Tomás Q. Morín

Because in medieval Italian it meant “room” I tied the curtains at their elbows with what could have been honor cords or worse yet, a belt from the 60s, so hideous were the tassels that were dancing a little tarantella after I had propped the windows and the wind had carried in the song the rubbing trees were making, without any accompaniment, mind you, from a tambourine, although the bells of   the occasional sleigh played that part, while I waited for the vixen and their shameless yelping to follow the music and the cold and the night inside where I sat half man, half snow, to investigate my squeaking pencil and the flapping of the bird-white page I couldn’t seem to catch in those years when I lugged around a frozen heart and was infatuated with whiteness, since I had read somewhere it was the absence of color, which could not be true since I had once loved a pure white duck with a white bill and feet and I had even torn its white flesh with my teeth that were still then white, which should have been all the proof anyone needed to debunk our outdated theories of absence.

For Micah Ruelle We were not green in judgment or cold in blood like Cleopatra in her youth who still was ordering chopped radish in her bowls back then, the hearts all gone to pieces next to the winter greens that in our days we never had use for so smitten were we with fire and ovens that I was gravy in judgment, which might not mean much unless you’ve taken a spoon of it and poured it back over a dumpling shaped like your heart so that it became even softer, something you could not have thought possible. It’s all happening now, you liked to say, and I agreed, though it was not the news from the outside I relished, but the daily Extra! Extra! the light of the morning brought to my attention every time we woke in your house or my house and my heart — salty, risen — was warm again in a way it hadn’t been for years. Organ of passion, organ of righteousness that has never had a single flavor cross its lips, how could you know how much I would miss the honey of those days, her drizzle of it on the turkey bacon, my cracking pepper up and down the pan, the sweet meat of happiness I would no longer let pass between our teeth.

If I had enough cages to keep all the birds I’ve collected over the years then I would have to open a shop because there’s only so much room in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds, not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs, or the different varieties of fish, the one species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud dogs and the lone mule, the profane one who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees; and maybe he’d let the mouse I found forever dying at the end of a poem ride on his back like a whiskered Christ and if not, maybe my yeti could do it when he’s not downtown working security at the store or teaching the parrots how to say brotherhood in grunt and how to comb out the tangles and mud from his hair whose sweat reminds me of that bearded collector of  beasts with the ark who would have no doubt understood how I feel, that prophet of change under whose spell I want to confess that I’m a Christian of   the Old Testament, that my grandfather hung all his goats upside down, their throats over a bucket, and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy who strutted around the ring like a peacock with his feathered hair that stayed immaculate even on the nights he lost to our hero Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel, he who hailed from the lost tribes of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs so much we wore pigeon feathers and circled each other inside a green square of water hose until someone finally rang the bell that was never there and we sprung toward each other like animals in love or at war.

For D’Andra My bowl brimming with pretzels, the snack you wanted least, I slid open the door of our sleeping car where we had been enjoying the country rushing by, as if   we were the first two people to look down into the valleys and see bright necks of pines stretch across farms and streams to the groves they once cradled. You had asked for Earl Grey cookies sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows made of chocolate, but all the tea bags had been dunked and the chocolate melted over biscotti. When I came bearing the salted and twisted news, the room was empty but for a heel. It was black as a bunting, and wound with zippers, and every time the car rocked it looked ready to fly and escape into the cold, tangled air of   travel that always feels heavy with joy and desire, and a little sadness, always a little sadness, because of the leaving, which is what I do when I realize I’m in the wrong room and that numbers have betrayed me again while I was hunting and gathering, foraging like Homo habilis who probably never lost his cave. Out of patience, I opened every door marked with threes and eights, those conjoined twins disastrously separated at birth, and roused the scabbed eyes of sleepers like a beggar, no, an angel, a begging angel who has written on his heart will work for love . Having not found our room, not heard the sharp swing of   your voice, I descended upon the passenger cars and row upon row of couples asleep or staring out the windows like zombies trying to remember what happens next once the newspaper is well-thumbed, the tea has gone cold, and the conversation is dead. I called for you, in vain, even using your secret names, the ones only the night knows: wind-kiss, brilliant-fruit, dervish-moon    . . . Over and over, I said your names, over and over until they filled the wounded air of  the car and when there was no more room for another sound, they caught and hooked the ring of   the brakes hugging the rails. Just when I thought I wouldn’t find you, you were there, the train was pulling away, and I was watching you slowly eat a dish of whipped cream and bananas — the house special — in a cafe in a city we didn’t know. When you finished, we started walking down a road that bent like a smile, a shy smile, like the one the Japanese cat wore on your purse. The road, we were told, would take us to the end of   the line where all lovers in search of   joy packed on bullet trains — they’re the fastest on two continents — arrive every hour.

A collector of   walks, I was practicing my llamastep when one of   those white geese with the knob of cheddar on its bill honked at the goslings ignoring the art of the rank and file so adored by Mussolini and other assorted lunatics who I have trouble believing could ever raise one leg parallel to the earth they scorched without falling prey to gravity that was given a special kind of dominion over the fascist paunch, a shabby thing I have never seen hang around the waist of a goose, though who can say for sure under all that heavenly down where the hips of a goose begin and end; and even if   tomorrow some budding scholar published a treatise titled The Mystery of Goose Hips to fanfare, it would be an exaggeration of   the grossest kind to equate a goose’s trumpet with the barking from the balcony by the sad bullies whose love of   the locked leg I will never understand since the knee was so obviously made to flex, which means locking one is most likely a kind of sin against Darwin or God, both of whom I think would disapprove of anything so unnatural as even twenty people moving in stiff unison to music unless the brass and strings were just about to sway and bend to the hot version of  “When the Saints Go Marching In.”