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.

Disambiguation and the Illusion of Intention

Anger swallows
a body whole and spits out the freckles.

Video game bleeping wafts in from
the living room as the subtlest reminder
and yet is excuse enough
to keep me distracted.

What's real
is that I am preoccupied by
the existence of everything.
I want a body to make me understand
completeness but I don't remember
it having been any easier
to imagine from the other side.
There must be something to it

The present is so impenetrable.

I walk down the street and
the buildings in Brooklyn are all
to be hugging eachother:
rows of worn brownstones
leaning very tightly against one
another's shoulders reassuringly;
we can impose signicance
on anything and

flattery is cheap. I don't mean it.

I Could be a Sailor

Tonight, mi amor,
un pedaso de velum. And
yes, isn't purple a color.

Life in a series of sucessions:
this morning I catapult in with
the wind and before I can leave,
I will want to kiss everything!

While alas, the you becomes
ever increasingly unimportant,
rippled green water, more similar
to the bumpy plastic in a marine life
display at the big museum
(fluffed gulls and all),
folds in on itself.

Chewing macaroon pulp,
sticky and hot, I overhear
the yellow brick building
creak mysteriously from within
and walk faster.

An echo in my brain:
lights on or off,
we can be naked or not be naked.
I am finding you difficult
to adjust myself to.