Frank Lima

the grapes remind me of the whales gathering salt for the ocean this is a poem about my life you've interrupted my life and death schedule which gives me that poetic look each day this is a poem about my life where was I before I met you? I was eroding on my way to work and slept a lot deep in the subways this is a poem about my life then I met your lips on that windy day I stopped poisoning my life on Monday mornings this is a poem about my life when I met you you were undressed like a stone in the rain I swam after utterly naked this is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will find you someone to love who will be shaped like a box this is a poem about my life before you leave me to heal I will become an apple and hide in a clock this is a poem about my life I will plant these wild lines they will grow into honey and weep in the spring for you 2.14.94

I wanted to be sure this was our island so we could walk between the long stars by the sea though your hips are slight and caught in the air like a moth at the end of a river around my arms I am unable to understand the sun your dizzy spells when you form a hand around me on the sand I offer you my terrible sanity the eternal voice that keeps me from reaching you though we are close to each other every autumn I feel the desperation of a giant freezing in cement when I touch the door you're pressed against the color of your letter that reminds me of flamingos isn't that what you mean? the pleasure of hands and lips wetter than the ocean or the brilliant pain of breathless teeth in a turbulent dream on a roof while I thought of nothing else except you against the sky as I unfolded you like my very life a liquid signal of enormous love we invented like a comet that splits the air between us! the earth looks shiny wrapped in steam and ermine tired of us perspiring at every chance on the floor below I bring you an ash tray out of love for the ice palace because it is the end of summer the end of the sun because you are in season like a blue rug you are my favorite violin when you sit and peel my eyes with your great surfaces seem intimate when we merely touch the thread of life and kiss 7.30.69

My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths When they are to express something unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, The boundless ones in moments of doubts. If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor, Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that "we must write Every day," but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you. So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart, For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart. 8.3.03

During the day I play at drowning looking for the smoke of eyelashes and faded hair the lilac shadows of blood and the ruins of coffee but a night I dream of the last syllable in my mother's heart the last red word in her lungs.

To my friends Each hair is a poem I gave my son Each hair is my allowance from the universe Each hair is a sunspot on someone's broken heart The secrets that emerge from the psyche have no floor They will get off on any floor when you least expect them to They wear shadows that look like my mother She could stop God but could not make it snow She said the weather was a work of art Like the last streak of wonder In Medea's heart You don't have to watch human Sacrifice on television Shut your window Lock the door Wait for yourself In the corner In the night In the little house That holds your tears There is no piano Just your green velvet And the years you spent in Russia As a little box in your mother's womb With all her curses and her dreams of men When I write poetry I hear voices: KennethKoch rubbing his forehead DavidShapiro swatting words FrankOHara blowing his noise PhilipBryant smiling upon me Neruda drinking red wine Lorca hailing a cab in New York Vallejo walking in Paris RonPadgett calming the world TedBerrigan dignifying wise-guy poetry JoeCeravolo on the radio with Melanoma in the milky sky Are you asleep? No Chopin is asleep on our new sofa He is wasting his life away His health looks like a dirty window His heart has a broken leg His breathing will go to the grave with him I'm not one to part I'm not one to hide my feelings I'm the end of the corridor in your hands This is a song of war Because love is music And its ferocious notes Are oars that pull us apart Death is incredible It is man made We change the names of the dead When we bury them In time they look back at us And see us The living Like old doors in the wind In the beginning there were small islands Floating on poetry These islands belonged to Joe Ceravolo Joe's words are the body parts of poetry Like the little children of the fireflies Who set songs on fire when we cry There is work to do on top of the forest There are too many words on top of the forest They are obscuring our conversation If the trees aren't pruned our words will never reach Their destination: The telephones that hate love And protect the dead from living Will my daughter dress like Venus Wrapped in exaggerated hopes? Will the pill invent love for her? Will her life take place on a Mental and spiritual planet? Yes No My daughter is a seed full of steam Leaving me behind like a bad marriage Helen Helen My Helen of Troy Once I placed a kiss on a spider's web Because there is no evil in nature The spider laughed Now the kiss is as free as an insect And the better part of our love My other marriages were like the four seasons That come and go They have left me small stones That spend their nights on the balcony of life Watching Pathos and Comedy celebrate their wedding Tonight I will write poetry I will pile the world on my pillow Like a paramilitary sous chef Toss an avalanche of flowers With sunlight and olive oil. (David Shapiro) 4.25.94

These empty words are so remote. They are stories someone wants To believe at the end of the century. Everyone gathers their sea of telluric Pain to greet the beginning of the new world. Cars stop and watch the deck chairs limp across the street to await The coming of the new year. It is the end of summer and autumn and Winters and springs, and panzer infatuation. After four hundred eighty-one years, I cannot pull out the Spanish arrow In my eye. Suddenly everything I knew was inhuman: The oceans, the tadpoles in their new cars. The clams became Cheerleaders. The palm trees, strippers, and everyone forgot, Deer are the shapes of God. His official language became Latin, when he ceased to be a Jew, Biting his nails and collecting cans like a cheap minister with sunny gold teeth. The tender years that once wore oysters would never speak to Him again. The female spider became a lesbian, devouring our new long legs, That would never again climb the toy steps our fathers left us. Although Our legs are hairy and the lilies of a theater, the gentle lips of Our pyramids rest on our souls like a lover’s fingers. How many aspirins will we take to reach the surface of truth? My existence is for sale. The dawn is learning English. The waves of the sea are unionizing. The stones that were once our troubled hearts are eating chocolate. I come to sell you fish, the bread in my blood and my existence.

To John Bernard Myers In the corner lot where they parked green banana trucks fruits palmed in paper straw I smell bedbug & kitchen-cockroach summer afternoons Somewhere tailless one-eyed cats doting in fat garbage cans screaming with the stench of rice & beans strawberry tampax piled high as the smell (I was small & slick) the covers tilted like the hat of a rock-look wino in a deep knee-bend nod on a beer can-street Sunday morning There were always time-thick empty nights of nothing to do but listen to the ethereal (she lived on the top floor) I-go-for-more screams of Charlie's pimp's woman when he beat her for his good business principles joy-pop the block with morning-talk I hear the dim iron dawn yawning (I lived on Third Ave.) rattle nights into Saturday morning flag-bloomer eclipses just before the hunt— they were as big— the cats like jungle bunnies fierce with fleas & sores I see window-people hanging out of gooey-stick slips sweating strange below-the-button drawers crouched junkies in hallways with monkey backs eating cellophane bananas on a g-string waiting for that last bust Spies with cock-comb hair fronts ear-gulping mambo music eye-lapping pepperican flower crotches I can hear the streets whispering in the ears of yelping kids in the fun-gushing that rippled my blood in the pump but the kids are dying in the lot like the tarry-blown feet of the rain jingling on the rusty-green of yesterday's fire-escapes.

Happy Birthday Kenneth Koch/Feb 27 We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants were waiting for him to unearth the sun in Elissa. The clouds were as cool as a dog’s nose pressed against our cheeks. I notice your eggshell skin is as creamy as a lion’s armpit as we cross the horizon on strands of Yeats’ silver hair. There is a light coffee flame in his eyes guiding us like an old Irish house cleaner holding a candle in a black and white English movie. Yeats’ lips look like an angry Rimbaud illuminating poetry with his youth and vigorous sunlight. He knew eternity would vanish the sun at dusk. He caught it with a rainbow tied to his finger. There was nothing left after that. We cross the equator heading north following Emily Dickinson’s black bag containing stems of her longer poems preserved in darkness and memory like wild pearls thrown overboard to avoid capture by Spanish pirates. The islands below float by like water hearts in a child’s aquarium. We are candy wrappers being blown across the waxed floors of poetry. We land on the Brooklyn Bridge. Whitman’s past-port face is grinning at the nineteenth century in the thorny arms of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose head was set on fire by God’s little hands. The hands that circumcised the world. Gertrude Stein is a match flaring on a young woman’s pillow whose birthmarks have been stolen. We cross the green Atlantic into World War One. We are met by Rilke dressed in his Orpheus uniform wearing white sonnet gloves that once belonged to a stone angel. Rilke offers us a glass of amontillado made from Lorca’s private stock of gypsy tears. The sherry is not quite as dry as Wallace Stevens’ lush mango metaphors of familiar objects. Although Stevens’ poems are fragrant, there is a lingering afterthought of Pound on the tongue. Pound collected his misty feelings to make raindrops into European and American poetry. Vagueness became as sharp as a pencil. Our blue box is not allowed to attend Apollinaire’s birthday party held by the august Académie française

Crows see us as another invention. Like summer and beauty, They shimmer at sunrise in their new cars, Change their names and color when they see us. When they fly, they’re the bite marks on the sun, And nail-scratches of black against the sky. We matter little to them as we are. They prefer hamburger, youth, Oxygen and mineral water. And, of course, we sell our souls to a passing crow, Because we’re shiny things they take to heaven. Crows are always polite to humans. They have lots of money And live at a party that never ends. We’re the junk genes they left behind, That play Aztec football with our heads, When we dream and lose. Crows have relatives everywhere. Human warfare moves across the sky Making more room for them to fly. We’re just a meal in the next world. We’re the hole in the sky. Crows are legends and instructors of grace. They are the dots in the fog, And the flight of the uterus. Crows are the printed warnings Of a wasted life. They will never leave or abandon us. When we take our last breath, Navigating through our mistakes and lies, The crows will take our last word. We are the last citizens of a pale race of crows, Rearranging the furniture in the mind of God. Crows turn the planet on its axis when we die, And do nothing to the body we’ll remember. Our souls are their meal of the day. And the blue marble in its beak, As it flies away, Is the world leaving you.

For Frank O'Hara I The lights are out The cats are hungry The room is full of gangsters II The dishes are dirty The icebox is empty I dream of celery and a compass III The roof is upstairs The window next door A guitar in the shower IV The hours disappear in my room Where is my blue pistol The door-god is knocking.