This is what I remember, before you left: The fibrous tearing crunch through seaweed into rich salty salmon, the calm click of slides changing (the sea; gliding fish; anemones like reaching hands), our sensual conspiracy of smiles, your extravagant thinness and elegance of line, the clink of lovely white china and the warm antiseptic sake
This is a day to wear. Grackles whistle and click in the leaves, damp plaid flannel shirts salute, flap from balconies, fragrant green horse-apples molder underfoot. I lay out my laundry, too, like an offering, like a sponge. I will keep this sun in my closet and wear it often.
You made your lovers’ songs thin with malice Those summer days we danced waist to waist In grass high as our navels and milky with summer Blowing locust flaps and Sirocco reed sounds. I would not sit down. I wanted to leave the crawling life, and did not care That your friend made love on
I took her to the marsh edge at night’s threshold. The frogs cricked and moaned and I was flustered and apologetic. “I wanted to take you someplace quiet.” She adjusted her shirt, cocked her head, and smiled. Crickets sawed their legs off, and some kind of water bird screamed in the distance. Screaming. Screaming in
A woman should have, okay, must have, several things– a small square bar of soap that smells like honey, something silky and lovely to sleep in on a special occasion or a not special occasion and preferably purple with velvet trim, and a place and time of a somewhat regular schedule in which she does
rabbit dens, though alluring and fun always reminded her — of him but blue bonnets in an open field no longer seemed enough so… I Alice chased a gray schnauzer down an ocherous brick path discussed Goethe/Freudian allusion in the early Mamet plays with that corny old hippie she met hanging out in the
Are those gang colors? Does that heart beat beneath a pointed white hood? Why must they jabber like that? How to hold another’s eyes in mine without fear, reveal the shared desires? Struggling to walk streets free from a history of pain and twisted yearnings, where arms are raised like the hey! of Greek wedding dances
My buck-toothed & aching father would laugh at things he didn’t understand. Aaron had a star & crescent moon beneath his eye & he’d lie down at the barber shop. Red used his hand for a razor strop, & long leather hanging down gave a laugh to the other men & they watched Aaron. I
She spent the rosefish hour being new, & lay across my mouth & whistled to stars that fluttered across the gingertops. She was conjured by the fragrance of heat & sliced peaches. It was in late July when the cicadas mutter in the tops of rosaceous trees & the naked sky looms like a
In November darkness, the closed stars shine like yes in a crowded room. We assign some type of feeling to events like these. We want, & tremble like your mother’s knees after hours spent behind some foolish contemplation. We love the things we wish for, & love the things that we’ve forgotten. We line up
