The
Mystery of Stolen Fruit
The man with deep pockets
has a heart which
crumples like newspaper.
His boots crack ice even
when his neighbors sleep on
their porches, and heat licks
the avenue with tar, smoking.
Each of his eyes,
compressed into coal,
while the wine in his veins
hardens into rope which he
fashions into a noose.
He no longer sees
the streets for its trees and
billboards promoting
mouthwash. He
witnesses
a murder in some parallel
tableau where a yellow
glove nailed on stallion’s haunch is
the sole evidence.
His fingers search his pockets
for the key that might
open the door of smoke;
he fumbles for a thread
to pull and undo the seams. Until then,
a coolant the blue
of crushed water inoculates
night under his skin; slow
rain needles shut his eyes,
and a loaf of bread
grows stale by
hooves of the perennial goat.
The
Fifth Chamber Which Isn’t Within Him, But All Around
The man who listens to rain
opens his word like an umbrella, and inch
by inch, his slippers, knees, the top-
most hairs on his scalp
meld with shadow, dissipate like
smoke into smoke, or the prayer
of one mother amid the bell-clangs and
shrieks of a sinking ocean liner.
His heart has four chambers:
The First, a terrace with wasps
churring around a fruit bowl
of guava, mango, and peach atop
a wrought-iron garden table painted red.
The Second is locked shut. Chamber
number Three echoes with a dog
jaw-cracking a bone.
The Fourth
is where he sits on chair
in room with etiolated walls
beside unmade bed in which
he hasn’t slept for years.
Because
he doesn’t thirst
the deserts where camels litter
droppings the texture and length of eggplants.
He doesn’t peel nipples from a woman’s breasts.
He doesn’t open sealed envelopes slipped
between scales of the Cobra.
What he listens for is more patient
than half-life of Carbon: a sound
like sigh unraveled from a caterpillar’s fangs.
The pause between drops of rain,
sizzle of hot oil, a static which
crackles in air and opens door between
lightning and the breath it
takes to funnel this message
through the labyrinth of a sponge.
Reservoir
Hyena is talking to me
He’s praising the whiteness of bone
Not feathers or carrion scattered beside thorns
but stark & brittle savanna bone
I give him a coin and explain how
its value as ferry’s toll relies on
the progress of beetles digging
into black soil so that
they reach the chipped tooth of the first Word before
blaze of Dog-Days
Hyena thanks me
in perfunctory manner before
scurrying from dark wind
After a week of wandering
I arrive at the skull of a gazelle who warns me
about Hyena staining
his muzzle with flesh and steaming entrails while
vultures inscribe their circles in the blue heat above
the stiffening lemon grass
I offer the gazelle’s skull my blessings
alluding to the interstices between Divine & Human
Meat
as according to the quill of Saint Maximus
After month or lifetime
of searching I am facing Hyena once more
Hyena’s not as loquacious and has forgotten how to
cackle and yip
Savanna has been seared into desert
All is still
The dunes are penny-blond and the sky’s an azure which
would shatter ice
if there were ice to shatter among these sands
In my saddlebag I’ve a bottle and hunk of bread
though I’ve never galloped astride stallion or mare
Black bread snatched from clay oven and
purple wine from the same press and den where I shared
sleep
with a woman whose eyes shimmered like silvery fish
and whose
thighs both flitted from and welcomed my grip
I remember her language!
(Full of diphthongs, lizards, hammocks and laze at
noon!)
I break bread with Hyena
and drink my wine savoring the taste of twilight
as purple as this evening season
It
is this desert I shall call home I say and Hyena
with tongue as purple as richest wine
licks my face tastes my face and
lets cool my words on his palate of ambuscade and
chase
then recognizes me as the Saint whom
he had tested
and now obeys as heat does the staunchest carbonization
Birth,
After-Birth or Burial as Springtime
You can choose yet some things prevail:
octopus remains six arms & two legs,
cockroaches have already
won, cashing
in lottery tickets of
grime, protein, edible asbestos,
pistols, loaded with dice
and shrimp cocktails,
mug elevators that
descend & ascend endlessly,
every shovel digs up
bones,
stones prove sturdy roofs
for scorpions
while hummingbirds
have barfed the algebra
of pollen.
Thus:
doors
are busted the locks are picked and parrots crash-land
while
the weakest denizens,
purple
eyeballs caked with rheum, they genuflect and
kneel
before the tinsel bull…and yet
the bull’s
blind, deaf and rapacious.
Therefore:
let
inside you the accordions and the esplanade,
hear
music scratching from the
guitar
of the corner troubadour for he’s
Marcabru’s
great-great-greatest grandson
and he knows
the gig’s shot ….
Tune in to:
still functioning gall-bladder and alternator,
the impossible-to-deter mosquito and lunar sweat,
and baculum in the erect and giddy remaining blue whales,
and some wind when necessary (especially at
noon and beneath the Oaks speaking dialects of Autumn ) .
I
still see you / I taste you
(so
tart so bloody real)
in the individual tear you
shed just for me and housed in the corner of your pocket knife .
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