Old Music

I go only so far before I stop and can’t remember what the next thing is to do.  I can get a third of it sometimes finished.  I can sometimes do half.  Mostly a third.  The time runs out.  Particles float in sun streaks stretching from the window to the floor.  Cat yawns and dog stares plaintively.  Now and then the transparency of marked time lays over all of it.  Anniversary and holiday remnants emerge in the strata.  I pour and sort.  Pile and stack.  Bag and transport.  House a canned buzz.  Here are the papers from a day, months ago that feel restless on my fingertips, still awash in their own day.  Socks and stripes from days in the sun and tossed aside to think about later.  It is later now.  The window is open and old music.  The wind that comes in is gentle and small and not quite warm.  The golden light is enough to make me move more today than usual.  About a third down and I sit and break into skittering.  Trying to rally my thinking, gather my thoughts back into the ant hill.  I wish there was something to eat or smoke or drink that would put me right.  Right side up and moving the right speed.  Right and right as rain.  Nothing I ever ingest seems to steady me on the beam.  I place one foot, one foot and another till there’s no thinking, just walking.  That’s the way to keep on the surface, where the edges are straight and the lines lay in predictable directions.  There is no dipping under where storms brew and repeat themselves, where there are churning gray skies and waves sloshing.  There is no diving under where pain is neatly folded, waiting to be put on.  When I move it all out and everything else finds where it belongs, I wonder how I will remember anything.  Mostly scraps moving agitated by the wind like confetti to a frog. Color and white and color.  Mostly if you do it on purpose or if you don’t or even if you try not to, you are always moving.  Forward and forward.  It doesn’t matter where you try to keep your place.  It doesn’t matter because your toe is swept out of it’s hold and soon back through the strata is how you can know for sure where you were.  If you even want to.

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.

More Then Than Now

I was going through pictures of everyone.  Five years and six years ago when there were fewer wrinkles and more food on the children's faces.  Few toothed baby smiles and running around without any pants on.  Piles of blankets for toddler and baby to pretend to read side by side.  Our old house, the two rooms full of sun and cracker crumbs, and some pictures of him on the couch, ripped green shirt on maroon couch and a smile that makes me eat gulps of some nameless feeling that feels like falling down.  I keep thinking of the kitchen floor where there were deep gaps between the slats of flooring.  I could never get that floor all the way clean.  Even when I bothered to try.  I used to like to sweep it and mop it.  I liked to have the back door open on that big sloping yard and how it sounded when he came home.  There is no place for the picture now.  Sealed in a screen, a big quiet stretch, the still of the dead.  I can barely animate him in my memory or remember the kisses the whispers of promise.  I can barely make it mean anything now.  It maybe never did.  I don't know when that is supposed to stop gutting me.  Maybe when I stop thinking of it, I guess.  I get tired thinking of him, in his new life moving on and what I become in the undertow, the disintegration.  Eaten by the waves he makes moving away.

Paper Cutout

Almost five years ago, my body began to vanish. I was stretched on my bones some skin and flashes of this and that, mostly an emergency. Now there are mounds of me; piles and folds with no more flashes but streaks and spots. It's a portrait of a wet dog with sandy fur. It's a half of a thought that keeps me from really getting things done now. As if that is different. I stopped drinking beer so there might be less of me. I drink beer so there will be less of me. There is clearly a problem there. There just keeps being more of me, my crowds of inner children, my night time hunger, the strangers I can be. I didn't sit down to say things about myself really. I was thinking about storage spaces and the piles of stuffed boxes that smell of damp evenings and dusty dining rooms, tables for scrabble, slender tan leather shoes, disfigured chiffon and heels worn from street dirt in the rain. I am yawning, swallowing stuff. Stuff hemmed into more and more of me as I become massive and retreating and surrender. Hoist my flag upside-down, a haunted ship cemented into a tourist harbor. A broken TV with only the sound, not synced to an endless shifting of constructed color and blighted memories, they solarize and warp and stutter, ravaged by the time passing over and over and over, twin rivers running forward and running backward. I hoist my belly in the crook of my arm, vestiges of it's usefulness coming into focus and darting into the foggy obscurity of daydreaming and I crawl inside the picture of myself on spindle legs, blasted in sunlight when I thought I might go out, just like a light. A bright flash and the trace of rose geranium, a dream trying to consider itself.

Stirring

Garlic and parsley and red onion. The pot boils. I can't stop the torrent, the lack of knowing, the way to stop the constant skirmishing, the constant backlog of how things got this way and how impossible it can be to change anything. For the third day I woke up and couldn't think. This is beginning to be tiresome and so I make soup. I clean rooms and make soup and plead. This is tiresome so I think maybe outside would be better. If only we could be outside and there would be some remedy on the wind, that the hot, humid air might hold the secret to the puzzle of how we don't fit and how we can't fit, so we clash and screech and cry. All three and me just like a baby. Marking time till something relieves me from this paralyzed spot and I finish this and I stand again. Someone is stuck in a chair.