MAYBE LOVE

The watering villa begins in China.

There, where the stream is like a flower

placed upon the absence of water.

It rolls, like a song, unfolding,

discovering itself, like a plaintain of light.

Shrouded in the mist of casual things,

and the decorations of deluded wood.

Inside the shop, the players arranged

themselves for this fairy tale—

but one, the saccharin type,

vowed for his final voyage

a map of that would trace the palms

of dead lover’s hands.

That would be nice, I suppose.

But suppose in the images of spring nudes,

in the passing gallantry of bootlessness and all,

if there was another way around the peninsula,

an inlet of jet, like oily color set

under the dampness of masks, and lamps, and night.

That would be another way to speak, shadow.

You can’t always speak in indigo.

You have to have another room to broker in.

The politics of desire require a laundry space,

a kind of personal inventory, where the names

can be bleached from the patina, and moss,

where rust can collect its dubious memory.

And who are you, dry one? I had to ask.

I have known you for about a dozen falls.

The wreckage of horses in paintings.

The sound of crackling lindens and lanes.

Oddly enough, the city too was all about it.

Scenes of teenage cellars and booming shopping.

The teacup, enamelled with the tiny sea—

the trusty messages that literally scissored air.

One was come back soon. And another:

we we should meet some day.

JULY 2009

DEATH IN THE VINEYARD

We begin with the question that begins us,

like a farce of rooms in the park,

the diffidence oblique, the cistern pattern

of pushed welcome, then irritation.

Preaccidental, the darkness is muffed

with some jolly time, skimpering down blocks

we have the clef to, before stuttering home.

A burrito will do, while waiting for the results,

pleasantly immersed in a cornery hole,

gazing at the blank manila envelope of the sun,

thumbing through a book on spared hogfish.

And in the glissando of hooked crowds, stool

pigeons and the same, amid buzzing limbs,

doesn’t something shimmer forth indirectly,

mute and pausing to the daily soundtrack,

like a ribbon of a monk’s costume (stowed)?

Call it Asteroid X, splittable and unpostulated.

Like a childhood bride bargaining down alleys,

her hair a mixture of stiff lettuce and lush snow.

Soon, sweat can do something odd, your brow

crenellated like a weak fortress, a puffed sog.

Light scissors the checkmate. Pong water drips.

And from one pinhole comes the anodyne,

and from another the merciless vantage point

of seeing the person you would love beg off,

and skitter away. The caseworm is as it must.

Concussional and overlarge, errands rehearse

the patio in the sky where you have to just kick

back and stare at tomes and treatises on gorilla

trysts, nefarious splendor, baking soda, cornpies.

There was so much we had to offer you, they

say, the actors, almost, as if aligned for sheerness.

Meanwhile, the macadam’s unappalled and crisp.

JULY 2009