In a Previous Life

for Douglas Crase and Frank Polach

I used to hide out in a cinderblock garage
set apart in an indecisive landscape
waiting under barren skies in which
even a child’s kite wears a look

of partial bereavement
practically nameless, a tangible sign
that lingers longingly in its own aftermath
its loneliness granted permission

are there still radios in this world
among the piles of sad merchandise
if you know how to broadcast a truth

let’s see whether I know how to hear it
if something else
hang on to it until I’ve left the room

//

Revocation of the Last Privacy Policy

A slashing light left its vanishing mark
in a poem secretly forged in your name
where even loneliness finds its perfection
products and services we think you might like

a solar body gathers dust in the reading
its scandal or wonderment
the way water looks you in the eye
trembling
in the high tide of a fallacy
or paints the passing portrait of a thought
still unfinished
and who cares if it’s clothed or naked 
consolation or reprisal
and whose soul enters whose body

a kind of gray religious feeling
against a planar scarlet surface
dishes clinking, phones ringing
we listen with a common ear

what else could we do but veer off
into what’s true outside on the street
where the facts already known
have been released into the wilds of time
so we will not withhold the judgement
long since been lodged

eleven thousand lightning strikes
lit what never looked like tinder

//

The Open Sweater Chronicles

Truth with its most annoying habits
humor bleeds into cruelty
like a double exposure
moon rising over the escarpment

noisy scenes of a silent city
its providential spaces
or forced heaven
your nostalgia for the sun 

but seeping in from our forgotten future
the sun just turns its back
old moments left out to dry
shadows hang over the eyelids

you sing into pale blue skies
of places dark and cold
trees losing all sense of time
they complain of excessive heat

//

An Author’s Love Note to Her Typesetter

Please don’t forget you’re just my poetry beast
this ambivalent nude who always disdains the inessential
no shame to compose a tenebrous wonder on movable type
tracing love’s plenitude back to its sources
nor blame the trees for the pages we made from them

enough of your damned simplicity
I heard not knowing is your favorite thing to do
please find the enclosed poems that lock you out
keep you in the open where I can observe you
pouring solar liquid in the ear of a ragged day

it’s an inappropriate tear that grieves for unmade plans
actually just the call of a distant bird
that warbling’s not our music
it says the sky wants to fuck the earth
but your body walks my mind in the direction of death

don’t hope to find me there
another cosmos under the roof of my mouth
just because we love flowers doesn’t mean
lay them on the grave of bitter thoughts
I know as the surface of your eye

//

The Future Will Not Forgive Us

Why the Golden Gate Bridge made strange noises
put that in your book of witty sayings
I thought she’d pour a little drop of poison on my tongue
a stone mirror shows the cruelty in a forlorn smile’s untruth
they dreamed they were autochthonous, souls heaved
up from the soil into darkness
their ciphers and protocols implicate other people, not you
whose failure to uphold your own obsolescent values
may be the most charming thing about you

nothing to say about that, nothing
much to know about it
strange as it seems
my other brain is a pinwheel galaxy
a deep-sky stellar factory most faint
on the edge of the perceivable
it’s elsewhere everywhere
and the only mystery
how did it come to this

this hummingbird lodged deep in my throat
hummingbird lodged itchily in my scrotum
hummingbird lodged fluttering in my asshole
gave me the courage to say that
to wonder how many ounces of meaning
you baked in with each word 
recapturing the childhood aroma that automatically brings comfort
which he won’t name in case you later use it to fool him