brows into fingertips
and as she
tugs each digit
the leather tube
suctions flat and
the bottom of
the glove cinches
a cuff around
her thumb-bone
where it angles
into her wrist.
So, the glove,
now, looks like
skin unraveled from
the spokes of
her fingers, or
a bat’s wing
as it catches
wind and launches
from the bone’s
knuckly masthead. Then,
freeing the butt
of her palm
from the glove,
she flexes her
hand’s muscly cheeks
together, skin compressed
so—folded, gullying—
love lines root
in her palm
(the likes only
her lover knew
from slipping on
the bike gloves
she keeps hidden
in the bureau’s
top drawer, leather
wilted and milky
from their smallish
hands over-fingering
the throttle’s stiff,
rubber grip). With
her fingers relaxed
she withdraws her
dewy hand from
the glove’s untapered
back end, spray
of polyester hairs
and must filling
the space between
her face and
her slick skin.
Then, she sets
the gloves down
open ends against
the table where
they stand-up,
each empty nook
having trapped just
enough air for
the bulbs of
skin to appear
natural and improbable
as found sculpture.
How much like
a pianist’s utensils
the hands trained
to relax into
near perfect cradles
when she wants
to believe that
the leather’s briefed
by her unmannered
or, somehow, unrehearsed
touching. Still warm,
the gloves pose
like their very
own living tissues
keep them up,
the molded leather
surrendering the rest
of her hands’
heat until gloves
gone perfectly cool
harden in place.
REVENANT GLADNESS
—for Karina
The world has sallied forth. Unmeasured, fumigated with acumen,
swearing I heard it. I heard it as branch hears its own knobs bear wind, and with it…
And I saw your eyes climb. Them and your own limbs needle spaces
laid bare in trees’ winter’s leaf drift, into their passages, little bony cups
the canaling of your ears produce their own echo, What was, is, will be
Worn against the newest weather? In the newest city you return to?
Its eloquence forced upon us the way the air frequents the prongs of
a feather, to underscore as frugal, unspeakable knowledge—how I ask (hardly knowing you),
Darling, when you name an unbearable truth, what do you find yourself
undernaming?
A shiver of false fire, the livery of a place setting beside bowls
of swollen porcelain, justness, air inside our lungs
warmed us stupidly, and the needles lay about bored by hearts gauged to
get stuck against each other needlelessly. Ay que naca,
you say when I ask you, What is the translation for “sin needles” (adverbio)?
On the floor and on the pillows, your name was like something laid before a doorway a prelude to travel, rose petals, nickels, grains of rice
that bloat swallows’ bellies—too full and too, overflowingly
There also against diminishment. These days diminishment and appearance
aren’t opposites—I remind—as much as they are opponents (distant, enemy cousins arriving at bookends of a family barbecue).
And I said it to tear the firmament freshly, like stars plucked from constellations
to bring her eyes’ confusion over forgetting; your top lip against your bottom
one in opposing operations. No, not absolutely unlike when words
turn against their truths. The phases of the moon molt the shells off
the crab’s back, wax and wane him till he’s limp-spined, his all-jelly insides
like traitors. Gaze and know my face before waking ruins the fog of my actual dream-dusted face!
Come back to the sunshine now rambling
Over the occasion like a mute apology for coming home exactly as I’d promised,
gripping green-shooted, leafyparts of beets I’d promised, purple knotted artery
talking from my fists. You’re on my lap, pounding my chest,
asking for forgiveness for accepting the part of lover who wants me, her, her love
to keep coming back in the first place.
We are near each other is what we say, and what you know I promise to feel
In the gathered promise of a girl who swirls her coffee before she drinks it,
who dives into a pool eyes open, first,
Who remembers the city as a transparent bride,
Her long hand reaching out of danger to find refuge in your bridle of echoey, black hair.
CORAZÓN COMO UN RELOJ
Los surcos en el sofá azul hacen tic tac al tiempo de las reverberaciones de sus caderas.
Los puntos en el techo de yeso esperan, pacientes como trampas para osos.
En la sala, el calor se hace penachos desde las costillas del radiador.
Afuera, ella se escucha mientras que se viene. Los granos brilliantes de arena, paso a paso, se suben por a sus pies.
Cuando ella está relajada, el techo hace clic. Cada minuto, se sueltan los muelles.
Revuelve su cara de la cuchara por su taza de café, y el poste se calienta, luego le calienta la mano.
Bajo los colmillos del techo. Bajo el tejado. Bajo las techumbres arcillosas que la abruman, ladrillos rojos y pesados.
Intenta apagarlo, pero no se mueve el mecanismo. La juntura brilla con una patina azul de musgo.
Afuera, una estrella fugaz graba surcos azules por el canto del cielo.
Las válvulas resuenan con el tintinear de los gases calurosos por los escapes.
Una vez, esperó a unas caderas para calentar los cojines a su lado. Ahora, ella arde. Ahora, se hincha.
En la cara del reloj, una mano da vueltas mientras—como si bebiera lengüetadas—la otra mano tiembla inmóvil.
Una pastilla fría y blanca para cuando se hincha el corazón.
Bajo el cielo azul azul. Bajo el vapor que se sube a las nubes, y se derrama que moja el paisaje como un suave detergente. Bajo el frío cielo diluido bajo las estrellas. Bajo el camino vago del satélite que desholleja fotos de la luz, se rompe la distancia como un trozo de piel.
HEART LIKE A CLOCK
The groove in the blue couch ticks with the reverberations of her hips.
The points in the ceiling plaster wait, patient as bear traps.
Outside, she can hear herself coming. The glassy kernels of sand, each step, grovel up her foot.
In the living room, heat plumes from the radiator’s brass ribs.
While she lies there, the ceiling clicks off the minutes, loosening its springs.
She turns the spoon-face through the coffee, and the metal post heats through, heating her hand.
Beneath the ceiling fangs. Beneath the roof. Beneath the clay shingles bearing down, red and heavy as bricks.
The spoon rings the porcelain like heat ringing the radiator’s gut.
She tries to turn it off, but the knob won’t budge, the joint sparkled with a mossy-blue patina.
Outside, a shooting star etches a blue groove into the tune of the sky.
The gasses through the heating valves clanging through the traps.
Once, she waited for a set of hips to heat the cushions, next to hers. Now, she smolders there. Now, swells.
On the clock-face, one hand laps around the dial while the other quivers still.
A cool, white pill on the counter for when her heart bells.
Beneath the blue blue sky. Beneath the vapor hoisting itself up into clouds, and spilling over, dousing the landscape like a smoothing detergent. Beneath the cool, diluted heavens beneath the stars. Beneath the random course of a satellite eeking photos out of light, shearing the distance that’s a patch of skin.
REAR WINDOW
We talk on the phone.
My foot in a cast in Heather Green’s window.
A single mole climbs the eye of the big toenail.
A toenail that is porous and slick as cornea.
At night while I sleep, the mole slowly creeps
away from me, from the big toe’s lunula.
This morning, the sky is wide and translucent.
It is as blue as porcelain as a bathroom sink.
We talk on the phone. Heather Green has packed her things,
dragged them to Adam’s and left me this window.
Heather Green: her name is a cortex of modification,
a plural green followed by a veritable one.
When she leaves, I miss her intensity.
So, I sit with my foot in a cast in her window and smoke.
The window is a movie screen I compose before me.
In the proximal foreground, yes, the windowsill, the smoke.
Toes poke out of a cast set on the sill tipsy as a gift-shop Devil’s Ivy.
Behind the cast sits two trees, a street, parked cars,
a grade-school building made of brick and windowpanes.
One of the trees accumulates leaves
while the other loses them to an April frost.
We talk on the phone.
In an instant, the leaves have grown old
and their leaf veins pierce their own fragile skin,
tips of those veins now shriveled and thorny.
As he fades the old man watches his fingernails
grow backwards into his hands.
When he scratches he closes his eyes.
The horror of his horns topples the buck.
A bird bathes in dust to wash off the bugs.
We talk on the phone.
The green leaves against the sky were liquid yesterday.
I said, Yesterday, they were a suspension but still liquid, staving off grief.
Today, the curds pulled back from the whey.
We talk on the phone and just like the film,
the leaves die right before my very own eyes.
A blonde is sent to investigate.
My toes curl when the Plains wind casts dust
through the rungs of the empty tree.
Wind, the likely murderess, her blue glances distressing every branch.
the days before I could stagger from bed.
I went to crutches, one leg, and stuttered before you.
The hammer of a metronome shuddering at one end.
Nights, you cast my leg in plastic bags and used a bowl to bathe me.
I watched light peal from the porcelain.
Dust spangled my reflection you bent with a fist
you made wringing the soap from the foamy washcloth.
Before there was a need for me to talk, for me to even ask,
there was the smoking afterwards of your hands.
There was a wind, there was dust,
and there was the window you had already shut.
There was sweat you drowned in the milky tub.
There was hunger, eggshells hulled-out on the sill.
I ate when you said I was hungry.
I drank because you held a glass up to my lips.
I slept because you lay down beside me.
I dreamt because you were gorgeous and I was dreamy, you said.
I cried because there was ache, and because of you
on the phone there is so much more of the gorgeous ache.
In the mornings, you dressed and redressed, knotting
the silky curtains in the windows when you finished.
When we kissed, brick-ends of the tenement started to echo.
O, we talk on the phone!
Outside a chainsaw’s teeth devour the skin
of the faded tree, the wheels of its gut, rings of moonlight.
The reappearance of Heather Green is imminent.
On the phone, she talks about orange-blossom-flavored
tarts she leaves cooling in Adam’s window.
From yolk an iodine-soaked appendage is scheduled
to be birthed from the silky insides of my cast.
Quiet as an egg we end without talking.
A new leg to grow back where the cast finally quits
and our good friends, the toes, cork off the ends.
I remember well the well where I drew water.
—Loretta Lynn
HOUSE
1.
Everybody lives in a house. The same house but with different trees. Each house finishes at the roof, with a chimney, and antenna for feeding pictures into the TV. Inside is a living room with a wooden floor, or maybe some carpet. And outside, grass sits in the yard thick as carpet. Every house has two or more beds, depending on how many children, or how many relatives live there, how big the beds are. There’s also a kitchen, a bathroom, and a place beside the grass to park the car.
A house has houses all around it. You can drive on a street between the houses until you reach the highway, or into the next town Arlington, Virginia, where houses are dotted between Miller’s Music Spot and Whitey’s Broasted Chicken Restaurant. In Arlington people sit on their steps outside of their houses, or on folding chairs along their small grassy carpets. And I say, “Look at the people in those houses,” and my father says, “Those aren’t houses, Sweetie. They’re shacks.”
2.
House is a five-letter word. It is pronounced /aus/, /aüs/, or /aüz/.
Looking at these phonetic spellings, you’d probably say, But wait! What have you done with my ‘h’? Where has that chimneystack, cleft of a letter gone to?
And, Nowhere, I say. Nowhere, trying to comfort you. ‘h’ is breathed, not said. A change of direction. A thread of air pulled up your windpipe, expulsion from the gut and lungs. Oh! Oh ‘h’! I say, you make health out of wealth, house of a louse, a home of Rome—just conceiving it. The heart and the earth—by the way the wind blows.
3.
I say the word house and a beautiful image stirs in your head. Like this, House. And then poof! The beautiful image stirring in your head. Yes, how beautiful it is with its chimney and windows and front door lowing. How wonderful to house such a beautiful house in your head. How wonderful and immaterial to be a sketch in a bubble that flutters inside you!
4.
Once the word house sentenced, “There was a brick house on Macon Avenue.” And whenever those words sentenced together, sounds soaked like a bruise, black and blue between them. And though sounds dousing one another wasn’t anything new, nor injured no word in particular, still words—as they were known to do—blamed this word and that for their ruin.
Avenue: “Macon, your ‘n’ is leaving ink clouds, my ‘A’ dyed blue.”
Macon: “Get over it, Avenue. Even capitalized you’re common.”
The two words nubbed
on, ‘n’ bleeding across the dignified Avenue, while house stood silent—never mind brick leeching the space between them with color. When one day, Macon pitted them against each other.
Macon: “House, have you noticed your stomach growing wider? The round sounds of house filling the mouth whenever you two are mentioned together.”
And house was confused. Or just uncommonly distraught when she faced up to brick to ask her:
House: “Brick. Do you notice I’m hardly myself? Just a mass of round sounds. An ‘ouse when I sit to one side of you.”
Brick: “House, don’t blow your stack. Your head’s in the clouds again.”
House, yet more confused and not as well-mannered as everyone thinks—she’s often mistaken for home, her cousin, known as a charming host who throws great parties—chewed out words she’d later regret.
House: “Brick house, they say about us. Brick house. My ‘h’ always trampled by the static ‘k’ makes grinding from the mouth.”
But brash ‘k’ shot up before ‘bri-’ could stop her.
‘k’: “Look here, /-k’ouse/. Your ‘h’ is a foolish place-holder. For ‘k’ was all friction, and knew not of the ebbs in clausal frailty.
‘k’: “You know, house, this sentence can sentence without you.” As the other sounds begged ‘k’ not to, she finished it.
‘k’: “There was a brick on Macon Avenue.”
So house was gone, a drifter blowing sentence-to-sentence, ‘k’-job to ‘k’job—her specialization. From “a trick house for catching mice and small pests,” to the first drafts of “Bleak House” before the typesetting, to odd jobs at “the smoke house,” “the break house,” “the steak house one must never return to…”
Then house, broken, wandered to other sentence, sound-combinations. “We should go to your house,” depressed ‘h’ to a gurgle, next to the rasping and passive-aggressive ‘r,’ who claimed her pal’s,’ “Does the work of you, house, and still more.” In “The green house on the left,” green was full of advice at the bar.