Four Day Clothes

These are browns and blues and grays.  They are soft and smell of salt and garlic and the din of rooms.  These are fitted and bent around me and they are skin.  They are keeping my attention and they beg me not to move very quickly and they slow me and have me lay down again, leaning away from a nausea that haunts my belly and the ache in my chest from crumpling into four days.  Four days of retreating and forgetting useful information.  Four days of hiding in clothes and blankets, greens and browns and grays.  Seeing the real danger and backing away into the rough wave of sickness that came upon me and drowned me to the rooftop, a bed under a blank sky.  The television glows colors into the dark and cluttered room.  The colors are dependable and take me from the presence of the blue and brown and gray, the knitted skin, the shell the skins colluded.  Time slips with no effort beneath me, time rushes, flooding away the numberless works that sat undone.  There is slow breathing deep underneath it, some small light filtering though the fathom above.  The weight of a sea bending in wind above.  I close heavy eyes and sing a picture, something bright, till I come up for real air.

Sleep and Vapors

Wind is a lick of warm and highway sounds
June bug wings and the road behind.
Spit on a sleeve.

We make small motions
big and mating breath
the smell in here is hardly anything but
it belongs to me.

Potatoes rot in the coffee
and raccoon shit,
the vegetables of grass and leaves
making hot chemistry with water.

The wind fills with water
the spring shadows the day heat in the night.
Still, a breathe of winter makes
cool the night
and the stalks sigh,
the branches orchestrate.

No rest for the wicked,
they wish and make might
they recoil and flee.

There are many cold rough tongues in the leaves
They sing and I purr and sigh,
another day we alight,
fall back on the mounds
and boulders in the dug up soil.

There are your taught shoulders
The banana tree looks like a bow-tie on the bricks out here.
It's not so dignified.

I'd fall asleep
and will
cuts me off from dreaming
of his dewy lip
   her cool white shoulder
his cracking hand.

The bird neck cranes
Red Wing Blackbird on the fence.
The whirr of highway and the water in the air.

Don't we twist and bend so nicely into blue
black sky all studded with
stars and regret, our dreams and mouth.

3/30/2011

Limbs with fingers
Limbs with leaves
The limbs of the next door birch
Bone white and thin
Reach into the wind of spring’s cold clear
Blue sky, next to the smear of clouds
The wind is moving along.

I look there when I
Cannot look at you. Sullen and bent
Over your chest, arms folded like a stern master.
Head tilted and eyes turned at me unblinking.
I think of cut apples and the smell of tea.
I think of a picture of a flower from the booth at the market
I think of anything but your frozen posture
Stuck there from the wrecking I do
Till you are a ghost of a building
I used to live inside.

Limbs with fingers
Fold around themselves against your trunk
While I, and my own fingers train the hem of the pillow out
I hold it tight against me,
stare out the long window at the new season
Full of reaching limbs and angles, wind and sun.