Of Fleeting Affairs with the Color Purple

In your pictures the forests changed into
green and yellow shapes, construed and blurred,
though I do not remember them that way.
How incorrect a vision becomes in retrospect
and yet we still wait sometimes for re-existence,
like tensed deer with prayers flung
silently into the air.

I have always been drawn to trees, but
these on the other hand, were not tall
at all reaching up with their deeply
knuckled branches towards the sky and the pigeons
who circled like sequins on string.

I insist on convincing you because I’d
like to imagine that we are not so different.
Listen:

I am only asking to steal back the bits
of loosed skin that have been shed
for the corners of rooms; to return home
all the empty mason jars in our kitchen.

A Craving

The treasure chest in the basement belongs to no one;
why do we keep such things
packratted into our corners, unlocked and empty.

People here claim nothing, big and small alike
words bob in the air suspended only by breath,
the great disappointment of youth
I am also guilty of.

Action: to lugclunk it up to my bedroom and
fill it with possessions: the pages of good books, borrowed
clothing snipped to bits like with shoe box art, or
to nestle into it like a cat in search of warmth,
who slinks in through the tunnels and crooks
formed by comforter when
a human body rolls over in bed.

What draws the sense to space yet leaves
the body craving comfort.

When I wake in the mornings,
gold eye slits blink from within the sheets.

Reminders on an Alien Terrain

An abundance of yellow for grass
if I were to assemble the backdrop:
an amassing of birds
like black and white
cookies with superfluous tails
collected on fence posts; not crows.
We find bricks and trees coexisting everywhere.
The familiar and unfamiliar
twining I am reassured
and imagine the river
is a slab of green marble between stone slopes.

Time inflicts on pigment; and
that which persists is not pertinent.
Desperation the cause of all that thalo paint—
Stop worrying,
what lasts will last.
Well, the museum was just a museum and

we prod the mountain like foreign thumbs.
Again and again, function performs.

In Search of the Duende; Also known as Gnomes

whom I have been having trouble finding,
I press my ear against walls
listen for scurrying.
I drift into sleep beside a neat offering
of toe nail clippings (his favorite).
No, he never comes.

When I wake I remember something
to do with spoons as a metaphor.
How am I a spoon!
This does not help me discover.


Occurencias: well I can’t speak for bright or witty
but most ideas are sudden and overwhelming.
These are the parts I have chosen to keep
from what my mother chose to keep.
An earthiness, a giving of sense
to the senseless. We begin a game of phone tag.

I have always preferred roots that arch from the ground
like the tell-tale toes of a murder victim—
the moment at which the gears give way.

And like of my grandmother and her plastic beauties.
Caridad del Cobre with your drifting sailors,
this is not so different a veneration.
A spineshiver that, unspoken for, still insists.

TURSCHWELLENANGST (German): literally 'threshhold fear'; fear of commitment.

We created the minutes to help us collect our thoughts
yet some of the bodies rejected time and water all the same.
Continuity: we did not both balance the narrow
walk together bobbing down unevenely with I instead
doublefooting the rough spots with my eyes shut.

TO PLUMMET: an act that orchestrates itself
[seems sufferable when compared to those three
long moments just before one
is forced into action.]

Names become unimportant;
to underline a statement and circle it.
And doesn’t the act negate the factness?

Our eyes receive certain random edges more willingly
shapes— a body spinning near an overturned
trash can the grass flattened in tiny moons—
not dissimilar from the methods expressed by
springforwards in pop-up books.

These were never really invented.

I couldn’t have kept the fish face, with its
parted lips shivering, from you if I had tried.
What even stays once it’s fumbled off of our tongues?

I burst into the bedroom and hide a few remaining
pommegranite seeds beneath my bedsheets but it’s no use,
nothing impervious to the act of listing.

A Small Loss

An ambitious octopus, one evening, suck
slurped its way out a decorative aquarium and
heaved its soft, gummy body all of three long
feet before finally expiring atop a blue area rug.
The next morning, touched by his valiant
efforts, Susan, the weekday receptionist at Montvale
Pediatrics, mounted a paper sign written in colorful lettering,
several inches above her sitting head on the glass
sliding window where
it hung for weeks. It read “Sleep tight, Ink Pot”.

And seven year olds,
grasping their mother’s hands impassively
as checks were signed or before loli-
pops were doled out, sounded it
out in undulating syllables “InK poT—
what’s that mean?” to which Susan would
always answer “For a friend
who’s seen better days.”

Then the mothers would smile
downcornered smiles with their eyes
squinting at child and then back up at Susan and
they would leave.

Invasive Exotics and the Body

Forsythia follow me everywhere
with their unavoidable yellow flourishes and
no, I do not think they are beautiful or want
them to mean anything other than
that they do follow me. By not leaving, I am
afraid that I choose to follow them too.

My body’s condition remains
tense; inflections do not come easily
but are inevitable the way
our young tongues have trouble giving
old words new meaning.

We find such a task excruciating
but others bare it. I enter
the Orb of Weapons room and am
transfixed. What else could I have
imagined but now all I dream of is
pulling them down from their
stuck spots and arranging them together
across the floor boards: anvil beside
nunchucks beside hammer, neat and clean.

The air here burns and clings to the skin
and I am startled when my fingers get
caught by a glitchspot as I reach
forward to clutch a kitchen knife.

Pohmelyatsya (Russian): the act of sobering up by drinking more.

Conversation forms a steady hum
at the dinner party and my mind
begins to talk to itself: why do we
get tired in shorter increments as
time continues. I think of saying it aloud.

In the distance one window blinks and
I watch over the head of a stranger sitting
across the table. Telephone wires
lacing to form interlocked triangles of
light within one illuminated rectangle
for a moment and then
it becomes black again.

People keep telling me that we write the same
story over and I agree but am not
interested in taking that any further.
I still dread repeating myself feel that
raw thoughts are like belly buttons,
or temples. And that night
walking home in a stupor,

I imagine rabbit’s teeth lodged
into my jaw not like paper but like
real live bone, pressing into my bottom lip.
I remember the girl in the painting
and realize that we do
wish for the strangest things.

Well mine did not make me fascinating as
they had she, with her chin pointing
towards the sky and her arms
flung above her head with insouciance.