Eileen Myles

Roads around mountains cause we can’t drive through That’s Poetry to Me.

Now the pink is in the water its wavy edges celebrated by cars & guys with hands in pockets staring out. A woman chewing gum by the window of the train. Which heaves its accordion on & we move. They call it choo-choo because of the faint chooing sound as it starts. It's twee too & dit dit dit eel & screech. All this as the colors change. The buildings they bothered to paint white are pink like someone's awful socks were mistakenly washed. Who owns this insidious red. The trees are black cause that's where the green goes. The girl who chews has fanned her fingers out below the glass and I long to stare at them. To count them one by one as the wires slip by. It's the sultriness, the smokey approach of the loss of light that I love. The homosexual lilac comes & it's ours & everyone like us. The bright compartment of white lights & gleaming flip top & yawns rage on. Outside the Hudson River queerness tools on my brain like a hopeless little wallet of feeling. A clear swipe to night. Everyone in my compartment is tearing now. It's true, I heard two sheets at once get torn to pluck a brownie out. Its smell oozes, & the other one, god knows whose—to park her gum? Her hands are holding her head, my silent partner's & she's sleeping (deep in my gaze.) I look at her knees, the wrinkled foot just above the heel, a yellowish unmoody pink. The trees crowd the house & finally we go fast finally it's not so warm on the train & boats are sitting on purple sand the mountains are bland & blue a woman's sigh is falling off, from on high and into her body. My partner's knees sway. Someone says Proust. Or was it Bruce. The train is rough. Cutting through sweetness every night. I think "time." Then "cargo."

I’m overcome by the cruelty of nature no I mean I’m with it. And each little capacity it has can’t be transferred I mean a spruce can’t give its oils to you can it. But that’s how it grows in the ab sence of technology my thoughts grow. My thoughts grow among trees but I don’t help them though I’m for them. I’m for my dog & inci dentally I feed her but I don’t see her much. Joe does. Joe is my friend & also a dog father I don’t help mountains Mountains help me I know the planet is old & splashy sleep helps me. Time helps me. My mother helped me. And now she is gone. She also hurt me so it’s good that she’s gone. I can grow different in the day or three decades in which I’ve got left I can grow toward the mountains sit in solidarity with prisoners or go to jail. I’m not joking I can push different. I want to say something about my cunt. Because that’s what you ask. But I am alone. No mother no phone just a notebook & a cunt & my thoughts. I don’t even think my thoughts. You do.

I’m proud that I fed my avocado to the mice this week To see that scattered dust around the hole I felt dis- appointed the apple had been spared the throbbing soup, home he said it’s a storm it’s a storm I thought am I allowed to ask entire questions to take this space alone you bobbing you painted in my dog’s face so care- fully some kind of violence stretches the thought so long and allows the horns of words to touch each other. I think of him taking this much space. you don’t know about this dish towel for that matter who was I in another time giving the tails so much puzzled that these spices went someplace else they did today in a sandwich the empty hall into which I am reading the empty country an entire country I wanted all of them how I would like just one to pick things up in its cities and its rain its coast the outer coat 78 rpm silly news- papers turning cat on a porch and other countries nearby & home ready for me when I have something to say or show if ever my empty mistakes my empty vase my empty powers of horror my empty sex o bring the snow that rat’s death killed me because i would see it for days over and over and it hardly could be the same rat whose insides whisked the street we don’t think that war is such an incredible mess but it was just yesterday and in ancient poems years ago in the past dying the balloon just bursts it cannot bring u back again the huge cool breath the lake doesn’t want you anymore or her arms her sweet muff or breast the storm the past. but no I won’t leave my cheese out for them anymore and I must be the last person in the world in new york to read him who told us about mice that sing & fill empty auditoriums like us and our singing hearts our formula for bringing it out. Pulling the receptacle apart watch the tiny ship floating on it smithereens I ducked the tail edging over taking a little bit more. The price of wider concepts is not choosing your drops oh flicking me off reminding me of you everyone yell at once Two Rabbit legs jutting out I keep my childhood around almost more than every- one and a mouse can share my house wet toot tootsie it’s kind of great the whole thing is relative. Since I ad- mired his mountains I imagin- ed I was in his landscapes but opening packages is occurring all over the place. That’s a strong image and I feel like the smallness is directly rooted forgetting to use the new cal- endar I planned. These marks (I imagined) are the sources all the milk flooding wildly over the rolling hills and out of the sun’s comical eyes. Not tears but creamy drops of mammalian weather. I’m given real information and the most difficult part is blindly creating the space where the parts I can’t see or even hear spread out (like the night in Paris when I walked to the movies ) onto my desk and the surrounding hills into the bleachers where everyone is pounding themselves bloody in salute of the hunt all I ever wanted was dinner or at least his love the delight I see in him is equally empty for anyone & probably that’s his stealth. Inner lake. There’s a car a maroon a colourless oval I can imagine the seats and the feeling of hearing a song as we’re weaving over hills. There’s no break. Ev- erybody I ever saw in my seacoast community is already facing the problems huge and gloomy I grant you and the night spills on my keys which are splayed over the counter and outside it’s light. & they are flip- ping their cards every one of them.

for Kathe Izzo I was 6 and I lost my snake. The table shook I can do better than this and shambled to the kitchen to the scene of the crime I was green I put my sneaker down, little shoe I felt the cold metal tap my calf moo and everything began to change. I am 6 turned into lightning wrote on the night At 6, I was feathers scales, I fell into the slime of it, lit You think you are six, it yelled. I am face to face with a frog a woman alone in bed. The square of the window persists. I am 6. The phone rings It’s my sister blamm I dropped a plate. Sorry. Now the clouds slide by afraid, awake my feet are cold but I’m fearless I am 6. Under here with bottle caps and stars adults and low moans, busses slamming on brakes I am 6 the cake is lit it’s round the children sing. I will never return. We are so small. My husband turns his fevered face. I put the medicine down. Click. I am 6. The movie rolls on. Tramping feet, music blaring at the end of the war. I am frightened hold my hand The round face of the woman upstairs, moving the faucets, strips of vegetable slithering down, her reptile child will never return. The telephone rings. It’s me. I’m six.

Soon I shall take more I will get more light and I'll know what I think about that Driving down Second Ave. in a car the frieze of my hand like a grandmother captured in an institution I know I'll never live here again etc. many many long years ago Millions of peeps in the scrawl the regular trees the regular dog snort & dig. In the West Village you could put on a hat a silly hat & it's clear whereas over here 20 years passed that rotting hat it's loyalty to someone or something that's really so gone the moment clenched like religion or government. Wait a minute. I prefer umm a beatle's cap when it's really really old neighborhood devoted to that. Poetry is a sentimental act everything spring she said being surrounded by so much rot. Pages & pages mounds of them that I'm in not some library but in your little home, like you. Every season I know I'm leaving I'm as loyal as the cross to this smeltering eccentricity down by the river with Daddio toss your ball in the river in the future over bridges they say you have to imagine the 20th century.All these buildings were colored a blasted interior scarlet curtains rattling day cobwebs on inexplicable machinery a theater once dwelled here all I see is rotting ideas the epics I imagined the unified cast of everyone eating turkey together on a stage my idea like waters towers popping up feeling mellow not exactly nothing all this time but the buildings that are absolute gone that I never described. You can't kill a poet. We just get erased & written on. It aches in my brain, my back this beauty I'm eating my toast everyone I knew you would be dead tomorrow &you were. The composing camera infatuated with the shovel on the lid & the pile of rocks. He is not aging same Alexandrian blond in Bini-bons the sirens are gods when I lifted my head from my swarming difficulty You were so marvelous bringing those toys to my feet in between the invisibility of the constant production & consumption the network of that & apart from the mold. You survived.

I’m playing with the devil’s cock it’s like a crayon it’s like a fat burnt crayon I’m writing a poem with it I’m writing that down all that rattling heat in this room I’m using that I’m using that tingling rattle that light in the middle of the room it’s my host I’ve always been afraid of you scared you’re god and something else I’m afraid when you’re yellow tawny white it’s okay. Transparent cool you don’t look like home my belly is homeless flopping over the waist of my jeans like an omelette there better be something about feeling fat what there really is is a lack of emptiness I’m aiming for that empty feeling going to get some of that and then I’ll be back

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body and mind summer as a time to do nothing and make no money. Prayer as a last re- sort. Pleasure as a means, and then a means again with no ends in sight. I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals. I have no desire to know where this, anything is getting me. When the water boils I get a cup of tea. Accidentally I read all the works of Proust. It was summer I was there so was he. I write because I would like to be used for years after my death. Not only my body will be compost but the thoughts I left during my life. During my life I was a woman with hazel eyes. Out the window is a crooked silo. Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along. We swim naked in ponds & I write be- hind your back. My thoughts about you are not exactly forbidden, but exalted because they are useless, not intended to get you because I have you & you love me. It’s more like a playground where I play with my reflection of you until you come back and into the real you I get to sink my teeth. With you I know how to relax. & so I work behind your back. Which is lovely. Nature is out of control you tell me & that’s what’s so good about it. I’m immoderately in love with you, knocked out by all your new white hair why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is. I love you from my childhood, starting back there when one day was just like the rest, random growth and breezes, constant love, a sand- wich in the middle of day, a tiny step in the vastly conventional path of the Sun. I squint. I wink. I take the ride.

You’re like a little fruit you’re like a moon I want to hold I said lemon slope about your hip because it’s one of my words about you I whispered in bed this smoothing the fruit & then alone with my book but writing in it the pages wagging against my knuckles in the light like a sail.

I have utmost respect for you but in that moment if I were to get out of your way instead of walking up the stairs to my home I would have no respect for myself. I didn’t know why you couldn’t understand this when I told you. Instead you screamed at me and told me I was rude. And then you said someone of my age should know meaning that you were adding to my crime the fact that I am older than you. What am I to do. How many days have passed and I have no reason to think that your ancestors were stolen from their home in A- frica and because of my not knowing that this is true but thinking that it is possible it makes me certain that respect next time would be for me to step around. Maybe I could say quietly joining you for a moment in your vast and ancient sorrow that was my home