you, but I don't. The dragonfly wings behind your ears are a nice touch, as is the horseshoe branded into your neck with the vagueness of healed flesh and scars. It's turned upwards to catch all the luck and all the breaks, as you always do. The sides of your head are shaved and through the peach fuzz I can see FEM rendered in Sailor Jerry script. Maybe, maybe closer I think, but you are so caught up in lighting your cigarette in that way that illuminates all the studious hollows of your face (and while I sometimes think about watching you smoke in cafes in places that have cobblestone and cable and capitalism), I stick around just long enough to make sure you don't ash in the eggplant and split.

Beautiful, breakdown, best arrangement of carbon and hope and arrogance I've yet met- you need to try a little harder. You've left marks on me the same way baby pumpkins will take fingerprints in their flesh and grow them into portraits rendered through the body itself. My heart is not elusive. It is unsophisticated and greedy. Enough of this artifice. What I would really like to do is chain you to my body and sing for days and days and days.

So I will wait while you try again. You give me strapping Israeli solider in a camo bikini with boots I assume you got some skinny subby girl to black, Carmen in black lace and merengue ( I appreciate the lapdance, but the carrots need to come out of the ground so I leave) big girl butch in grey wool trousers and matching vest, Lolita in ankle socks and pennyloafers and before you flounce off, you make sure I notice you are not wearing any panties under your bubble skirt. You are about as subtle as an earthquake.

Finally, come one dying September sunset, you get it. I am pulling the last of the leeks when suddenly, here you are. You have finally understood the power of you nakedness, radiant trusting as a sapling. The hair between your legs is as downy as dill, and I imagine, just as soft. The bruises on the corona of your hipbones, the silvery stretchmarks between your legs, red spots, broken veins, I want to run my tongue over all of it. You are the fruit from an orchard that flooded last spring, a redwood cathedral in a forest that could build itself only after fire

You tell me: i want you on every hill in Lebanon, under every tree

How this telling of the story ends. Afterwards I leave your hands tied to the headboard Penelope grew for me out of willow. You are stretched long and languorous, a garden of delights on display. Your paleness on the river green moss. I feed you slices of mango. You take them from my fingers with great tenderness and care. The ripeness runs in rivulets and when I lick you clean, cannot tell one sweetness from the other.

I want this to be number 41

So I'll say it is.

The Consequences of New Albion

1.
We built between us a city.
You built the bridges that spanned me, the river that we both named Safety.
I want you to remember, delightful,
that I did not lay these cobblestones alone. You were beside me,
you were the one who suggested brick. You
taught me to lay grout by taking my fingers in yours
and running them down that smooth slick groove.
The pleasure gardens, as well, were yours.

2.
"To walk the city of New Albion was to understand what want will look like, after its been satiated. The couches at crosswalks, the small clean bathing pools in the lobby of every hotel and on the roof of every apartment building; the city made me want to rest in it. New Albion has always made me want to go home, where ever that is. I was born in Lancaster Maine, was schooled in Zaire, I've bought a house in Quebec, but New Albion, while it stood, was the only place I've ever been that made me fall asleep curled around building corners. It was that protected and settled and warm. You never needed sweaters, not in New Albion."

-"Disappeared Cities of the West Coast" By Samuel Marks

3.
Now.
I wake to walk alone.
The trees come apart in splinters when I touch them.
I should fix that.
Buildings calve like glaciers.
When I pick up the phone, I hear only a rustling of dried cicada shells.
The memory of this city's glory eats me in small, tender bites.

I'm sorry, I'm tired it's one and the same

This has been a year of surviving. Writing requires a certain joy from me and hope, both of which I have lacked this last year. I'm going to try again. Wish me luck

"Untitled": By Marilyn Hacker

You did say, need me less and I'll want you more.
I'm still shellshocked at needing anyone,
used to being used to it on my own.
It won't be me out on the tiles till four-
thirty, while you're in bed, willing the door
open with your need. You wanted her then,
more. Because you need to, I woke alone
in what's not yet our room, strewn, though, with your
guitar, shoes, notebook, socks, trousers enjambed
with mine. Half the world was sleeping it off
in every other bed under my roof.
I wish I had a roof over my bed
to pull down on my head when I feel damned
by wanting you so much it looks like need.

30, too tired for clever

An older one, with some editing. Homesick and lonely.

 

i've already given up on myself (once twice) but the third time is the charm

we stood on the hills in oakland and threw caution to the wind

but damn i've got a lousy arm

you used to tell stories about us versus the world but our silhouettes were never heroic

hunched shoulders messy hair angles of fear and exhaustion

(were you trying to tell me something?)

i miss when we used to lie on the floor and you would lay your head on my stomach and hum

breathless almost hesitant filth into my bellybutton

and i wish we had reached that point in the future where you would've driven all night just to meet me in the morning

(the sunrise was spectacular all burning carbon monoxide and carcinogens)

and sing me happy birthday happy happy birthday

off-key, but the beat would be perfect

i know you as a kind of perfect

 

because we are failures bound only by silent elevator rides crowded against the walls by the mass of our disappointments

because i can smell your body ripening into sweet age that is not for me to know and have

and because your nighttime noises in my memory keep me awake with the immovable ache of our distant proximity

-you turn the earth beneath my feet but
i keep still

it is as though you decided in a snit that movement never existed for me at all

(such exiles from the continuity of our reality can be found in every village, in basements, under bridges

they are not to be touched or marveled at

they are to be left alone and pitied)

and I don't regret any of this you-inflicted destruction

 

only that away from you is the only place left

and oh, oh

how i wish it wasn't.

Interludes: Other people’s poetry

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything, it's true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of your panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.

(missyoumissyoumissyouinwaysyoucan'tevenknow)

Interlude: Other people’s poetry

This is Nikki Rhodes, everyone. The best thing I've felt.

Best Beloved (I'm in the market for a new title for this btw)


If you burn enough people, you can squeeze
the ash into coal, the coal into diamonds.
We are carbon bodies; we will be.

If I were wealthy, darling, and I wanted
to keep you with me everywhere, here
is what I would do to you:

I would burn down your house with you in it,
you and your cats and your bottles and books.
I would burn it thoroughly. What didn't catch

I would leave hanging on strings
from the maple tree in your yard until
it was eaten by birds and sliced them through

like glass. The ashes and coal, I would push them
together so tightly they shone. I would compress you
into diamonds, you, your home,

and everything you know. I would wear
you on my neck and be beloved all the time. People
would say how beautiful you were but they

wouldn't even know the half.