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Her voice comes out of her knees, her fingernails are full of sound, Birds are in her lungs, which gives her gargantuan flight, A florescence through ether waves, like ancestral Morse codes. Oriente province de Cuba her first steps. At nineteen she dismantled retinas— roosters blew themselves inside out, When she swayed by cathedrals they folded, guayacan trees fell to their knees, Mountains bowed with the contents for ajiaco. She filled the horizon with kerchiefs, gypsies danced behind her, Her bracelets were snakes, forces were captured in her gold chains, The moon was in her silver, there were reptiles stationed In her Afro-Siboney cheeks, there were in her Asian eyes Radars picking up the fingertips of the piano player— The language of the trumpet— black changos landing upon The shelf of her eyelids. She motioned in songs to live them. Her passion destroyed the container, She blew up into false promises, romantic lyrics tied her in knots, Broken into pieces of kisses, she knew it was “theater” That you offered, A landscape hanging in the museums of desire, Rows of guayava paste, stories that according To your point of view, salons of dried roses. Illusions. Her songs became the windows of the city, In the distance a hurt bellows from a bird locked in a radio. Classroom teacher of tropical children, reading to them native flora— A wind entered her and she flew to New York, eating the skyline, Bridges of electric lights, conduits to the house of the Saints. At the Jefferson Theater she melted the microphone Into liquid mercury, and an ambulance had to Get her off the stage. She embodied in gowns, capes, dresses, necklaces, bonnets, Velvets, suedes, diamond-studded, flowers, sequins, All through which she wanted to eat herself She salvaged us all, but took the radiation. Each time she sang she crossed the sea. From the Bronx she went back to Cuba, Adrift on the sails of a song.

Though it’s all too clear how unimpressed you are by a cri de cœur and wafting away unhugged is from your perspective de rigueur of schemes to rendezvous with you I’m still a restless entrepreneur The thought of you converts my favorite main dishes into hors d’oeuvres My addiction to the tingling you induce is a fait accompli Each drifting day is another page in the secret book whose d é nouement never arrives, while your fleeting glances lock me into this unfinishable roman à clef The idea that any one remembered moment at a party or picnic was my sole forever lost chance to touch you must be a cul de sac When my projects for a prudent career try to stand up your voice remembered administers the coup de grâce and my mélange of bright ideas becomes a mere potpourri How I would love to believe this dance is a folie à deux The way you stride across Memorial Drive is a tour de force but glimpses across traffic make a paper-thin raison d’être Your recent exit is implicit in many a mise en scène It’s as if you heard me approaching for a tête à tête and you slipped into the elevator with your tall boots and sangfroid Always you get to reculer and I never seem to mieux sauter— Still I will keep an eye out for you on every rez-de-chaussée.

I almost insist on the words as doors left swinging from the force no one saw A wrap around hotel with empty courtyard boarded up, sprayed white Hiding Out. Nick is too kind two black and slowly moving marbles against flesh Sara, a model of containment Brian is luminous (all eyes) twin fires beyond the pit that only crackles green brighter than the edges of the neon lining Fairfax Family Books The Films of Robert Blake We score a trim ocean blue windbreaker and Dinosaurs of the Land, Sea & Air I slipped away from the bench when they brought the car around My black hobo sack abandoned and thought a bomb. I was seamlessly high on my air heels and driven away to where the camera could not follow 8-4-13

Love is the kindest expression of absence— Or else is a day by the river, in which by motion it becomes clear— there have been in an hour an infinite train of rivers,& which did you want to see? One comes slowly to realize there is no evading things (the heart will have its way, though its will go unfulfilled), & there is no shame in this. The pleasures in this world— soft breeze, soft thighs, a bit of music, words that make a good sound— suggest when taken whole that the thing the body longs for is not & never has been some petite mort, a true thing known to grass & the elderly man with a kind word in greeting. And the woman saying that she is about to come, as in going to arrive— at last to fill the body held so long by stewards in her name.

In the seam between day and night, wind ruts the dirt road and ruffles the milky way of dandelions. The young among them are greasy gold and urgent, while the old are balanced between growth and that burst past growing—annihilation, culmination of a beginning each has always been ending toward, admitting more and more space, until what's left is beyond color, a bleary truss of matter and air. Shocked accomplice of the rounding light, how you tremble in the stretch of your death, which is like all deaths, geometric with seed. Wind-swimmer, eye-floater, white nightgowned grandmother dancing your platelets on the head of this pin, can you show me how to wish, how to gather and scatter this single hooped breath?

She expects nothing but to witness our lives and find kindness and why shouldn’t she but for the boiling water my partner spills on my arm and the FUCK'S SAKE that escapes my mouth now the snout of the spitting mammal in me. If there’s a craft to the failing of simple expectations, I have mastered it and majestically—but when there’s something that must be said, it must be said, Lispector says of a woman entering an empty room and finding a version of herself so dark it makes her pause and really see it, how she’s no better than the cockroach in her closet and so she eats it.

Even the bosses are sleeping late in the dusty light of September. The parking lot’s empty and no one cares. No one unloads a ladder, steps on the gas or starts up the big machines in the shop, sanding and grinding, cutting and binding. No one lays a flat bead of flux over a metal seam or lowers the steel forks from a tailgate. Shadows gather inside the sleeve of the empty thermos beside the sink, the bells go still by the channel buoy, the wind lies down in the west, the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines turning a little, this way and that.

So I say to my friend at the day job “We are bored sometimes, and scented like realtors but if everyone’s equally disconsolate under labor’s gooey caul then nuance can be stitched more vividly to secrets lodged inside of everyone until it becomes your own country with highways that carry you silently past the jetty which, from their heavy drinking, the case managers come out to failing to be stable and badly attempting to sing” We’re pushing our barques past the mansions as I say this, near the dwellings of persons whose lives have no mooring outside the slow fact of our passing— huddled arrogantly under their air-conditioning they want us to be users moved by advertisers enticing the constituency to join them and sit there and weep But we’re too busy pulling toward centers where workers assemble. While time for them is a melody played at long intervals across condominiums we who are the power know our systems so much better now come to this hour outside it now give it new form on guitar

pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter. I’m a hog for you baby,I can’t get enough go the wolfish crooner. the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down in twig rapine. let me in, let me in. no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement: his deadeye bigger than his brick house. Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose, whose greedy void like a whorehouse full of empties getting full. can’t get enough! rumored Stagger would root through pussy to plumb a fat boy. here piggy! what Lee see he seize. manful, ham-fisted. sorry Billy, your name mud and who love dirt like swine? they get in it like a straw house. it’ll be cold out before Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls. he got down. he get dirty.

Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely, As thou pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy— Which is the poison to poison her, prithee? He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here. Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder,—I am not in haste! Better sit thus and observe thy strange things, Than go where men wait me and dance at the King’s. That in the mortar—you call it a gum? Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come! And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue, Sure to taste sweetly,—is that poison too? Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures, What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures! To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket! Soon, at the King’s, a mere lozenge to give And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live! But to light a pastile, and Elise, with her head And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead! Quick—is it finished? The colour’s too grim! Why not soft like the phial’s, enticing and dim? Let it brighten her drink, let her turn it and stir, And try it and taste, ere she fix and prefer! What a drop! She’s not little, no minion like me— That’s why she ensnared him: this never will free The soul from those masculine eyes,—say, “no!” To that pulse’s magnificent come-and-go. For only last night, as they whispered, I brought My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall, Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all! Not that I bid you spare her the pain! Let death be felt and the proof remain; Brand, burn up, bite into its grace— He is sure to remember her dying face! Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose; It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close: The delicate droplet, my whole fortune’s fee— If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me? Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill, You may kiss me, old man, on my mouth if you will! But brush this dust off me, lest horror it brings Ere I know it—next moment I dance at the King’s!