V.

Coronette V.

1.

It’s almost painful, to be still fluent with saying

but mouth emptied of cherries or chariots, reports

only its sonorous self: a communion of abandonments

stretched over the seven day orgasm of creation, all the

hurt of words, bruising us with their callous porn

like some ultimate betrayal with everyone you ever knew.

2.

That’s not nice. But you’re not nice either,

the way I stand around and watch

the leaves turn red until they fall into the circle 

at my feet. Like rose-petals every year I wait

for you to come marry me and you

come with rakes and leaf-blowers and

trundle away or burn my marriage bed

the leaves your giddy promises sprout from me

rubbing your numb hands drunk on moon and cider

you warm yourselves with my hopes!

it takes all winter to forget, all the white and

ice of nothingness to believe you again, hanging

on my arms like so many gap-toothed angels.

And I stand here with a withering heart: for half

my life my heart withers, and I lose my meaning. Until

Impervious, inert, giving anyone splinters if they get too close.

The end of the world is the death of a tree.

3.

Can you ever be here enough to be me? Near enough to understand?

But of course it’s you who understands, and I’m just another

moment, come with birds and trinkets, slightly

familiar, annoying, pretending to be anything but you.

You there, lying on the grass wondering who broke 

the moon, the way it used to be your mirror

and understood you with the Devonian hollywood of its souls.

You wonder why someone has to come break you open

to retrieve it. Did you swallow the moon, and not

a bug like you thought, when you yawned at the water

those millions of years ago, and decided to get up–

can I be you, returning at last? Would you let me?

4.

Would you permit yourself to enter quantum entanglements

with a perfect stranger? It takes a moon, a rock from the sky

cave bears, remember Switzerland? Dancing around 

the fire rattling a femur in the skull. It permits us,

us moon-zombies, hoodwinked by rocks, thrilled by

synchronicity – though that is only the foreplay,

the ape to listening. It’s in the shadows

cast by the rattle’s clack, in the marrow where the other

moves, moving and not moving. So still in us, yet

you could spot it anywhere, like a vanished house

or a lady in the park covered over with birds.

It’s a pack of goats fainting mid run.

It looks like your neighbor in drag or in your bed

or maybe even in prison. It looks back

like the sky when you’ve written on it with your 

finger, just before the rain drives everyone inside.

It looks like a “me” only you forgot to sign it.

5.

My flesh the gyrations of DNA and RNA struggling

to solve their inherent inconsistency, repeating themselves

so many wild horses from a spanish boat capsized 

on some Virginian quantum reef. Would you 

watch me go on and on, like the obsessive

sloganeering in your head, those traditionalist 

village drunks unaware if they’re sitting on the 

train-station bench in Smolensk or Brighton Beach. 

Certain trees you have seen, lonely ones, and orange moons 

spying on you at dinner, a disaster, a fallen star, an unreasonable portent

swelled and spilled and wheeled like creation to its august return.

Would you pinch a drunk and run off with the secret in his mumbled curses?

6.

Still there was him, the drunk itself, perhaps a her,

bent away from your hungry looking (generally speaking,

you always look this way), as ignorant as you,

she bends away in the simplest terms, a piece of

midnight DNA, flashing you encoded nothings

bending and swirling on the library steps the way

all bodies do this they can’t help it, as the streetlights

and dirty late workers and fresh Night People swarm

in her shofar swoon filling the hollow tower of all you

didn’t mean, standing there with your hands in your pockets

at the corner of Eastern Parkway and what you thought was the lost

or fleeting or never even there world.

It doesn’t matter if she hasn’t seen you, she

chose you, and her hips cry out to you cry

beyond you with shadows and response

as suddenly what cast shadow casts things in you

and you feel her there, and you feel the deeper shadow

of which her own is part and you become intimate. Good as new.

7.

There is no relief but to feel her difference

be whole by it, he thought, that at least

is a world, or word, solid enough to swallow.

Difference, like Buñuel, he acquiesced, a 

narrative of hinges, straddling and opened

onto the narrative itself, evacuating the flow

out one’s crooked teeth or the crook who lives

between your thighs selling you the outside world,

all the difference out there, swallowed into the 

stream dribbling down the library steps from 

the homeless legs of my mouth.

Undoubtable stream where even prim

ladies in Dante or Keats loiter around listening

to those treacherous never the same twice, never the same 

even between us outpourings you’ve got to wade across someone's on the other side.