*
Eyes, blank or deep,
a lake
gone bright dark bright
(on thin ice giving way—
one: roll up the window
two: when the car fills…)
the fatal-in-seconds
keen cold of a mirror,
the blank bright blank
that any word might,
any word might not.
*
No one my touch
(that treasurer says)
can bear and tell
(apparently did not touch himself).
*
Wine so cold it’s nails,
rings in the glass, poured,
your ring and its click
two-three, and click,
the bar awash
in digital and silver
whispers of the disc,
yes-no, yes
yes,
and This
Just In:
incredible metals
the shifting of your silks
imagines, unimagines,
the thought-blue
alloy of your lids,
the pistol
chill of your lips
my lips might freeze to.
Head-On
Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging
tell you what it’s too late for.
Don’t rubberneck.
Don’t look down the front of death’s dress.
Don’t say that white oblong on a gurney
looks like a bobsled, looks like room service.
Don’t say it looks like a man,
all bright days jarred from his brain
like droplets from a branch.
Iron Age
Lest he could not make out my name tag,
I signed that I was a god, and would eat.
He brought me, as was meet, utensils,
but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté
of which of the human muscles I won’t say.
No problem. Nothing I had not imagined
as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man
concocts strange sauces for his cruelty
that he may forget what meat he feasts on:
thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,
his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,
in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths
the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.
All this I knew, without what you call horror,
but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,
and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.
All one to me were his turns and swervings,
confession, lies, indifference, remorse.
Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him
from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.
Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.
Classic Bar Scenes
I. Apollo at Happy Hour
Shoulders and faint sheen
of lotion, torsion,
loose dress sliding
over flanks of glass,
silks so utterly watery
splashing, as you click along the shine,
on left shin right shin, but alas
the chase is a tired
and tiring metaphor:
let’s sit. It is
your Beauty that is omnipotent,
and I the god its constant
victim, automatic
as the keyboard you reach over
accidentally typing with a breast
aaaaiiiiyyyyesssss,
as the copier you press
with a page and another page
that lights again and again your face.
Hear my song:
I will walk out of the 14th floor
and into your ear like a wireless call.
II. Ovidian Deposition
The bull or swan,
face rippling as it changes,
speaks, and for a long, long moment,
you can’t tell luck from disaster.
