The Other Sun

poems '99-'01

Afraid

Some poorly imagined paradise
comes to you at dusk
to open doors just out of reach
and this is how you like it.

Along a row of storefronts
you glance at your reflection
and do not pause.
You won’t look past your own
dim and doubled face --
you spare yourself the sight of
products
and dry, unloving words.

You do not want to taste
the whiskey of the evening light,
do not want to drink
and be drunk;
you do not want to taste
the kiss of devils dancing pale
along the highway verge
behind the chain link fence;
you do not want to taste
the rain of poets’ blood
or shoot their shining ink
into your veins
and dream.

You are afraid the drunkenness
will not transform your flesh
or give you words
you never had before --
will leave you sitting by the wall,
afraid to dance to unfamiliar songs --

will wake you in the gutter
in a vomit of roses,
will show itself no more elixir
than your own sour spit
and breath that every day
in bus exhaust and hard white sun
expels wrong words.






Food for the dead

The sky is filled with the sound of wailing;
at my shoulder I feel the cold hands
of other people’s griefs.
Why would you want to regain what is lost?
What is destroyed is dirty with destruction:
you soil with your despair
that which might otherwise return whole.
To you, Lazarus will always be
a ghost in your house.

If you were dead and risen
you would not be transformed,
but preserved.
Not descended into the dark
and returned to light
but caught from stumbling
a moment too late.
You would preserve your shroud
like a prom corsage,
you would take remembrance
instead of life.
In everything the stench rises:
grave mold clutching the hems
of new clothes.

Therefore let us try fire,
from which there is no rising.
Out of that angry flower
an entirely new thing will come.
We will not see it.
We will fly into the orange night
as a primal odor
and a spark.








A dream

The night we walked
snow fell in flocks of
underwater animals
as big as stars

the air was cloudy
indigo with winter
night and lamps adhered
unwillingly to solid air
and mixed with milk

between the pins
of cold your hands
were hot
my face stiff with smiling
my lips hurt

in this dream you told me
only how you know
and nothing of the
time between us.

When I see the window
glass like gray paper
it means I could have mentioned
and did not

how we walked in schools
of flying cotton water lights
and said nothing
with many words
and ate snow
and leaned into each other’s shoulders

like very old friends
would do
if they were as young as we
and followed like one thought from the next

it is not that this can’t
occur but that it won’t
and it is not that we
are implausible
but I can see the future
and in the future
it will be too cold to snow.




The famous dead

Pallas, the shattered mirror,
is remembered for her death alone.
Narcissus, emptied like an ending song
into the water;
Hyacinthus emptied like a spilling cup;
Iphigenia, the vessel, emptying.

Deaths that outlive gods --
grace in death, ingenious death --
bright blood more true than gold
or prophecy.
No life can shine like its ending,
no deeds done shine like deeds suffered.

No man is called happy
while his life is a balanced cup
on the rim of the discus,
the edge of the knife.
Let it be said:
may the stain of the wine be dark
where your cup is spilled.



Swallowing the burn

What right do I have to be jaded?
Is the twilight less blue,
has the opiate green gone from summer?
Why did I break your mythology?
Am I that much in love with rust?
Scream at me, sweetly,
with a break in your voice --
you’re delicious when you’re bitter,
you give such brittle light!
I still thank you for the lightning;
this is one of those things you have to kill
to love.


The place where your elaborate worlds
had been
(bright and damp like a dragonfly birthing
cruel as imagined defeat
and pale as frost on eyelashes
fragile
powdered under my heel) --
I filled with concertina wire
and the sound of bone saws
and world-breaking equipment
I designed myself.
Why couldn’t you see the beauty of steel?
Isn’t blood-painted asphalt
the pure kiss of time?
When it came to endings
you were afraid.
It could be I loved endings a little too much.

They are dead, those lovers
who believed no storm could ever harm them.
I killed them.
I had my reasons.
The corpse is more beautiful
than the living beast.
Sometimes I dream you empty and still,
a wax lily with glass eyes,
the taste of blood in your mouth --
a kiss between us
which no one else has ever tasted.

I had to excise the double heart
to know I hated solitude;
but my time as a pillar of salt is done.
I have relearned the liquor of forgetting.
I still thank you for the lightning --
then I tear it out of the sky
with surgical teeth
and swallow the thunder like gin.



The sky on the last day

Living by the train tracks,
falling into a deceptively easy blue decline,
about to preface every
statement with your name,
I am learning the exact descending note of loneliness.

Words should not twist me so hard:
an earthquake voice in time with
my pulse is not enough to apply the kind of
mountain-grinding torque --
I am right this second a sort of mountain.
If sand is what you want, keep talking.

Did you figure it out?
What it was you were chasing
that was almost like the skin of my waist
and almost like the cut of my teeth in your throat --
that was almost me, and was not?
Did you find it? Where is it?
I am going to go there, and burn it to the ground.

The quality of light after last call
when all the dim corners are lit
and the neon begins to look dusty
is the light that shows me
how perfectly wrong it would be
to enshrine your imperfection
the way I am about to.

-- but I will not excise you.
You may follow me like a rumor
all the days of your life,
waiting to retreat when I turn,
expecting any moment some
spectacular breakage --
you may orbit just out of reach
until your gas jet eye fades
until your sharp white cat teeth rot
until your hands like diving sea birds
wither to bone
for all I fucking care.

With one sharp bright shock of recognition
it will come to you
(some moment when I am nowhere near)
that it mattered to be wanted
(around the time I am
demolishing your shrine).






Maps

In every moment, twenty choices:
every branching in the road a way
that leads to harder choices later --
have you chosen, friend?

You turn your back on your long shadow,
offer toward the light a drop of your
own precious future, which it can’t
increase, nor is there gratitude.

I am your shadow, shining one,
and what you choose may lead to light
so bright I fade away, and no knife width
of me remain, not memory

or emptiness where memory should be;
no lock of hair or scrap of flesh,
no scented breath, no drop of blood,
no keepsake to remember me.

What help I give will be a hindrance;
what I have said before, you must forget.
My maps are all the underside of yours,
and know the roads of other lands

whose springs would only poison you.
Your high road leads out of my country,
out from the lands of Never where I dwell,
which smoke in ruin beneath the other sun.









[untitled]

O flying hands and flashing teeth,
the sun of every room you enter, sea
of changing diamond, star,
I wish you wouldn’t toss your head and laugh
the way you do --
one of the thousand ways you hurt me
every day.

O dweller in the house of summer,
do you see me looking in your windows?
your dance whirls on without me
while night lurks like a murderer outside.

The blinding curve between your throat and shoulder
hurts my eyes
your name
numbs my mouth
your hands
burn my skin
from all the way across the room.
And how I pray you never touch me
with those hands --
and how I pray you’ll
burn me down with them
like the empty house I am.

O gardener of sudden, shocking flowers,
do you hear me crying in the road?
Your laughter blooms like brushfire;
I stand and twist my hands outside.




Winter song

Carve your name into my skin
open your mouth and let me in
I speak but no one understands
a different language with my hands
to tell you what you ought to do --
hold still -- I need these things from you.

I dream of how your blood is sweet
your voice a different kind of meat
my bones a cage you can’t escape
my game a slower form of rape
I don’t know how to hesitate
if you can’t love, then burn with hate --
my heart is hammered out of tin,
so open yours and let me in.

I don’t have anything you need
I can’t do anything but bleed
I am the broken knife machine
the god of under and between
I am the absence of the sun
I am rusted and undone
I am left out in the rain
I want to share this lovely pain
to drag you with me when I fall
feel something, anything at all --
I am the better kind of sin.
Open your mouth and let me in.



Hungry for time

I hear you were wondering
what’s gotten into me
why I don’t call
I hear you wanted to know

It seems you were asking
what you had done
to drive me off
or what my problem was
or if my problem was you.
I’ll spare you an inch and inform you
there are things that aren’t about you

-- there are things that aren’t about me
even where I’m the axis --

and in truth I haven’t thought of you
for weeks.

What you want this guilt to accomplish
is impossible under normal physics
because now I’ve been running
inertia forbids me to stop.

If I could live until I was finished,
if you could say what you mean,
if they didn’t need all this lying,
my friend, we would speak again.







Smoke and Mirrors

You are the slim pale flame
which burns away my colors
You are the black silk veil
across my lips
You are the new color
I want to paint the world

You know everybody
I’m under the table
Your triangular smile
I’m hungry
You move like rising smoke
casting shadows

I would cut myself open
what would you do?
Emerge an insect
to your disgust
Made of aluminum
stroke my spine
God let me be dangerous
this time

Let me keep what I threw away
peel back the skin
and years
I’m sorry
but this is all I have
flesh
and bone
smoke
and mirrors

Your intangible
my static
your sky
my stone
I am going to hide my eyes now.
Don’t speak.





Mr. Poe to a stranger

You will forgive this intrusion,
I hope, but I am --
shall we say convivial?
-- say drunk and let it be,
let us be honest with each other.
If I were sober -- and with all
this undertaker’s black, this
perpetual mourning -- I am not
in mourning, or have always been --
what did I mean to say?

You are the very apparition --
no, I mean the image -- of
myself when young. Before my
brother -- how he used to laugh
at me, and he was right to laugh,
for I would not. No, all my jokes
were bitter, at my own expense,
and I had little reason then to
spread such gall about.

My name? -- is Peacock, sir -- have we
not met? So I apologize -- too
often -- not enough -- it is the
Champagne, sir, the heat, the
cold, my heart, my brother and
my wife. My mother did not
die of bearing me. And words
will never die.

My theory of the ether, sir, of
sounds which echo, minuscule, and
never fade -- the scratching of
my pen, by which a careful
listener might read my hand, by
which my little cousin learned
to forge -- affection, and my name --
and life -- to counterfeit -- for she
was never born, I had her
from the womb --

You will forgive me, sir, I hope,
and understand it’s not to
frighten you I speak this way,
but to illumine that which, dark,
is cause for fear -- but lit with
colored lights is wonder and
remembrance --

As a child you knew that every
hedgerow harbored -- fairies? No!
A thousand eyes, I say!
A thousand million hands!
That every sin was heard
in every step, that pines which
wheezed and gasped upon the wind
might know your name, that love
and comfort were a mist of flesh
which might at any moment -- in
the numbing wind of names -- dissolve --
It is the wine, sir, please forgive --
Please God, forgive --
I did not mean a single word, I meant

one star above the river
and a sleep not full of dreams
and skin that doesn’t show the bones
and, sir --
my brother --
my own face --
forgiveness, once, let me be shriven
for meaning every word I said.






Endurance

You’re a magnet
I’m bolted to the wall

I could stay awake forever
it’s dangerous to dream

You’re a wise word
and I’m a deaf ear

I could lift off any moment
it’s difficult to breathe

You’re a sine wave
I’m a speck of dust

I have been through the machine
and come out different

You’re a kind of sun
and I was only thinking

When all this is over,
how old will I be?









[untitled]

fix me in your mind’s eye
just like this
lolling drunk and drifting
right in your face with
shouted incoherent truths
obvious
this will remind you
in later years
why you laughed when you
touched me
why you made such
shouted incoherent
lame excuses to leave.









[untitled]

Shut your mouth now --
every word you speak to someone else
is nailed into my skin
so sharp it doesn’t hurt
until I move

I’m on to you
and you don’t even know it yet.
Three words I hold
in escrow for your
frozen eyes and shadow:

Never.
Later.
Now.








Hero

Where are you, Stephen Dedalus? You were my first love, my first taste of honesty in thought -- you alone of all my friends were real, you who never lived. And now I’ve missed my chance to meet you on your own ground -- passed you up, and now I’ll always be older than you ever were.

Where are all my heroes now, my Cyrano and D’Artagnan, where is Arthur with his tangled beard? You men I never learned to emulate, because I was too literal and saw my mirror every day, and listened when it told me: little girl, you are an apple, not a god.

Where are you, knights and vampires, elves and spies and superheroes, all you men of power whom I should have been? You do not help me do the dishes. You never pay to fix my car. You never had to live with sagging tits and blurring eyes, backed-up toilets and other people’s cats in heat, the little things, the crushing weight of all the little things -- how easy, to be a hero! Your targets were so big, you couldn’t help but hit!

Where are you, Stephen Dedalus? You had trouble with your breakfast. Dead dog on the beach. And when you loved, it went in all directions, leaving nothing for yourself -- and so you taught me, and I’m grateful, but -- where are you now? You’ve gone back to your paper house and left me drying in the sun.






Spark

You were thinking
the filament was broken
you could not again reach that
blue-white burn
and you were wrong

you thought you had smothered
what was open to pain in you
were sure of your callus
and therefore you spoke --
not prepared for any consequence
to reach beneath your skin

you were certain this did not
concern you;
so this will come as a shock.
The hands you were asking for,
the teeth you weren’t expecting,
the answer to your arrogance,
the spark in hydrogen,
the knife.




To a silent man

You were once wax-colored and bloody;
Once your mother was a bright blur
And life came striped in hunger
and not hunger;
when you needed, you screamed.
When you did not need, you were silent.

Once you were wax-colored and bloody;
a thing came that was not an angel
and not a bright blur, but a thought nonetheless.
A thing came to make a new stone
in the spraying stream of the world,
and for this purpose touched
your wet and crumpled face, saying:

Be always wax-colored and bloody,
but cut those who touch you --
cut more the more you are broken.
Take a gift of backwardness,
scorn those that adore you,
long for the dead,
breathe dust,
be adored,
be dead.
May your great slow heart
swell the earth when it beats.
May your shattered eyes
flicker like television.

That this occurred can be discovered
by tracing the atoms of your breath
to the moment of your first breath
which was a cry of assent.
You had no choice
and yet the blame is yours.

All around you time flowed.
Things happened to other people.
You became white as wax,
red as blood,
green as glass.
You burrowed like a worm,
you were not visible.
You swallowed the hidden books,
your food was the dust on their spines,
poetry your manner of exhalation.
What your body did was no concern to you;
it climbed, it sang, it wept, it slept
without you.
All around you, bright blurs.

Seasons exploded, colors flying like petals,
but not the seasons of your heart.
You grew long-handed and thin-lipped,
eyes like broken agate
and hair like blood in water
developed a nervous smile
and a secret language
and you were
white as wax
red as blood
green as glass
silent as dust
empty as wishing.

Then you were ignored, and you learned longing.
Then you were adored, and you learned contempt.
Then you were trusted, and learned
to betray.
Then you learned to walk your own labyrinth
with your head on backwards
unravelling your own words
slow as if underwater
not touching anything
making your ears ring
with manfactured silences
to drown the breathing of the genius dead.

Now you have destroyed
everything you were
and it can be revealed
that the shell was empty:
having wanted nothing, you are nothing.
Light enters your eyes and mouth
and smoke swirls in the beams.
What would you give for just a little worry?
Bite your pale wrist to see if it hurts,
unable to remember if it ever did.
Kick down the door to your memory
to find no message written in the dust.
Speak to those you harmed,
awaiting remorse with open arms --
the machinery is frozen by rust.

You are dead, and walking,
you are trapped in the head of your corpse,
watching it thumb through your books
and touch your lovers;
white as wax,
red as blood,
green as glass.




A portrait of Merlin as a young man

I take umber on the brush and touch his neck with it -- rub it out, murmuring frantic apologies. Twice now I’ve dreamed making love to this man, which makes him too real for more paint. My brush is a scalpel, wounding. One more shadow beneath his eye and there would be no adequate restitution. I can layer folds into his clothes, stir his hair with light, but I can never again touch his face.
Next time I’ll use a model, I growl, and he smiles his sullen smile. Just a dab of sienna at the corner of his mouth would wipe that sulk off his face. Damn it, I made you! I am your God! How dare you sieze my dreams in your lopsided hands, your ill-jointed hands you won’t let me fix?
If I licked his lips, would I taste cadmium or spit? If I breathed on his eye, would he blink?
I will burn this canvas, I tell him, and I throw down the brush.
And his eyes glisten with drying oil, and he whispers: murderer.


Twelve Lovers

I will make for myself twelve lovers
and hang them around my neck
like beads on a string,
hang them around me like reassuring habits.

I will name them after months
because tweve is a magic number,
because each month envelops me
and is jealous of the others.

January bows his ashen head
and waits to be reminded
that it is possible to dance,
that there is incense as well as bus exhaust.

February stomps around the house
in his dirty boots, slamming doors,
then slumps in a chair by the window
and smiles a smile like lemonade.

March expends himself in explosions,
shouts his greetings, kisses everyone,
courts me with tiny perfect gifts
and leaves with someone else.

April trails his fingers in the water
and laughs like breaking glass,
splashes water like breaking glass,
doesn’t mind being splashed.

May is fat and quiet,
stretches like a cat,
pulls up grass stems one by one
and eats them.

June zooms by on his busted-up bike,
whizzes around me in circles,
counts out his change, green mohawk bobbing,
wants me to pay for the beer.

July perches on the porch rail,
gossiping about mutual friends,
while the fine hair on the back of his neck
curls in the heat.

August likes to lie on the floor,
and to shotgun potsmoke,
likes starting fires,
and the smell of asphalt.

September is so sincere
that it half breaks my heart
when he uses his crow voice
to tell plausible lies.

October makes a music of weeping,
makes a startlement of his cliches,
shrouds himself in the curtains
and calls me Ophelia.

November looks down his long nose
as if he doesn’t like anyone,
offers with his snag-nailed hand
half a peanut-butter sandwich.

December -- stay forever!
His room contains Byzantine artifacts.
Behind his hair’s black veil
his eyes are full of icy sacraments.

I will make for myself twelve lovers,
I will make a hundred,
a host of graces,
a multitude.

I will wrap them around my shoulders
like a robe of eyes;
every moment place a different hand
on the back of my neck.

For S.

I have seen you laughing
in blue light
and thinking on the shore
and drunk uncaring restless
I have seen you angry
made you angry
heard you make harsh judgements
I’ve heard you forgive
I have seen you quiet
in despair and quiet with joy
I have seen you laughing
by lightning
I have seen you weep
I have seen you in black velvet
I have seen you in my dreams
I have seen you sleeping
I’ve seen all your tattoos
I’ve seen you laughing
in storm light
and I’ve laughed with you...

It is like breathing
borrowed air...





Clarity

I see you in a barn full of machine parts,
somewhere on the edge of town.
Chains that weigh your narrow
wrists leave streaks of rust
and you look as if
you think you wanted this
and now you’re not so sure.
You are like some blue stone
thrown on the coldest beach.

I see your eyes black and round
and full of vacuum
but nothing you have can swallow me.
You are like some beach glass shard
among the sawteeth and the steel
discovering that you are not hard
you are not hard
you are made of meat just like
everyone else but me.

I see you wanted me to think
about you but it may have backfired
on you there are things about me
even I don’t know.
You are like a child whose place
in the schoolyard heirarchy is made
whose little brothers fear him
whose teachers praise him
who has met with a semi
hauling explosives.

I do not wish to own you;
have the sense to be grateful.
I am not afraid to know you;
what you have is not my name.
I see you in the quarry
floating on a deep green pool.
You are like some white shell
swallowed by Leviathan.
I see you think you’re jaded
and want anything to happen
but this is not the anything
you had in mind.