Thread Count

I feel the urging
of your canescent body,
and through the fungus of dream
know again
that these to me will
be your lastly uttered sounds.

Exeunt Players

I uncurl the decimate white frame
you keep skinnied
to land parts
and grit my jaw
at the sallow belly lumped
below your
ribs,

ruck up the waxen
hips to the
pale moan
complaining my stubble
is scratchy against the
thighs shyly
bulging the blow-up mattress;

until you sit up,
your collarbone emerging from your breast
like a willow root swelling from dry grass—
you say you are a virgin
in a voice that is angry.

I give your body
clothes for sleep.
a white undershirt
and blue shiny athletic shorts—a poor joke, I know,
because you played soccer when
you were three
and stopped
when the boys got bigger than you.

The October

your skin
like a pale pat of butter
glows by the sheer
and pretends
not to wait
for my battered knife.

you stand in the kitchen for two days
with bleeding joints;
two glasses of milk three quarters full,
with bubbles at the surface,
and a wet white smear
on the rim
where your lips
have been.

after a time you
leave things where they are,
lie on the couch
and clutch at a man for a while,
soaping away
your body’s
acrid filament.

after his chlorides
your bulbs, burnished, peachlike glow.
you feel voluptuous and desirable,
if not healthy, again.
you pour the milk away,
being rubbery
and bad,
and wash the glasses
with hands
seeming
to grow old
in the water.

Slit Wrist

you set the hot skillets
down
and look at me
as if
a good meal and
your sweet brown smile
could cull
from me the parts
which do not answer
the egalitarian trumpet
of love.

I scrub the plates
all the while your frothy
devoted breath
on the back of my neck
until I rush
to the porch

and lean on the rail
thinking of other lovers for a while.
night rises in
a multitude of white roundnesses,
but I know
I owe you too much
to really love
you now.

Harvest Chaff

you were by
the silos, which were full of rice,
that year.

it took you a long time to talk, like always,
you kept rubbing your eyes
and elbows
while I stared busily
at something else like a man
waiting for his wife
to pick a purse.

I rolled soggy pocket lint
between my fingers until
you left.
your green corolla fled between
the rice ponds’ silver guts.

I figured I’d pick up the truck
tomorrow,
and got back that night
shiny and mosquito-bitten,
my breath gaspy
and bright.

Observer

as we kissed I noticed
the dewlike snap
of our lips was not
caused by their
union

but by their parting,
and not by
your lips against mine,
but
the soft friction

of each pair, alone.

Summer Insects

now I know
why I didn’t call you:

ten minutes—
I was quiet so you’d have to
lean into the phone
and each syllable would
sound
exquisitely chosen,
but I can’t say
I meant
much
of it.

a fly scrapes its legs
on the patio table
and while you mew
about work and your mother
a sprinkler
swelters the grass.
I wonder how
I have begun
to sweat
without doing
anything.

Moreno

in the beginning void
like a hunch of black shoulders;
then
like the whisper of blood in cavernous places
your mountainous voice
before which I was
an unformed thing.


your feathery body in my ear
saturday mornings
as you rest from
gorgeous labours, a white throat
upon my bulkish breasts
and the fast blood within
oh
slow,
the yellow crest
of winter.


but
sleeping on the bank
in the cadillac and sweat
in my clefts and yours,
drops like wolves’ eyes
in the silvered wood,
the river white with joy,

I look
and see in your artful slouch
the love I am to have
of you,


my arms cupping my woman’s body
my nails in my thighs
on the orange carpet
a black tuft of your hair
a dark boatman
sailing a tributary of blood.

ASPIRATION

I put down my head
to ignore you,

lingering always
like a beetle
moon
scaling
(heard but not seen always
like the hovering snitch of rat’s foots;

the foamy blood
dribbing at my black lips;
juices drying
in my cylindrical eye,

my love for you like
a dog with
its dying
head stuck in a pipe,
rasping starvation).

I put down my head.

God Was In Love

squirming like the licentious ease
of my fingers in
your skull’s red roots,
the industrial murk
of your
body
like the urban sway
of bridges in the whispered air.

in their gray shadows
the jacarandas
scrape the fog
for purple arms
and keen,
keen.

Derelict

the morning air like a white sinew
I shuffle with bare chest
to the yard
where the aphid-tattered roses
are not
the mewls of your studded skin;


rather,
summer mornings are gluttonous
with bug-howls but
require nothing
of me—
the dew-jangle merely
cool under my toenails and wet
white beads ignorant
of
the mountainous lust
behind the window
muttering.

Wirra

I am half-deaf

of my own din;

half-dead of drowning

the

remnant of

my love

wrist deep

in your eye socket.

Memory-monger

your streetlamp reveals

nextdoor
the orange bloodswollen
dancers
with grunting
ears,

the moon’s wrinkled breast
sagging into
my wet
cheek; and

by the sidewalk
those tongue-tinctured
blooms
like
red
fingertips.

Love Chant of the Wild God

under a chain of jagged stars
with gray bent filaments
I have washed myself with Shaol's sweat,

listening to
a starve-ribbed god throwing out red limbs
and humming low
a sappy tune.

A Change is Gonna Come

slouched vertebrae
of emaciate beast:
my long blue ridge
of knuckles
cramping toward the evening sill
and
its slow
light;

like a lurching horizon train,
this restless tongue
dabbling the red spread
inflating beneath my warm
cratered cheek,
a stubborn,
inevitable flow
glimming in the
slow
light,

and the air whistling cool
through the
moist hole in this congealing flesh,
the wet
powder-spotted skin
flapping: a
banner
celebrating
the human capacity to effect
change.

Ego Gas

morning
the thickchested bellowing of trees
trumpeted me.

your body’s loudness
is for me.

the sharp rain
like the smell of a thousand futile blooms—
redolent
unto me.

the mighty howls
of engines—
copious glorious fleshy metallic keenings
for the pale bulging salty grist
of me.

Brownsville Grave Amid the Pines

I had held hopes
you’d meet me here.

after standing wet awhile
with
black-keeled crows
raking
the blue-veined fog

we’d have slugged
down the gravel road

to
the usual milkshakes,
our feet placing
the sounds of stones between our voices.

Angeles

were I anywhere
else
the sea winds
would’ve come in by now,
coughing
through trees
like an old man pruning.

like an eyeless rat instead
the brown air scrapes
the belvedere’s balustrade,
titters past me into
the chamber groping
for sweets.
I turn to follow
humming low

a hoyden to bring you satisfaction
a shy lass to drive you mad

and find you delectably unmoved,
two breasts steaming like dawn snow
(and perching there
two red-flecked grackles in the snow).

Darling, I shall winter here;
in these shaded vales shall I encamp with all my arms,
and once satisfaction
I have gained,
shall campaign with equal fervor
elsewhere.

Theurgy

the hair on your shoulder is
wet grackles on the snowy hill
my fingers sucking the crystal air and
white
sun
sluicing our

hurtful stillnesses;

the red flush of my spine’s cup,

the nude retreat
of my defeat swagger,

the wet swathes of molecules
drifting
absurdly upward.

Stroke

the red ambulance snout pugs through the kitchen window
your limbs thump to the vanmorrison radio.

for all that I have sung shower-ditties in your wet ears and hoisted
up our squealing dollops and
sunk in you the long tooth of love,
here now oh your crystalline drool is
matting the hairs on my arm.