872 Life poems

Of the face in general, let me say it’s a house built by men and lived in by their dreams. When you’ve been plucking eyes out of the floorboards as long as I have, you’ll see this, just as you’d see the patience it requires to render an eyebrown, half an hour and an understanding of architecture. When you see your body, think its opposite: not the bridge, but its lighted face reflecting the water, some other city as seen from a ship— your forehead, once ponderous, now light as umbrellas— still not beautiful enough to make time stop. The pleasure in being a woman’s knowing everything’s borrowed and can’t be denied, as when you take apart a clock, there’s always another inside.

Or Oreo, or worse. Or ordinary. Or your choice of category or Color or any color other than Colored or Colored Only. Or “Of Color” or Other or theory or discourse or oral territory. Oregon or Georgia or Florida Zora or Opportunity or born poor or Corporate. Or Moor. Or a Noir Orpheus or Senghor or Diaspora or a horrendous and tore-up journey. Or performance. Or allegory’s armor of ignorant comfort or Worship or reform or a sore chorus. Or Electoral Corruption or important ports of Yoruba or worry or Neighbor or fear of . . . of terror or border. Or all organized minorities.

A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. Dead rabbits hang by feet, their red eyes dull, while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. A vessel in Juan’s brain begins to bleed, spreading into the fissures of his skull. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. The madams in the district underfeed hookers they line up for a spectacle while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. A vendor buys his wares, then smokes some weed; he seldom deems police an obstacle. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed. Redeemers tend the poor, avoiding greed and never gesture for a miracle while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed. This is the life they know and that they need, the common life that no one can annul. A narrow girl sells purses made of reed while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.

Ancients threw the masks down the cenote— the faces smashed first in little ways before the long drop, an eye or an ear broken, a mouth snapped in half. Then, lifted from the well, two thousand years later, still grinning and golden. The loose spooling of two people fast unravels—how we let go of time spent, how heat fades, how a body forgets fully what it knew. I have learned your face as you will never. The third day we met you gave me all your secrets until I held an ocean in a cradle. Now all I ask for is more.

What might all songs lean into? You scramble eggs one moment, and in the next minute you're eating them with dry toast and black coffee in silence. On a day like any day, your voice is not your own: the grass clippings disrupt a robin too large to fly from worm to worm. We don't know why we speak, but yet our voices persist, even when void of substance— like a dream you'd like to recall throughout the day, but you don't or you can't and after a week, it's gone forever. Of course our voices evolve years before our bodies— our vocal cords vibrate like a heartbeat, senselessly. No explanation needed. Eventually all languages converge. Each thought falls into all others. And what thought resists being built by words? Perhaps fear placed us here in this room together: a fear of fire at one point turned into a fear of God. After that, a fear of godlessness, a room where a word before another word and another word after the first was all we had, all we could imagine. Somehow an image means more than the object itself but not because it's made of words. Most likely it's because the act of creation sets the mind down like a bird in a field where the speed of the invasive cannot exist.

There are those for whom moving house is all so many pennies in a jar. It’ll all amount to something. I am more the alchemist; slowly, but not surely, making the mundane something precious. Just as it is several floors above the street, my new flat is in nearly every way better than my old ground-floor one, all except for the cheap plastic toilet seat that wasn’t even bolted to the bowl. I took a dislike to it even before I’d started sliding left, right, and front and back every time I eased myself; sat there a-flipping and a-flopping in some kinda kooky Pan’s People routine. No big deal; I now live amidst a jangle of pound shops and determined to purchase and attach a brand new model. I spotted a real bobby dazzler; clear resin filled with silver glitter. I liked it, it had a certain 1974 “gay bloke in a glam rock band” quality but, on reflection, did it give the message that I wanted to send, to ladies especially so? So I got plain wood. No mistaking that. However, this soon broke; too much cheesecake too soon? Of course there’d been second thoughts, and my framed portraits of Ingrid Pitt and the sheer amount of reggae singles would surely choke any doubts about my dance moves raised by this, admittedly, exuberant toilet seat. I returned and purchased the glitter that could, perhaps, handle the weight of my pretensions. The bathroom is the one place where we truly relax, it hangs out, baby. We are confronted with the true selves we love, loathe, or try to avoid. Both seat and lid molded stardust! My life has plopped into the plush. I’ve taken to hot, foamy baths with Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits pumping on the stereo. Lathered with scented foam, I wonder about Bryan Ferry looking through an old picture frame. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Thane of Bathwater. Us skinhead types aren’t known for our decadence, Desmond excluded that is. Even now I’m more coal tar than Imperial Leather. Citrus mouthwash has appeared on my bathroom cabinet. I’ve even started using it twice daily, according to directions. Outside, Ermine Street walks backwards to the gilt and butchery of Londinium, then as now, my manor blinged up vermin. My street is a busy one, a dirty one, a loud one. Police cars freeequently scream past, sirens forcing themselves in. It’s not the noise I object to. It’s the urgency. I’m all for the fight against crime but surely it can be done in a more Sherlock Holmes and gentlemanly languid manner? Iniquity is a mire, into which we are sinking, or a briar catching at us with thorns. I forget which, although I note that these encompass both descent and ascension. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions but the road to Whitechapel, is laid far less savory. The Commercial Tavern, once a trysting place for East End homosexualists, is now frequented by “artists” and the like. I work around the corner and am there for the lock in. For all its bustling traffic, Commercial Street crawls slower than most of London. Painters whine, beer flows, brasses ply their trade; much the same as in the Ripper’s heyday. I am introduced to and shake hands with the new landlord; tall, louche, pastel open-necked yet masculine shirt, sovereigns all heads, blond flipped hair    ...    no less than Bryan Ferry in negative! The police speed past, the prostitutes splash.

We were up late and everyone had been drinking, and someone said, Hey, is that God’s head on the boil? We didn’t know where to look or what to think, it was obviously some sort of perverse joke, or not, right? And the conversation went on for days, sober, drunk, asleep, awake, what did it matter? Some of us felt the real time was for something, but what? And the questions kept coming, once they started, my favorite one being two strung together, What makes art “modern” and what does “urgent” mean now? Where was the greater good? That was another one bandied about, followed by Where was the common tent? which gave a feeling of empathy for a minute and then grief because, well, where was it? Will you arm, hoard seeds, go hungry? Those terrified me because, after all, who will repair things when the end is pale or dark? Where will you hide out when capital runs out, when water? Which will be greater, the heat or the cold? Wait, did God’s boiling head just say something? Cry out Go to hell from a giant lobster pot? Tantalizing us with where to go next? Are phosphorescent lamps to mark escape paths? Not that it’s not a great party, but whose place is this? Igniting quail in banana leaves, sons bandaged, who invited us? Why are the emerald bleeding and the ivory weeping? (Lower the freaking music.) Does anyone have the time?

In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s floor. He packs wool sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather tanned from deerhide, and vinegar in a barrel hooped by hand at the forge’s fire. He walks by his ox’s head, ten days to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes, and the bag that carried potatoes, flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose feathers, yarn. When the cart is empty he sells the cart. When the cart is sold he sells the ox, harness and yoke, and walks home, his pockets heavy with the year’s coin for salt and taxes, and at home by fire’s light in November cold stitches new harness for next year’s ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again.

I’ve caught fish everwhichaway they can be. On the Chattahoochee River I’ve used nets, gigs, trot lines, and bare hands. Even electricity. One day Braleigh and me caught so many that two-ended punt boat nearly went under. We were boys and didn’t know any better. Catfish were plentiful as water for all we could figure. That was back then. We’d wrap the copper pipe and drop it in, then use the telephone battery to make a wet cell of that whole muddy dogleg of the river. The small channel cats would rise, then recover, but big whites and blues would float, belly up, and we’d haul ’em in, fill the boat to the oarlocks with fresh fish to eat or sell. Their backs shined so bright it was a wonder. But let me tell you this: it was also a danger. If you caught the coil wrong or touched iron binding on that old craft with a live wire, it was enough to knock you on your ass. A man could get killed just trying to catch fish. Of course, such a method was a sin against Jesus and man, fish and fresh water, but we didn’t savvy. We were just free as gnats for the summer, a little enterprising and a little hungry. Besides, we hadn’t heard of sport or mercy. That was a cooter’s age ago. That was then.

A downpour drumming on the rooftop, engine running, car, idle, interior bathed in the pungent intoxicating spices radiating from the carry-out in the passenger seat. Inside the Taj, neon beacon in a strip mall dark with the common sense of folks long gone home, red lamps glowered. A pair of headlights glared back. A downpour drowning out its own drumming, so loud I could barely make out the whispered venom streaming from a mobile into my right ear. She was saying something about something as I reached across the steering column with my left hand, as if my left ear had been bent by the loudspeaker of the law. Engine off, everything—the car, the carry-out, etc.— went cold. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat, put her into reverse, backed up, out, and drove home with my double order, her running commentary as undertow.