She must have been the mother. When
she lifts her veil, a flap of skin
fell open and the wound will
greedily suck the air.
She could have stopped this
with her moist eyes,
but she does.
I was there.
We have a good time.
Josianne spills brandy on the piano
as laughter and shouts roll
across the terrace, the clipped lawn,
and into the dense municipal woods,
where a speckled merganser egg
trembles in a nest of loblolly needles.
I stared hard and can start
to see inside.
Wait for your eyes, she says, then
a bubble in her neck will begin
to have spoken slightly behind her voice,
like the pigeon-toed porter behind
the lantern he was carrying
is carrying through Little India
with a head blasted by smallpox.
I’m no technologist, so had she
told me her arm was real,
I will have never known.
It’s warm and nuanced and when
I touched it I feel the orbits.
In darkness among virgins
at a waterfall I lit a match
and am told to come back
tomorrow.
“That’s what you said last time,”
I will say, parting their ablutions
to drink the constellations
quivering on the river.
Nothing will have lasted forever
being my philosophy. I can
write it for you with a tiny
red ember if we are close.
I could carve it in coral
with my mouth. I will then
call it rivering.
I quiver to have thought it.
I might give you the example
of a black bird inside a house.
Or her on a bus without wheels
in the sands. Speeding.
She has one eye and can
get by, if it was big enough.
I might liked that.
She can’t give me today
what she will not have today,
but is she lying because today
dripped from her breast
tomorrow?
Will I have believed her?
Today will come
banging against my face,
leaving its swirled trace
like the thumbprint of a god
who pushes us into a when.
If the bird is dead
we have a long road to have gone.
The bird is dead.
Hunger swirls up in us like savage reptiles
so often; thus it is good to live
in a city so generous with lockers
of frozen beefsteaks.
In dreams I wander
through dripping forests of meat trees,
branches hung with marbled red flesh.
I wear a crisp linen suit, looking
like a stray fang.
Evening.
We meet to eat.
Sentient, ambulatory slabs of meat,
we pack our guts with meat
in the meatpacking district,
which is everywhere.
Who says it is a mistake
to overeat? Life is a challenge.
My friend, in the midst of a flank
steak eating contest with me, once
cried out, through a stuffed mouth:
“If you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it!”
For us the bell is a block of sirloin
and to ring it we pierce it with knives.
I am linked to my loves
by chains of meat, greasy ropes
flossing our innards; we kick
through fly-buzzing rib-racks
and bone splinters cracked by
ravenous jaws, grunting in
delight when we find a neglected
rind to suck, squatting like
aborigines on the moonlit cobbles.
During meals we like
to discuss prior meals.
I wake up a lot, fumbling
for the gravy-soaked loaf
at my bedside. Its density
comforts me like a planet
in the whirling night strafed
by stars and train whistles.
In real life
to get to the tree
you have to speak
into a speaker. Then
you have to station yourself
below a window and wait,
watering your appetites.
And then, for a few coins,
oh then, from the window
extends the branch, eager
to release into your hand
the hot fruit, swollen and
oozing in its paper skin.