Two Vagrant Coyotes

talking once,

we glid by the reservoir—and two coyotes

pittered by with wide, competent eyes,

then sunk into the caliginous firs

like sugar in a vat of joe.

we grew close in darkness,

that’s why I hated your service in the D street Episcopal—

which all and every remember with great fondness

because the day was bright as hell,

and the photographs poxing the bulletin board

showed you polishing that soda-fountain grin

at ten, eighteen, and twenty-five.

the grin was a fib, I know,

because the man I knew

was voluptuous, scrappy,

and manly as hell,

nothing like the withered invertebrate I kissed

in the toothpaste-scent of the ICU,

you who all your life

reeked of cattle and rum.

I hate the nurse and mortician.

I should have done all their jobs.

swabbed myself

the grass stains from your knees

and sculptured with sweet-scented tonic your

final rambunctious hairs,

buried you when I wanted

and no moment earlier.

Embla's Daughter

the song wore down—the torches’ querulous pits

slumped into acquiescence.

the radio sputtered—

a movement began—

the doorway resolved the dark canker of your body

advancing with bulldog conviction

upon my unwary bivouac,

the questing snout and red jowls descending

and dispatching the feeble sentry

whose dagger merely ceremonial,

lacks the keenness to render warning persuasive.

to what resilience, what

barred, impregnable fastness

may I retreat

when you oyster me open,

and cleave

the innermost flesh?

I have tried to forget

the black chimney

of your single eye,

but there has been intervention

neither of time or love

enough.

I sit, I serve tea to friends

and they jest

of love and their wilted husbands.

I don’t talk

of your thick hot hand

your spit on my nose

and my old volkswagen thighs.

The Russian of Robertson Street

I don’t
mourn you the way
I used to,
I don’t

smell the same eleven oclock
lawns of those same
scattered houses,
their windows
like the bulky spill
of your foreign breasts—
their scuffed paint fluttering
in the sprinklers’ luminous chaff.

from osgood
came the sound of a train
clobbering the distance,
and you stretched your incandescent throat
from which
I’d so often drunk

as though thumbing open
a can of stars,
knowing that
its effervescent parts
were dead
before they reached my mouth.

Body

your body once,
I think,
was lean,
and hot as horse’s muscle.
I am certain of the way you moved,
your breasts like extrusions of fire.

today I saw you sitting in the sprinklers
at dawn,
the yellow light invading
your flabby peignoir.
the water on your gray face
filled the canyons and coulees,

and laved the skin red, foal-new.

I could tell then
you were pretty once,
with a sharp little nose and
eyes like
two dark little jockeys,

the taste of your skin
like the smell
of wet cedar.

Metal Heart

your phone rang and you answered it.
you spoke for a long time
and did not see
the shadowy shards of concrete,
disjuncted boxcars,
the gnarled silhouettes of cranes,
like stooped
Camels.

And behind:

the black ranks of mountains, dark scaffold of nightmare.
the dark throat of fog
advancing

across
the pearly bay
and my oily heart,
singing the
old world’s
iron hymn.

Seedling, Sapling

An old one, chanced upon during a search for editable material, and better than I thought.

the wet mouth I
could not discern
whether rain
rolling berry-like
into me or
your sugary lather
on my flesh.

nor differentiate
my red thighs
and the grass
curling soppy and jewel-like
around me, which
blood-thundering limb
yours or mine;

the long love-clustered bough
booming
with the deep sap-thrush,
bursting in the loam,
and the sound of wild sighs.

Transit (New Draft)

I let you have the window seat even
though
you know
how much I like the view
this time of day.
and
your head obscures
the firm rolling breast of the bay.

as we pass the place
you used to live
the light
on your face
is like a blue cluster of birds
shredding the ground
for seed;

I watch you
unearthed in short stabs,
the green bulbs
of my planting scattered
and devoured.

look at the light on those buildings
you say.
like they’re on fire.

Transit

I let you have the window seat even
though
you know
how much I like the view
this time of day.
and
your head obscures
the firm rolling breast of the bay.


the light
on your face
is like a blue cluster of birds
shredding the ground
for seed;


like handfuls of fire I said
holding your hands like two brown wrinkled children.

Midlands

beyond your porchlight’s
dull peel
I hunch
by your jade’s
white clumps
where the rain
claws out
the furious scents.

even if
beneath the birch
you clung
to me in the clinging
of your wet garb,
you would not feel
the funnel of cool water,
your breasts the aqueduct
to the navel’s
velvet curl—

you would not see
the buds breaking
their green crusts
in the dark—

not the moist flock
of droplets
in my hair;
the spicy loam.

only
the clinging
of the wet garb,
your clothes informing
your body of its shape.

January Hanging

He grapples
your body under the persimmons.
your hand remarks
his buttocks’ frenzied loaves.

I envy his ebullient strain
and your valiant
dissatisfaction, note
the narcoleptic
drift
of your eyes toward
the red muscular fruit
dangling in red fetal curls.

your eyes on the fleshy red buds,
and your thirst for them.

Premature

I couldn’t get us a table
at that place my dad recommended downtown
palo alto
tends to be a hopping place.
I looked around at the big suits leaning
gymnastlike on their tables strafing thirty dollar steaks.
I couldn’t buy you anything that good.

this was after we raided the garden
of rodin and his rude-figured limbs,
mouths without lips rising half-reptilian
as if from wombs of mud.
I took
a couple pictures of you,
I wish I’d taken them now instead,
I’ve got a better camera and know
a little better
what I’m doing.